Feels Bad Quotes & Sayings

My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day. Right now I live without inspiration. I go day to day and do the work because it's all I know. I know that if I keep moving I stand a chance. I must keep myself going until I find a reason to live. I need one so bad. On the other hand maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. Nothing I knew from my old life can help me here. Most of the things that I believed turned out to be useless. Appendages from someone else's life.
Everything I have I would give to not know what I know. To not feel emptiness as my constant companion. To not look into this room and be reminded why I'm in it. I'm not getting enough air. The room feels so small all of a sudden. It's pathetic to be this lonely and know it. To keep breathing. To be silent and alone. And to know. — Henry Rollins

This whole business feels kind of intense, like a bad fit. Round peg, square hole. But whatever, I'll take it. — Paul Giamatti

Anyone who consistently makes you feel bad is not helping you get better. — Sam Horn

I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it's good, and if it feels good, you are bad — Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes even feeling bad feels good. Negative emotions can feel so familiar (especially if they mimic our past) as to actually be comforting. Awareness is realizing that our life could always be better. Growth is doing what it takes to make it better ... — Danielle LaPorte

There is an eternal difference between regret and repentance. Regret feels bad about past sins. Repentance turns away from past sins. Regret looks to our own circumstances. Repentance looks to God. Most of us are content with regret. We just want to feel bad for awhile, have a good cry, enjoy the cathartic experience, bewail our sin, and talk about how sorry we are. But we don't want to change. We don't want to deal with God. — Kevin DeYoung

I don't put a lot of pressure on myself when I'm writing. It feels like if I come up with something good, or I come up with something bad, I'm not too worried. — Moby

There's plenty of days when I'm like 'Oh God, why? But that's just life. It's every job, not just mine. Every moment is not perfect. But it's definitely more good times than bad. You can't even compare. And when I'm on stage it feels incredible — Beyonce Knowles

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life. — Alice Walker

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell. — Michael Frayn

So do I kill myself now, or do I wait and do it in front of Evan so he feels really, really, really bad? — Robin Benway

No matter how interminable something feels, there is always, always an ending. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's bad; sometimes it's a matter of indifference, and sometimes it's heartbreaking, and your life is never the same thereafter. — Ann Aguirre

It's horrible if someone delights in someone's failures. It's horrible if someone feels bad when someone does good. — K.R. Royal

Everyone feels hemmed in from time to time, no matter where they live." She laid a hand on his thigh. "When I'm feeling that way, I go to Ireland. Walk along an empty beach. When I do, I think of all the people who have walked there before, and will walk there again. Then it occurs to me that nothing is forever. No matter how bad, or how good, everything passes and moves on to another level." "'All things change; nothing perishes,'" he mumbled. — Nora Roberts

I know what it feels like to struggle with your weight, and it makes me understand why women get attached to numbers on a scale or a dress size. It doesn't mean that I have gotten over all of it myself, because I have good days and bad days just like everyone else. — Stacy London

I've been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep. — Andre Agassi

I feel bad sometimes because I secretly hope New Orleans gets nailed again. — Daniel Tosh

Okay ... This looks bad.
You cowboy around with the Avengers some. Guys got, what, armor. Magic. Super-powers. Super-strength. Shrink-dust. Grow-rays. Magic. Healing factors. I'm an orphan raised by carnies fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era.
So when I say this looks "bad"?
I promise you it feels worse. — Matt Fraction

Athletes train 15 years for 15 seconds of performance. Ask them if they got lucky. Ask an athlete how he feels after a good workout. He will tell you that he feels spent. If he doesn't feel that way, it means he hasn't worked out to his maximum ability.
Losers think life is unfair. They think only of their bad breaks. They don't consider that the person who is prepared and playing well still got the same bad breaks but overcame them. That is the difference. His threshold for tolerating pain becomes higher because in the end he is not training so much for the game but for his character. Alexander Graham Bell was desperately trying to invent a hearing aid for his partially deaf wife. He failed at inventing a hearing aid but in the process discovered the principles of the telephone. You wouldn't call someone like that lucky, would you?Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Without effort and preparation, lucky coincidences don't happen. — Shiv Khera

