Harder Than I Thought Quotes & Sayings

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story. — Donald Miller

I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb
a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn't thought as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than you were rudely shocked in to consciousness by the alarm. That you might missed the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. — Jojo Moyes

Yeah, but I kill myself training. It's just about all I do. I get up and train, and run and I split my hands on the punching bag, and I train for hours into the night, and I have to, because there is nothing else special about me and nothing else that matters. All there is, is training and finding out who killed my parents. Because they were the ones who thought I was special, and whoever took them away from me...What I have is trying. I can try harder than anyone else in the world. I can make revenge the only thing I have in my life. I can do that, because I have to. But it means it's all I have. — Cassandra Clare

Page 148- But I did , Hannah. And I wanted to. I could have helped you. But when I tried, you pushed me away. I can almost hear Hannah's voice speaking my next thought for me. "Then why didn't you try harder?"
- I think this quote is so powerful. This entire book is based on the effort of trying for a loved one and I feel as if clay is feeling the entire impact of hannah's suicide. However, I feel like he's placing all the blame on himself rather than seeing that other people had faults in not trying hard enough for Hannah. I think that later on in the book this quote will be acted out in a sense that the mistake of him not trying hard enough for hannah will be acted on someone else.. maybe he'll try harder for someone else? Maybe Hannah made the tape, not to necessarily blame him for her suicide, but so in the future he will help someone rather than them killing themselves. — Jay Asher

It was harder, I thought, to watch someone in pain than to be in it yourself. — Maggie Stiefvater

I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon. — Donald Miller

Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wife, who was ice dancing at the Rockefeller Center ice rink. — Michio Kaku

Talk to me." She shrugged. "Nothing to say." "You're strung tighter'n these wires." "You scared me, is all." He hooked a finger under her jaw, turning her face. "It's more'n that." She pulled away. "You haven't exactly been Mr. Easygoing lately either, you know." He was quiet so long she almost looked at him. Almost. In the quiet, she could feel her pulse throbbing in her neck. "Reckon you're right," he said. She could count on one hand the times she'd heard that from a man. One finger. "It's harder than I thought." "What is?" she asked, then pressed her lips together, suddenly sure she didn't want to know. "Loving you. — Denise Hunter

I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy. — Andrew Sean Greer

Death turned to leave the room, but stopped when Hex began to write furiously. He went back and looked at the emerging paper.
+++ Dear Hogfather, For Hogswatch I Want
OH, NO. YOU CAN'T WRITE LETT ... Death paused, and then said, YOU CAN, CAN'T YOU.
+++ Yes. I Am Entitled +++
Death waited until the pen had stopped, and picked up the paper.
BUT YOU ARE A MACHINE. THINGS HAVE NO DESIRES. A DOORKNOB WANTS NOTHING, EVEN THOUGH IT IS A COMPLEX MACHINE.
+++ All Things Strive +++
YOU HAVE A POINT, said Death. He thought of tiny red petals in the black depths, and read to the end of the list.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT MOST OF THESE THINGS ARE. I DON'T THINK THE SACK WILL, EITHER.
+++ I Regret This +++
BUT WE WILL DO THE BEST WE CAN, said Death.
FRANKLY, I SHALL BE CLAD WHEN TONIGHT'S OVER. IT'S MUCH HARDER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE. He rummaged in his sack. LET ME SEE ... HOW OLD ARE YOU? — Terry Pratchett

The path of self-purification is hard and steep. One has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. — Mahatma Gandhi

Having been an editor for more than a decade, I thought I had a good idea of how much work was involved in writing a novel. I was wrong! Writing is a lot harder than I ever imagined - but worth it. — Julie Klassen

He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o' aught on earth. He thought God could na be harder than men; mappen not so hard; mappen as tender as a mother; mappen tenderer. I'm not saying he did right, and I'm not saying he didn't wrong. All I say is, may neither me nor mine ever have his sore heart, or we may do like things. — Elizabeth Gaskell

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
Let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots babe
I just wanna be yours

Secrets I have held in my heart
Are harder to hide than I thought
Maybe I just wanna be yours
I wanna be yours, I wanna be yours
Wanna be yours, wanna be yours, wanna be yours

Let me be your 'leccy meter and I'll never run out
And let me be the portable heater that you'll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion (I wanna be)
Hold your hair in deep devotion (How deep?)
At least as deep as the Pacific Ocean
I wanna be yours

Read more: Arctic Monkeys - I Wanna Be Yours Lyrics | MetroLyrics — Arctic Monkeys

