Quotes & Sayings About Figuring Things Out

There's a huge misconception that innovation is mostly about inventing or coming up with cool new things. More often than not, innovation is about figuring out what people really need or want but can't have or afford. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Solving crimes is like following a spider web. Everything is connected in some way. It's just figuring out where things intersect so I can find the spider in the middle. — Lisa Kessler

Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point. — Steven Pinker

It's strange to play outdoors, especially in the daytime. But we're figuring it out. The rules are different for festival shows - how you talk to the crowd, how you can try to get them involved. Things are just a little different, and I think we've learned to adapt our show. — Andrew Dost

I've just grown up a lot and started to encounter some of the big decisions of life in terms of what career I wanted to do and figuring out personal relationships and things. — Lee Norris

This is why stories like this, with great evils in them, are necessary for children to read. Kids just got here - they are still figuring things out, and stories are one of the central realities that can help them. Chesterton says somewhere that stories about dragons and knights do not teach children to fear dragons. They had dragons under the bed already. They had the fear already. The stories actually teach children that dragons can be killed. And — Douglas Wilson

I'm good at figuring out how things work, but I don't know how this happened. — Nora Roberts

There are things we can fix and things we can't. I guess life is about figuring out which is which, and dealing with both the best you can. — Ruth Cardello

UNDERLYING NEED "COPING" MECHANISM To have support in figuring out your talents Getting stoned to avoid thinking about it To be loved, held, appreciated Negativity, pessimism to "control" expectations To have feelings received Overeating as an attempt at self-soothing To be recognized as mattering Overwork to prove worth To forgive yourself Becoming perfectionistic to try and avoid mistakes To avoid punishment or disapproval Focusing solely on the needs of others so you don't take care of yourself by exercising Rest and rejuvenation Drinking alcohol to excess, "rewarding" yourself with fatty or sweet foods Solitude and contemplation Picking fights so you end up alone Stability in chaos Worrying as a way to feel in control A sense of purpose Overspending in an attempt to find meaning in material things — M.J. Ryan

If you don't have the ability or encouragement to use yourself in a physical way, you could become just another talking head. And talking heads run things. That's part of the reason why we're in such a sad state as a planet, because it's all about thinking, and thinking has led to a lot of aggrandizement - taking over [resources] and figuring out how you can steal and leaving people and the planet in an impoverished state. — Alice Walker

I'm pretty good at seeing like a lot of different things happening at once and putting them in a pattern and figuring out how you can rearrange it so it might have a better outcome. — William J. Clinton

In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining. — Joe Swanberg

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important. — Sam Altman

I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I'm supposed to be doing. In fact, I'm not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things. — Colson Whitehead

Figuring things out for yourself is practically the only freedom anyone really has nowadays. Use that freedom. — Michael Ironside

Yeah, we don't consider many stupid things. I mean, we get rid of 'em fast ... Just getting rid of the nonsense
just figuring out that if people call you and say, 'I've got this great, wonderful idea', you don't spend 10 minutes once you know in the first sentence that it isn't a great, wonderful idea ... Don't be polite and go through the whole process. — Warren Buffett

[Playing] the bad guys tend to be fascinating. Figuring out what makes them do the things they do is what interests me. — Adam Croasdell

One does not divine this by impressions or knowledge. What this means is that no matter how much you try to figure or calculate by means of impressions or knowledge, it will not prove the least bit useful. Therefore, separate yourself from the discrimination of figuring things out. — Takuan Soho

It's puzzling to me that so many self-help gurus urge people to visualize victory, and stop there. Some even insist that if you wish for good things long enough and hard enough, you'll get them - and, conversely, that if you focus on the negative, you actually invite bad things to happen. Why make yourself miserable worrying? Why waste time getting ready for disasters that may never happen? Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it's productive. Likewise, coming up with a plan of action isn't a waste of time if it gives you peace of mind. While it's true that you may wind up getting ready for something that never happens, if the stages are at all high, it's worth it. — Chris Hadfield

Any time you add something to your game, you still have to find ways to improve, so I'm still studying the game and trying to find out ways to increase how we use me on the floor. You're not being complacent, not falling back and floating around the perimeter too much, figuring out when to attack. I'm trying to find that balance between attacking and spotting up and things like that. — Blake Griffin

