Got Prize Quotes & Sayings

Jack Wise he got the prize for being circumspect, which is the great big grown up way of saying he's correct. — Sara Loo

She got fired?" Confusion laced Gavin's voice. "When?"
"This morning," Dante muttered.
"Why?" Gavin asked. "What did she do?"
"Me," Dante said.
"Oh." A moment of silence passed before Gavin broke out into laughter. "Ah man, really? She lost her job for fucking around with you?"
"I don't see why that's so funny."
"Because," Gavin said, "you're the worst consolation prize ever."
Dante shot right back up, and Matty barely had enough time to move out of the way before the bottle of water hurled by him, hitting Gavin in the chest. — J.M. Darhower

Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times. — Bill Bryson

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening. — Haruki Murakami

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I'd won the Pulitzer Prize. — Rick Atkinson

I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked having something to think about. I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first one got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
I wish I had a pig ball. — Margaret Atwood

Went up from my feet to my head,
With little chills after it stealing-
And my hands got as numb as the dead.
A moment, and then it was over:
The diamond blazed up in my eyes,
And I saw in the face of my lover
A questioning, strange surprise.
Maybe 'twas the scent of the flowers,
That heavy with fragrance bloomed near,
But I didn't feel natural for hours;
It was odd now, wasn't it, dear?
Write soon to your fortunate Clara
Who has carried the prize away,
And say you'll come on when I marry;
I think it will happen in May. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The woman I love she got a prize fighter nose, cauliflower ears and a run in her hose. — Bob Dylan

[On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn't read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize. — Bernice Rubens

Okay, you've got to do something very difficult. Don't focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize. The — Ryan Holiday

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library. — Vijay Seshadri

Lex lets you off the hook way too easily, you know that?" "Of course I do." No laughter now. Dallas's expression was deadly serious. "Why do you think being a better man matters so damn much? The sex, that's good, but it's not the prize. Trust is the prize, and the fight's not about winning it or keeping it. It's about deserving it, and that's a fight a man's got to have with himself. Every fucking day. — Kit Rocha

I don't like honors ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. — Richard P. Feynman

You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize. — Napoleon Hill

Fucking Hallmark never wrote anything for how I felt then. When Metallica and the rest of the metal community pitched in to pay for Acrassicauda, the Iraqi heavy metal band, to move to the US is the only thing that comes close. And maybe the late-breaking success of Anvil. I had a toasty heart, especially after I got called back to pick up first prize for Miss Frizz. Ah, never mind. You know what I'm saying. — Susan Juby

I had a place at university to study theology and philosophy. I got the divinity prize at my school two years in a row. Probably because there were only 10 of us, but still. — Ben Lloyd-Hughes

I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence,' because I don't believe that I am non-violent ... Right now, I would love to kill George Bush. I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die, the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life. — Betty Williams

Collaboration is just, really, a group of people getting in a room with their eye on a very similar prize and wanting to come out with the same show. The director, ultimately, is the guy in front of whom the buck stops. So, he has to have the courage to prevail. But, he has got to have a huge amount of respect for his collaborators. — Harold Prince

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital. — Doris Lessing

The Macedonian Endeavour Channel was screening live coverage of the world series of the Who's Got the Stupidest Name (WGSN) competition. First prize had already gone to Brian Burdock, a French Algerian with a penchant for Longchamp. — St John Morris

So I think that in the beginning of your career you're just looking to work. Luckily for me, my first movie was 'Rabbit Hole' and I got to work with incredible people, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, John Cameron Mitchell, and all the actors involved. So it's tough, man, because you want to have credibility. — Miles Teller

That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there - hot boudain sausage and cold beer - had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn't deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts-friendship, for instance - couldn't be confused with payback for something you'd accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize. — Mary Karr

I shouldn't have lost my temper that way. It just pricks his pride, makes him dig in his heels."
"So why did you?" I asked, genuinely curious. It was rare for Nikolai's emotions to get the best of him.
"I don't know," he said, shredding the leaf. "You got angry. I got angry. The room was too damn hot."
"I don't think that's it."
"Indigestion?" he offered.
"It's because you actually care about what happens to this country," I said. "The throne is just a prize to Vasily, something he wants to squabble over like a favorite toy, You're not like that. You'll make a good king."
Nikolai froze. "I ... " For once, words seemed to have deserted him. Then a crooked, embarrassed smile crept across his face. It was a far cry from his usual self-assured grin. "Thank you," he said.
I sighed as we resumed our pace. "You're going to be insufferable now, aren't you?"
Nikolai laughed. "I'm already insufferable. — Leigh Bardugo