Hanging out with my girlfriends is my sanity saver. We go out for a bad chick flick and dinner. I suggest you break free from the guys, see a really silly, girly movie, and get a little something to eat afterwards. It feels like a treat. — Tamara Taylor

For something to hurt that bad, and feel so good, it's just inexplicable. — Adam Goucher

It's better to feel sorry for doing something bad than to feel superior for doing something good. — Tullian Tchividjian

The woman next to you that looks really bad might be going through the toughest challenge ever with her teenage daughter; think about if it were you in her shoes before gossiping about her. The man at the checkout line using change may have lost his job and is buying diapers for his baby at home because its all the money he has left; think about it before you snicker to your friends because he could've bought beer or cigarettes. The child with holes in his shoes could be homeless but he's still going to school because he feels safe there even though others laugh at him; think about it before you judge the innocent. You never know what challenges you're going to face from day to day! — Barbara Morrison

Kidnap me and take me away. Throw me across the back of your bike and show me what it feels like to have the wind in your face and the sun on your skin, day in and day out. If it's anything at all like this then it must be heaven on earth. — C.M. Stunich

A bad black horse steals
Steals into my head
And moves across the landscape
Of my mind, while I sleep.
He does what he likes in there.
Next day I feel
The damage.
In the quiet mist
I watch her go.
It feels like snow.
There's a feeling that I get.
I walk back home
Sad and slow. — John Marsden

It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So, when the memories resurface it does not feel as though they belong to you, it feels alien, more as if someone had told them to you, or you had seen the images in a film. — Carolyn Bramhall

It's a bad place, brother. All ruins and bare rock. Only ever seen it from a distance and it gave me the frights. Something in the air (...) Just feels bad. The Lonak call it Maars Nir-Uhlin Sol, the Place of the Stolen Souls. — Anthony Ryan

Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral. — Ernest Hemingway,

C. S. Lewis said, "When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on . . . up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."21 — Randal S. Chase

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. 'What's the point?' he said. 'Kids aren't getting jobs.' You never hear faculty talk that way. He did. — Daniel Amory

Many partners of addicts have told me they feel bad about themselves for staying in the relationship because of the betrayal they've experienced. They imagine that the people who know their past judge them to be stupid for staying with the person who's caused them so much pain. I often counter this thinking, explaining that leaving may seem quick and easy because they can pretend they're okay and the problem has disappeared. However, if you leave your relationship, you'll be stuck with your pain and sorrow without the person you loved to help you sort it out. Why is this true? Because even though it feels as if your pain comes from your partner, it's actually coming from inside you. — Alexandra Katehakis

You know how bad my voice sounds - well it feels just as bad. — George Herman

Major success feels a bit like a coronation. Like I'd become a king. I was one of the most famous people in the world, loved and hated in equal measure. I couldn't see anything bad with it. It made me a happy person. — Larry Hagman

He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened. — Naomi Alderman

Such is life. And it does go on, in the young ones and the things we leave behind. Is the pain of losing them not worth the delight it was having them?" said Grandma Lilly when I was finished.
"I don't know," I said. "This feels pretty bad."
She wrapped her thin arm around my shoulder and held it firmly. "Of course it does, but that is because you are in the throes of it, like you were once in the throes of love. Would you take it back? — Clare Bohning

It's hard for me to feel bad for myself because I'm doing what I love to do. I'm in a good position. — Dom Kennedy

It is important for a father who feels pushed away [by the mom] to say, in effect, When you do that, I feel unwanted as a father, or I feel my rough-housing is not bad parenting; it's my contribution to helping our child take risks. Women cannot hear what men do not say. — Warren Farrell

You learn to be friends with someone, get to really know them before you get all excited about the guy. You have to keep it tempered and figure out if you even like him, for who he is, not how he feels about you. I know it's not easy. Believe me, I know. But this thrill you feel.. is probably only there because things are new and uncertain. It's not about him. It's you, caught up in you. Your mind craves anxiety, the good exciting kind and the bad I-can't-function-at-work kind. You need to deprive your body and recognize that your propensity to chase codependency is leading you toward a fat, greasy life of miserable. — Stephanie Klein

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency. — David Foster Wallace