I sat for a moment, figuring things out, then decided to stay there. If I was on the floor, I couldn't fall down. — Kim Harrison

There's some things that you learn as you're shooting, and as you're editing that are key, because when you start you don't have the brain that can finish it. You don't really know what it is, and that's the key job; figuring out what you actually have, not what you're dreaming of having. — Mike Mills

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. — Elon Musk

I do have a lot of difficulty figuring out what I want to be working on, but what's the alternative? To be one of those people who has a million things they want to do, and then never does any of them? And then where will you be? — Cyndi Lauper

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. — Arca

I am private because I'm still figuring things out. I'm young! I'm making it up as I go! — Allison Williams

There were things worth keeping and things worth letting go of, and figuring out which was which wasn't that easy." -Jane — Tara Altebrando

We're not broken baby...we're just bent. And bent's okay. Bent means that we're just figuring things out. — K. Bromberg

Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It's almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on. Through the most ordinary things, books, for instance, or a postcard, or eyes or hands, life is transformed. Hands that for decades reached out to hurt us, to drag us down, to control us, or to wave us away in dismissal now reach for us differently. They become instruments of tenderness, buoyancy, exploration, hope. — Anne Lamott

Reading something for the first time and getting this feeling like the material provokes you on some level, and doing the movie is really just sort of defining and figuring out why exactly you felt certain things when you read it. — Kristen Stewart

Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters) — George V. Higgins

I happen to love engineering. I love figuring things out in a spatial sense, that whole realm of working with mechanical parts, and the relationship of the parts, and things like ratios and the speeds of particular objects. — Arthur Ganson

I caught up on a lot of just domestic normal everyday stuff, and grew up a lot, and went to therapy, and did a lot of contemplating and figuring things out. I needed to just strip everything away and figure out who I am and get to know myself, as cheesy as that sounds. — Natalie Maines

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard. — Jim Henson

What's the fun in approaching something closed-minded? I'm very specific; if dialogue is too on-the-nose, or there's a lot of telling and not showing, I'll talk to my manager and let them know the problems I have with it. But, I always go in with fresh eyes. The first pass just needs to be about figuring out little things here and there. — Will Rothhaar

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them. — Jeffrey Eugenides

There are many, many things that are difficult in this life, but one thing that isn't difficult at all is figuring out whether someone is excited or not when they open a present. — Lemony Snicket

My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie. — Stephen King

Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate. — Adam Savage

The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don't go crazy is up to you. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Have you ever been with a man who d-did those things to you?" His voice had turned husky and dark. "Talked dirty to you? Spanked you? Tied you up and sspent hours figuring out how many ways he could make you c-come with his tongue? — Ruthie Knox

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. — Kazuo Ishiguro

The thing about my smart mouth is I have zero control over it. Some people's words pass through a filter before they talk - you can see it on their faces as they rehearse their sentences quickly before speaking. While they're figuring out what to say, I've already said three things, two of them socially inappropriate. — Dalya Moon

I've gained so much confidence as a woman from figuring out that I don't want to be destructive. I don't want to stomp through the world and be number one. I just want to tread really lightly and not destroy anything. Hopefully, I can try to mend some things. That's my goal. — Alicia Silverstone

Intelligence tests require that certain things be figured out, but the figuring out doesn't count. If the figuring out leads to the right answer, then of course the right answer counts. But no tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on figuring things out on the test, the less time there is for filling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the score will look. — Eleanor Duckworth

I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, 'I worked really, really hard in my 20s.' And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more. — Steve Jobs

Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn't care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. — Jo Walton

I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally. I'm a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make something work for all people. — Bill Richardson

I was always interested in figuring things out. I'd do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together. — Alan Alda

Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_. — Kage Baker

I think that sometimes things just get confusing and we get lost, and sometimes you can't figure out which path is the right path ... which is the right decision. Quit or move forward. Heal or break. Fight or die.I'm still figuring that out. — Jessica Sorensen

On films, you have the liberty of working out the details, the psychology, taking maybe more risks and takes than you can in television just because you can't be figuring things out on the day. — Rami Malek