You've got to commit to something. I'm not telling you it has to be your life's dream or that it'll get you a Nobel Prize. But it will earn you more ownership of yourself. Commit to something
that is the essence of soul-searching. — Laura C. Schlessinger

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it - oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible. — Desmond Tutu

I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [ ... ] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal. — Steven Chu

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. — Joan Didion

American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes. — Thomas Friedman

We won a contest at the teen fair in Vancouver and the first prize was a recording contract and we recorded at a radio station on the stairway, and we did a record and it got put out. — Tommy Chong

In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. — Richard P. Feynman

I've organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn't help but at least they explored it. — Elie Wiesel

In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease. — Constance Baker Motley

I was in 27 Broadway plays, and three of them got the Pulitzer Prize. — Dick Van Patten

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass. — Douglas Adams

I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal. — Sue Miller

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. — Sam Kean

I got my eyes to the prize, honey. — Kristen Ashley

I absolutely want and prize and love and revere every single media review I get, but if I got 50 reviews from major newspapers and one review from Amazon, I still would feel a little weird: 'What's going on? Why aren't people responding?' — Caroline Leavitt

I got a washed out version of Mom's curls and a better copy of Dad's blue eyes, The rest of me, I guess, is up for grabs. Except maybe Gran's nose, but she could have been trying to make me feel better. I'm no prize. Most girls go through a gawky stage, but I'm beginning to think mine will be a lifelong thing. It doesn't bother me too much. Better to be strong than pretty and useless. I'll take a plain girl with her head screwed on right over a cheerleader any day. — Lilith Saintcrow

I realized that all those superheroes were doing was fighting themselves, and that getting to breathe underwater or shoot fire from your fingers didn't really make up for being screwed up in the first place. It was just the consolation prize
you got the great costume and the invisible jet for being a loser in everything else. — Michael Thomas Ford

I was 15 when I got my first job as a proofreader for an advertising agency in the City, earning £12 a week. But by then, I was already playing darts tournaments every weekend, regularly winning the £50 first prize. By the time I was 16 and winning two or three contests a weekend, I ditched the agency job and concentrated on darts. — Eric Bristow

While it's possible I just got sick and she arranged for me to be cleaned up and cared for - much as I do, or did, for my undergraduate friends - I have no idea why she might benefact me thus. I don't have a lot of faith in the milk of human kindness; it's generally been left out too long. Then again, I also didn't see why she might spend a night in drunken revels with me, either. I'm no prize, unless you count door prizes. Well, — Garon Whited

[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking
colored it true blue
but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father. — Gordon Donaldson

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work. — Joshua Lederberg

The Syrians lost out because they happened to have their revolution during an election cycle in America, France, and bizarrely, some kind of election cycle in Russia. Obama wasn't going to be seen to commit anything to Syria, that would be political suicide, but he's also got a Nobel Peace Prize sitting on his mantelpiece. — Paul Conroy

I don't like honors. I'm appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else ... I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors ... I can't stand it, it hurts me. — Richard P. Feynman

What a dumb accident a family was. Some people got lucky, some not so lucky, and some people got the booby prize. — Laura Ruby

Way back in 1989, I got lucky with my first published story when it was selected for the Journey Prize anthology. Then I got lucky three more times. It is astounding to see how many writers published in the anthology have gone on to publish great story collections and novels. The anthology is a windfall for both writer and reader. — David Bergen

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers. — Diane Sawyer

You got an all-out prize fight, you wait 'til the fight's over, one guy's left standing and that's how you know who's won. — David Mamet

Bother the right man!" cried Miss Findlater, crossly. "I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful - like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The Democrats say we ought to give Barack Obama credit for trying. That sounds like the nonsense of giving every kid a trophy for showing up. Friends, we're talking about leading the country, not playing on a third-grade soccer team! I realize this is the man who got a Nobel Peace Prize for what he would potentially do, but in the real world, you get the prize for producing something, not just promising it. — Mike Huckabee

Feels almost like real agent work, doesn't it?" Barron says as we walk down the street, heads bowed against the wind. "You know, if we caught your girlfriend committing a crime, I bet Yulikova would give us a bonus or something for being prize pupils."
"Except that we're not going to do that," I say.
"I thought you wanted us to be good guys." He grins a too-wide grin. He's enjoying needling me, and my reacting only makes it worse, but I can't stop.
"Not if it means hurting her," I say, my voice as deadly as I can make it. "Never her."
"Got it. Hurting, bad. But how do you excuse stalking her and her friends, little brother?"
"I'm not excusing it," I say. "I'm just doing it. — Holly Black

I'm not sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize or not, but the Nobel Committee called me, and, 'You got the Nobel Prize.' So, I was so, so happy, and I was so surprised. — Shuji Nakamura