That I'd day after day after day greedily take what looks like it's good from Your hand
a child gloating over sweet candy ... but that I'd thrash wild to escape when what You give from Your hand feels bad
like gravel in the mouth. Oh Father, forgive ... should I accept good from you, and not trouble? — Ann Voskamp

I feel like I'm 11 again, with my drums. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad. I'm just playing. — Patty Schemel

Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture
relatively innocent, and boring
could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. — Peggy Noonan

But the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal. — Sam Altman

ADHD isn't a bad thing, and you shouldn't feel different from those without ADHD. — Adam Levine

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. — Jennifer Egan

I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away. — Suzanne Collins

It's never as good as it feels, and it's never as bad as it seems. — Edward Zander

Words, especially when yelled in anger, can be very damaging to a child's self-confidence. The child probably already feels bad enough just from seeing the consequences of his or her behavior. Our sons and daughters don't need more guilt and self-doubt heaped upon their already wounded egos. — Jack Canfield

He never hurries. He never shows his cards. He always hangs up first ... Like when we first started talking on the phone, he would always be the one who got off first. When we kissed, he always pulled away first. He always kept me just on the edge of crazy. Feeling like I wanted him too much, which just made me want him more ... [It was] excruciating and wonderful. It feels good to want something that bad. I thought about him the way you think about dinner when you haven't eaten for a day and a half. Like you'd sell your soul for it. — Rainbow Rowell

Why, Tea Cake? Whut good do combin' mah hair do you? It's mah comfortable, not yourn." "It's mine too. Ah ain't been sleepin' so good for more'n uh week cause Ah been wishin' so bad tuh git mah hands in yo' hair. It's so pretty. It feels jus' lak underneath uh dove's wing next to mah face. — Zora Neale Hurston

The reason I trust so much is that I don't feel like I have anything to hide. If somebody betrays that trust, it could never be so bad, because I don't keep any secrets. — Kate Hudson

I want to say one last thing, and it's important. Though I am a generally happy person who feels comfortable in my skin, I do beat myself up because I am influenced by a societal pressure to be thin. All the time. I feel it the same way anybody who picks up a magazine and sees Keira Knightley's elegantly bony shoulder blades poking out of a backless dress does. I don't know if I've ever seen my shoulder blades once. Honestly, I'm dubious that any part of my body could be so sharp and firm as to be described as a "blade." I feel it when I wake up in the morning and try on every single pair of my jeans and everything looks bad and I just want to go back to sleep. But my secret is: even though I wish I could be thin, and that I could have the ease of lifestyle that I associate with being thin, I don't wish for it with all of my heart. Because my heart is reserved for way more important things. — Mindy Kaling

Expansion in love is an action that is available to every being in the universe all the time. A willing awareness will take
us to heaven, a loving attitude will make us free. Nothing else controls our fate. Good or bad behavior is secondary.
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking, love yourself for thinking it. Love is the
only dimension that needs to be changed. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not being sure of
how it feels. There is nothing on earth more important than the love which conscious beings feel towards each other,
whether or not it is ever expressed. — Thaddeus Golas

A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad. Not even close. — Andre Agassi

Can't ... can't just go away. Can't just ... You can't get on that train and charge out of my life. It's not fair. I can't work, dammit! I ... I made a bad trade. I made a bad trade. How dare you? How dare you walk into my flat and ... and then just ... just walk out again? How can you even - — Amy Lane

I don't consider myself as a bad person, on the whole I consider myself a good person, I'm good to my parents. I treat my girl right ,,, take her out and buy her stuff. And I go to church every Sunday, But I've decided that just once I wanna do a really bad thing. I mean a really seriously bad thing. 'cause, ya know, like, we're put on this earth with free will. We can choose to do this or that. We can choose to be good or bad. But sometimes I think most people are good and not bad only because they're scared they might go to jail or hell or someplace. Some guy once said: "Anything done out of fear has no moral value" Well, I think that's right. I figure the only way you can be truly good is if you've tried been good, and you've tried being good, and you've tried being bad, and being good feels better. — Alan Moore