He had bucked harder with me than the fellows expected him to, and I don't know how I stayed on. I guess I was just too scared to fall off. Anyway, Mr. Cooper shook hands with me after Hi lifted me down. He said, "By God, you're going to make a cow poke, Little Britches. As long as you're with me you can call him your own horse." Then he laughed, and said to the other men, "I thought, by God, the kid was going to pull that one-inch hackamore rope in two before the music stopped."
Father never swore, and I know I wouldn't ever have said it out loud, but before I really knew what I was thinking, "By God, I thought so, too," went through my head. — Ralph Moody

You're the most stubborn person I've ever met, and sometimes it seems like your sole purpose in life is to make mine harder, but I swear, I love you more than I thought I could love anyone. — James Patterson

When she treads on my grave and feels as if she's trampling on that doting old man's bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I'm dead I'll be aware of that. I can't believe I won't. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha's Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: It hurts! It hurts! ... Even though it hurts, I'm happy - I've never been more happy, I'm much, much happier than when I was alive! ... Trample harder! Harder! — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

Doing reality TV is a lot harder than I thought because I come from the world of [scripted] television where everything is thought out and you know what's going to happen, your lines, what your wardrobe is going to be, etc. But with reality, it's very spontaneous and the cameras are around for 12 hours a day. — Tia Mowry

...choosing words is harder than I thought. — Cynthia Lord

Tell me more," I said. "Tell me anything. What's the meaning of life?"
He let out a big, burly laugh.
"You thought you'd stump me with that one, didn't you? It's actually very simple. The purpose of life is to find your way back to a spiritual way of thinking and living-to be able to get past the physical stuff. That's pretty much the whole test. And every soul is given talents and strengths to help them along the way."
"That's it?"
He snickered at my bug-eyed response.
"It's much harder than it sounds." He looked up at the clock now. "Ten more minutes, little one. What else you got for me? — Wendy Higgins

Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?'
He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.
'No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no selfdoubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right, that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next. — Karen Maitland

After I won 21 games, I said, "This isn't that hard actually. I can do this every year for maybe 10, 15 years." To tell you the truth I thought I was going to be in the Hall of Fame. I really thought that. You feel so strong, so powerful walking down the street. You know you can throw a ball harder than any man in the world, or certainly the top five. Sandy Koufax knocked all of us out of the box on that one, so we would think, "I'm the second or third hardest thrower in the game." — Jim Bouton

Interesting that the book used the word define.
That's just what I've been thinking about.
This business of defining who you are
and what you are
and where you are headed-
it's all harder than I thought it would be.
I thought that this stuff
just ...
happened,
I thought that life
just happened,
and I guess I thought
I'd drift right along,
like a leaf on a river,
flowing with the current
to wherever the river wanted to go. — Kelly Bingham

Imprisonment hit me so hard - much harder than I had thought. — Mathias Rust

He looked down at a tired face that was only fifty-one years old. He looked down and thought dad I feel lots older than you. I was sorry for you dad. Things weren't going well and they never would have gone well for you and it's just as good you're dead. People've got to be quicker and harder these days than you were dad. Goodnight and good-dreams. I won't forget you and I'm not as sorry for you today as I was yesterday. I loved you dad goodnight. — Dalton Trumbo

I mustered all my strength, drew back, and swung.
The sword's blade hit the side of her neck, hard and deep. She gave a horrible, sickening cry, a shriek that made my skin crawl. She tried to move toward me. I pulled back and hit again. Her hands clutched at her throat, and her knees gave way. I struck and struck, the sword digging in deeper into her neck each time. Cutting off someone's head was harder than I thought it would be. The old, dull sword probably wasn't helping.
But finally, I gained enough sense to realize she wasn't moving. Her head lay there, detached from her body, her dead eyes looking up at me as though she couldn't believe what had happened. That made two of us. — Richelle Mead

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you'd get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it's hard work, almost harder once you're successful because you've got to maintain it. — Steven Wright

MirkerLurker: I thought the characters were the reason anyone read Monstrous Sea.

rainmaker: You mean like, shipping?

MirkerLurker: No, not shipping - shipping's great, and I do it all the time, but I mean... the characters themselves. The struggles they have to go through, and when you really love them, how much they affect you. When the characters are good, they make you care about everything else. That's why I draw them. It probably sounds dumb, but they're like real people to me. And this will probably sound worse, but sometimes I like them better than real people. I can empathize with characters. Real people are harder. — Francesca Zappia

I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street. — Jojo Moyes

I've always thought that travelling every day as a journalist on the Tour's got to be harder than actually racing. — Greg LeMond

The guy who was punching me was a lot burlier than I was, so it hurt plenty. But I tried to pretend it didn't bother me at all, that I actually liked it. It was hard to do this convincingly, because he had kind of knocked the wind out of me there, so all I could do was smile and wink and give him the thumbs up while I waited to be able to breath again. He thought I was making fun of him and started punching me in the stomach harder. Meanwhile, I'm not any closer to getting my breath back. Some days are like that. — John Swartzwelder