I never took you for a coward, Stevie,' he said quietly and her gaze swung back, angrily. 'Did
I make you mad? Good. I'm glad. Because you make me mad. If today didn't change anything
for you, then you're either a liar or a fool. And I never took you for either of those, either.' He
leaned closer, until he could see every dark eyelash. 'I'm not a coward or liar, but I might be a
fool because I'm not giving up on you. Nor am I giving you up. So consider yourself on notice,
Detective Mazzetti. Things will be different when you get out of here. I'm not going to wait
forever, because we don't have forever. If things had been any different this morning, we might
not even have this moment. So if you're not "ready", then you'd best spend your time in here
figuring out how to get "ready — Karen Rose

I prefer buying things and figuring out where to put them later than regretting not buying them. — Christian Louboutin

Just don't get distracted. Keep focused." "I think I could figure that out." I snapped, and knew I was on edge; perhaps overreacting due to stress. "There's a lot of things I thought you'd figure out that you haven't." I should've left it at that. I'd gotten nasty, he'd gotten nasty back. But I couldn't. "You mean like figuring out that you used my friend to screw with me? Stuff like that?" "Using her would have been sleeping with her. If I'd actually wanted her, I would have had her, and that's just stating the facts." He broke into a falsetto then "'I don't want you, no wait, I do want you' and then you hang all over Vitor. Maybe you had it coming?" "So you used my friend? You thought that was the smart thing to do? No wonder we've got holes rotting away our universe, this whole operation is being run by an idiot! — Donna Augustine

My optimism and confidence come not from feeling I'm luckier than other mortals, and they sure don't come from visualizing victory. They're the result of a lifetime spent visualizing defeat and figuring out how to prevent it.
Like most astronauts, I'm pretty sure that I can deal with what life throws at me because I've thought about what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. That's the power of negative thinking. — Chris Hadfield

I think high school's very difficult. You're figuring out your own power and your effect on other people. You look back and see how you spent so much energy on figuring out things with your parents or your peers. — Kelly Rutherford

Just recognizing and naming that many of the things we treat as historical fact are stories can help erode their power over our sense of identity and thinking. If they are stories rather than "truth," we can write new stories that better represent the country we aspire to be. Our new stories can be about diverse people working together to overcome challenges and make life better for all, about figuring out how to live sustainably on this one planet we share, and on deep respect for cooperation, fairness, and equity instead of promoting hyper-competitive individualism. — Annie Leonard

What podcasts can do in order to liven up the talk show area of TV is bring new personalities and unique worldviews into the fray in a way that's not going to be filtered through the whole Q-rating thing. I think there's a whole new layer of doing things that TV is behind the Internet in figuring out. — Julie Klausner

It's very juicy to twirl your mustache and figure out why people do the horrible things that they do. It's not just because they are evil, but because that's how they somehow explain the world to themselves and justify themselves. It's always interesting figuring out how that happens. — Zeljko Ivanek

I had to figure out my own faith. That was something I figured out a while ago when I was 18. But I can always stand on the fact that my dad has been a great example for me. Beyond that, building my career hasn't been attached to my dad. It's been me figuring things out for myself. — Anthony Evans

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. — Eric Schmidt

Things weren't the same with us, not right away, and maybe not ever. We were growing up. We were still figuring out how to be in each other's lives without being everything to each other. — Jenny Han

What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do. — Yo-Yo Ma

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. — John Berendt

Movies don't look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody's character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it's creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn't mean I know how to fix them. — Nancy Meyers

My mother says it can't stay like this, but I believe it will. The Pants are like an omen. They stand for the promise we made to one another, that no matter what happens, we stick together. But they stand for a challenge too. It's not enough to stay in Bethesda, Maryland, and hunker down in air-conditioned houses. We promise one another that someday we'd get out in the world and figure some stuff out. — Ann Brashares

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible. — Bill James

One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you're married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you're single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what's for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. — Nora Ephron

I can't muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it's dark outside and light up here, it's hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can't even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable. — Nina LaCour

Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person, and I soon came to despise the type who packs even her empty shampoo bottles, figuring she'll sort things out and throw them away once she's settled into her new place. — David Sedaris

It's interesting because the way J.J. cuts - we're very close with our editors as well, so it's kind of the first cut and then he went back and started tightening things up, etc, then loosing things when it was too tight. Then you start watching it and you start figuring out performance - not performance, character-wise I should say, who you're really able to follow, whose journey is harder to follow, and you make all that work. — Bryan Burk