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad. — John Coltrane

One day he said, "I'll tell this town How it feels to be an unfunny clown." And he told them all why he looked so sad, And he told them all why he felt so bad. He told of Pain and Rain and Cold, He told of Darkness in his soul, And after he finished his tale of woe, Did everyone cry? Oh no, no, no, They laughed until they shook the trees ... And while the world laughed outside. Cloony the Clown sat down and cried. — Shel Silverstein

It feels bad to feel like you're not wanted. — Joe Namath

Everything just feels so right when I'm with you, Scarlett. I can be me. But it's more than that. You give me something I haven't had in a long time, if ever. You give me peace. It's like the jumbled mess in my head can settle down, and I can be still with you. Like none of the other stuff matters." His voice catches, and he swallows. "I had a bad day and usually I'd get shitfaced drunk, but the only thing I could think of was I had to see you. — Denise Grover Swank

If God was dead, how could I feel this bad? — Joseph Heller

- Child is abused, perpetrator threatens to hurt mother. Child feels protective of mother.
- Struggle to escape perp reinforces feelings of mutual protection. It's Mom and I against the world.
- Something necessary at the time later creates "enmeshment." Child doesn't see her actions as separate from mother. Even during normal adolescent individuation. But
- Normal individuation doesn't happen in abuse survivors. They don't feel normal, so they
- Act out in unhealthy or self-destructive ways, which creates
- Fear and pain for mother, which creates
- Guilt for child who still feels responsible for mother's emotional health.
- Child seeks release from the guilt and from not feeling normal, which leads to
- Escape to the world of other not normal people, where mother can't see her child self-destruct, which leads to
"The bad news. — Claire Fontaine

I always try to give good ratings to books I have read unless it is really bad. Being a writer I know how a bad rating feels. Sometimes it is better to encourage a writer rather than discourage them. After all the next book they write could be a World Renown novel like Harry Potter. — William Roach

When rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that's one fewer bad guy to harm us. . . .

Where I do not think there is much hope. . .is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do. . .because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives
them satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn't mean we're going to be able to rehabilitate them. — John E. Douglas

Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position. — Stephen King

Positive simply means unifying energies, while negative simply means separating energies. It's not about what's good or bad, right or wrong. It's about
embracing what feels good and brings us closer to peace. — Alaric Hutchinson

And when someone grows up knowing so little of what real love feels like, whether from family, or friends, or the love of a companion, that person starts to believe that they weren't meant to be loved, that good things will never happen to them. They start to believe that whenever something good does happen, it's inevitable that something bad will come along to replace it. — J.A. Redmerski

In some ways, if you make mistakes with your own money, you don't feel as bad about it as if it was someone else's. — Bill Gates

My throat feels tight. "But I betrayed you. I left you."
"You're my daughter. I don't care about the factions."
She shakes her head. "Look where they got us. Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps in and poisons us again. — Veronica Roth

If everyone feels good, nothing's bad. — Kit Rocha

Getting naked feels better some days than others. (Good: when you are vaguely tan. Bad: when you have diarrhea.) — Lena Dunham

I used to feel so bad before I got to the clubhouse, I didn't know what to do. But when I put that ballsuit on, I don't know where I got the spark to save my life. — Satchel Paige

It is only those who know how to feel that "this is not good" who devise improvements. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It's no use just by shouting out that it is bad or it's good. If someone feels bad about something, they should go and support the reins themselves. — Mithun Chakraborty

A Master Jedi feels emotions, but they do not allow them to influence their reasoning. Yoda told Luke that he would know the good from the bad when he was 'calm, at peace. — Stephen Richards

The image of God I was raised with was this: God is an angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who had to send his little boy (and he only had one) to suffer and die because I was bad. But the good news was that if I believed this story and then tried really hard to be good, when I died I would go to heaven, where I would live in a golden gated community with God and all the other people who believed and did the same things as I did ... this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You're like a gazelle that smells a lion and can't relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn't last because the "do something" feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you're successful in your survival efforts. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food. — Maria Popova

Look, I know what it feels like to believe you're 'different' in a bad way. — Nicholas Brendon

Dante's leaving in a week. I'm glad. I need a break from him. I'm sick of him coming over every day just because he feels bad. I don't know if we will ever be friends again. — Anonymous

Jace: Feels like I just woke up from a bad dream.
Max Guevara: I know. One of the reasons why I don't sleep. Let me know if it's a boy or a girl.
Jace: Either way, name's gonna be Max. — James Cameron