I've learned that moving away from my closest friends was much, much harder to do than I ever thought it would be. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Respect your soul: don't keep repeating "I'm going to make it". Your soul already knows that, what it needs is to use the long journey to be able to grow, stretch along the horizon, touch the sky. An obsession does not help you at all to reach your objective, and even ends up taking the pleasure out of the climb. But pay attention: also, don't keep saying "it's harder than I thought", because that will make you lose your inner strength. — Paulo Coelho

I thought it was the opposite," Scarlett said. "The past is set but the future is changeable?" "No. The past is only mostly set, and the future is harder to change than you would think. — Stephanie Garber

You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and an A-minus feel like a slap in the face. — Taylor Mali

I don't know when I fell in love with you, but I have fallen deeper and harder than anyone else in my life. You've become my world. I can't imagine a day without you by my side, an hour without your smile, a minute without hearing you laugh, and a second without you in my life. She opened her mouth, and I shook my head. I will spend my life protecting you and being worthy of being yours, I've never wanted anything as badly as I want you to be mine, walking through life together hand and hand, and waking up with you next to me each morning makes my life so much sweeter than I ever thought possible — Chelle Bliss

I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can't do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness ... and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK. — Helen DeWitt

I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That's why they're willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body. — Chaz Bono

All you had to say was, 'I am a writer,' and you became one. You didn't even have to write anything. You could just sit in a coffee shop with a notebook and stare into space, with a slightly bemused look on your face, judging the weight of the world with a jaundiced eye. As you can see, you can be completely full of shit and still be a writer ... I also thought it was going to be a great way to meet girls, but it wasn't
probably because as I was staring into space, I no doubt looked mildly retarded. You see, I wanted to write plays, which in retrospect is a lot harder than learning Mandarin, I think. How I ended up in this delusional state shall be saved for another time. — Lewis Black

I'm a fan of Bill Hicks. He did things that no other stand up did at the time. He was making fun of religion, at that time it was a lot harder to say those things in the States than it was here. To slag off Christianity and fundamentalist Christians, and to be pro drugs and anti gun in the deep south, that's a big ask. And he did that and made it funny. Bill Hicks was able to say things that he really thought, and he managed to make those thoughts funny without a care if it antagonised people. — Ed Byrne

I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading. — Petina Gappah

It is not as difficult as I thought it was, but it is harder than it is. — Eugene Ormandy

My ministers have informed me that Alyss is ridding her land of Glass Eyes."
Overriding the imperative that Redd embedded in them is harder than she thought," added Ripkins.
In other words, they're designed to kill and nothing more."
The bodygaurds bowed that this was so.
Perhaps the trick is not the override their imperative," Arch mused, "but the reprogram them to acknowledge a differnent master. Everyone in Woderland
even the otherwise rebellious Redd Heart
is, was, or always has been occupied with inventing things. But what good are things if there no clever schemes in which to use them? I putthings to unexpected and imaginative use."
Seeing Redd — Frank Beddor

I've been through the entire list of Polar problems. I knew it would be hard, but it's harder than I ever thought it would be. I've suffered from blisters, a high-altitude cough, frost nip, and I even managed to break a ski they told me was unbreakable. — Lewis Clarke

I will never give up, just push harder because the thought of quitting if far worse than the temporary pain I'm feeling now. — Sarah Van Waterschoot

I think it was always there and it was maybe a matter of bringing it out. It was harder than I thought it would be and I had to try harder. I had to regain my confidence, maybe the most important thing. I have learned a lot to relax. I know what I can do now, and I do it. — Guy Lafleur

Of course, walking alone on a country path, it is easier to maintain mindfulness. If there's a friend by your side, not talking but also watching his breath, then you can continue to maintain mindfulness without difficulty. But if the friend at your side begins to talk, it becomes a little more difficult. If, in your mind, you think, "I wish this fellow would quit talking, so I could concentrate," you have already lost your mindfulness. But if you think, instead, "If he wishes to talk, I will answer, but I will continue in mindfulness, aware of the fact that we are walking along this path together, aware of what we say, I can continue to watch my breath as well." If you can give rise to that thought, you will be continuing in mindfulness. It is harder to practice in such situations than when you are alone, but if you continue to practice nonetheless, you will develop the ability to maintain much greater concentration. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be ... because the thing is, even if you're just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week's worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That's just the nature of the working world-things have to get done, babies or not. And if you're like me-if you're like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job-you don't want to disappoint a boss. And you want to do a good job raising your baby ... It's not like you think it's going to be — Jennifer Weiner

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Trying not to look at his penis was proving harder than I'd thought it would be. — Darynda Jones

Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done. — Donald Miller