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. — Gary Wolf

I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women's History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.
Half the world is full of women, but it's rare to hear a narrative that doesn't speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man's daughter. A man's wife. — Kameron Hurley

I don't want to be perceived as someone who has it all figured out. I certainly don't feel entitled or like I'm a superstar. I'm still growing, learning, and figuring things out. — Kirsten Storms

Mai grins at Mycroft. 'You know that's slightly ridiculous, don't you?'
He smiled. 'Why?'
'Because. . . because you're teenagers.' Mai's expression says it should be obvious. 'Mycroft, this isn't like figuring out who spray-painted some guy's car. This is murder.'
'The principles are the same' he insists.
'But you're both minors. And you have no access to police information, no experience, no forensics lab, no authority. . . '
'Mai, are you trying to bring me down or something?'
Gus, who usually only gets emotive about things like soccer, suddenly leans forward. 'I think you should do it.' He glances at me and Mycroft in turn. 'This homeless guy, it's not like his death is going to be a major priority, is it? The police won't bend over backwards to bring his killer to justice or anything. He was a derelict with no family. So you two are the only ones who even care. — Ellie Marney

No one has it all figured out, especially not the people who are acting like they do and judging you because of it. Pretending to be something you aren't because you're trying to please a bunch of judgmental hypocrites and shitheads is not the way to be happy. Living the life you want to live is. It really is that simple. — Tucker Max

Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me ... I use entirely too much sugar and so far don't find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It's about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.
And that's not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you're not careful ...
But I've spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope ... ) at the writing, so I'm not giving it/them up! — Ariel Gordon

I tend to not speak up as much, so saying no is rather difficult for me. The biggest step of being an adult is saying, "This is what I do like. This is what I don't like." Being yourself means certain people aren't going to like that. I'm still figuring it out and taking things day by day. — Selena Gomez

I've learned that sometimes love is not enough. You can have a soul mate and be madly in love with that person, but it's not necessarily enough. I think you have to have personalities that mesh well. You have to be the yin to their yang. You also have to be open to figuring things out together and communicating even when it's the last thing you want to do. — Jessica Simpson

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own. — Michael Pollan

One of the nice things about a second book is that your readers already have so much of the introductions on board, they don't have to put all their attention into figuring out the world and can more easily let that play out as a background to the other things you want to do. — Ann Leckie

I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work. — Charles Petzold

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. — Ben Fountain

The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but [ ... ] once you do that, the rest is really easy. — Elon Musk

I'm certainly not an expert and I imagine I'll spend my life figuring it out. What I do know, is that you can't take it all on yourself: find amazing people to collaborate with, build a team, and support other people doing the same. When you share your goals and ambitions with other people and they share with you, you exist in an energizing cycle of always creating new things with people that believe in you. — Karlie Kloss

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that. — Greil Marcus

I was really selfish, and I didn't want to listen to anyone. Then I started working with some really amazing people, traveling more, and figuring out who I was as a person - looking at different things, listening to different music. — Charli XCX

The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having another take on something and keeping it alive. — Jake Gyllenhaal

The first draft is for YOU, the writer; the second and subsequent drafts are for the reader. Trying to do both things at once - figuring out what we want to say, while also fashioning it for another human being to read - is the cause of writer's block. — Karen Karbo

This is a competitive business - there are a lot of women who want these jobs, but experience, education, and smarts go a long way. I'm still figuring it out - I learn new things every day. Once you stop learning, you should get out of the business. It's just really about being hungry for more. — Nicole Lapin

When you have trouble with things - whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industries - it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer. — Donald A. Norman

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What — Steve Krug

It's actually totally badass to go from your twenties to your thirties. There are so many awesome things that happen to you! Like deeply bonding with your yoga pants, developing a burning passion for expensive cheese, having real, actual orgasms (!), not giving two shits what other people think, figuring out the things you actually like to spend time and money doing, and embracing giant underwear. — Ingrid Reinke

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction. — Trip Hawkins

One of the great things about turning 30 is figuring out how to dress comfortably and still look good. — Cobie Smulders

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality. — Laura Lippman

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended ... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice. — Caroline Shaw

The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn't know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you'd stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever. — Nicholas Evans

I think that being on the road and doing more and more stand-up has allowed me to figure out ... like, I don't think I'll ever be Bill Hicks, but I think I'm figuring out what my opinion is on things. — Nick Kroll