I love you, Ink, and I want you-only you. Being strong doesn't mean I don't want you too. You are the only person who knows every part of my life, every part of me in it, the good and the bad and the horrible, and you still love me. You are always with me, even when you're not there. And when you're not there, I can feel it, like an empty space where you ought to be, and I can hardly wait until you're back to fill it again. Neither world feels like it fits, but we belong. — Dawn Metcalf

It feels bad when a film doesn't work; everyone puts in a lot of effort to make a movie. The positive side to failure - they make me work harder. — Shahid Kapoor

I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in things because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play. — Suzanne Collins

This isn't a good idea."
"I know. It's a terrible idea. But right now, it feels like the best bad idea I've ever had. I have to be inside you. — Chanel Cleeton

If Troy Heathgate locks in on you,you're done for.Even when you know he's so,so bad for you,it feels so,so good. — Leylah Attar

During the course of my presidency, it feels as if a couple times a year I end up having to speak to the country, and to speak to a particular community about a devastating loss, and the grieving that the country feels is real, the sympathy, obviously the prioritizing, comforting the families, all of that's important, but I think a part of the point I wanted to make was that it's not enough just to feel bad. — Barack Obama

As the late baseball manager Sparky Anderson put it: Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good. — L. Jon Wertheim

It's happening," he says. "Jakku." "I know." "It's gonna be one helluva battle. It might get bad." "I know that, too." He chews his lip. "It feels weird, doesn't it?" "Not being there, you mean." "Yeah. You, me, Luke. Chewie. The Falcon. Those two walking talking garbage cans. It feels weird we're not part of it." "We've got our own adventure." She pats her belly. "End of an era," he says. "And the start of a new one. — Chuck Wendig

An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days. — Maggie O'Farrell

I haven't sought self-forgiveness because I feel I was preyed upon and not responsible for the many bad things that happened to me. — Liane Holliday Willey

I'm going with Charlotte Rampling. In 45 Years [movie], you start out feeling so bad for her, and then it kind of shifts. I don't know how long you have to act to be able to say everything when you say nothing. The acting feels so real. It's not a fluke that a movie that probably no one's heard of, an actress performance comes out of it. — Bun B.

So if it seems like you're doing something different from what everyone else is doing, and if sometimes that feels hard, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. — Craig Groeschel

Stories don't teach us to be good; it isn't as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It isn't like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we're not mechanical, we don't respond every time in the same way ...
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it's happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005 — Philip Pullman

My activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television. — Alice Walker

The Jeep was parked at the beginning of the causeway when Denny got off the bus. She ignored it and started toward the island.
"Denise . . ."
Denny ignored Mr. Jones's call and kept on walking.
She heard the engine start, and soon the Jeep was rolling along beside her.
"Picked up your mail," said Mr. Jones. He handed some envelopes out the window. Denny grabbed them without a word.
"There's a letter there from some old coot named Jones," Mr. Jones said. "Looks like an apology."
Denny looked down and ruffled through the envelopes. "There is not," she said.
"No?" said Mr. Jones sheepishly. "Well, there should be. Guess he didn't get around to writing it. He feels real bad though. I know that for a fact."
Denny stopped and put her hand on her hip and stared at Mr. Jones. — Jackie French Koller

Men are easily threatened. And whenever a man is threatened, when he becomes uncomfortable in places within himself that he does not understand, he naturally retreats into an arena of comfort or competence, or he dominates someone or something in order to feel powerful. Men refuse to feel the paralyzing and humbling horror of uncertainty, a horror that could drive them to trust, a horror that could release in them the power to deeply give themselves in relationship. As a result, most men feel close to no one, especially not to God, and no one feels close to them. Something good in men is stopped and needs to get moving. When good movement stops, bad movement (retreat or domination) reliably develops. — Larry Crabb

I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back. — Anne Lamott

There's lots of bands where somebody will write lyrics and somebody else will sing them. It works for a lot of people, but that feels weird to me. I don't mean this in a bad way at all but it just feels fake.. I guess in my heart of hearts, whether the person has a good voice or not I want [the songs] to come from them. I don't know why. — Frank Iero