How To Copy Quotes & Sayings

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading. — Elizabeth Berg

Run to the local bookshop and buy a copy of How to Learn Mind Control in Ten Minutes by Professor Stephen Haste and very quickly hypnotise Miss Spite into thinking he had already given her his homework. Disguise himself as a plate of spaghetti Bolognese. Bribe the school nurse into telling Miss Spite he had died. — David Walliams

Conan O'Brien has talked about how comedians try to emulate their heroes, fall short, and end up doing their own thing. Johnny Carson tried to be Jack Benny but ended up Johnny Carson. David Letterman tried to copy Johnny Carson but ended up David Letterman. And Conan O'Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O'Brien. In O'Brien's words, "It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique." Thank goodness. — Austin Kleon

If you haven't done what you intended to do yet, donate or recycle that book. Only by discarding it will you be able to test how passionate you are about that subject. If your feelings don't change after discarding it, then you're fine as is. If you want the book so badly after getting rid of it that you're willing to buy another copy, then buy one - and this time read and study it. Books — Marie Kondo

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success. — Alice Foote MacDougall

Perhaps the most versatile and useful plug-in in the collection is Mass Copy. It is certainly the one I use the most. Due to limitations in how plugins can interact with Finale, Mass Copy has a somewhat unusual user interface. — Robert Patterson

I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style. — Jana Novotna

A problem I've always had with fashion magazines is that women are encouraged to copy other women. While I suspect that many men enjoy copying other men (consider the idea of the alpha male and beta males), and while part of what makes a man "superior" is how close he can get to "embodying manliness — Sheila Heti

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn't slip, that's how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse. — Victor Lodato

And when we diverge, it will be impossible for the expendables and the ship's computers on all the ships to know which version of Ram Odin to obey," said Ram. "Therefore I order you and all the other expendables to immediately kill every copy of Ram except me."
"I'm so sorry," said the expendable. "One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word 'immediately,' and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin."
Ram gave a little half smile. "How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once-"
The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram's head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin. — Orson Scott Card

I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it. — Adam Mansbach

That's exactly how I want you to feel. When you finish this book, I want you to be filled with curiosity. I want you to say, "I have to find out what happens next," and then I want you to head to your nearest library or bookstore to pick up a copy of Wuthering Heights. — Clare B. Dunkle

Being in New York, a lot of people I knew were top-notch copy editors or photo retouchers, so I had a good community around me that knew how to do the specialized stuff. — Ian Christe

How boring to copy the past
with all the magnificence of today and tomorrow. — Diana Vreeland

The Republicans released their 'Pledge to America.' It's 21 pages of phony charts and bad ideas. Sarah Palin got a copy, and she said, 'How am I supposed to fit all this crap on my hand? — Bill Maher

A copy of Thoreau's Walden ... which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago ... when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way. I — Robert M. Pirsig

IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here - gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah - should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what's astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete. — Alan Weisman

The kind of sleep that I had during my own film [Certified Copy] screening in Cannes is different. It's not because of the specificity of the film. It was because of my relationship as an author to this film. Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them. Whereas this time, I didn't have that responsibility on my shoulders. — Abbas Kiarostami

But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too. — Mo Yan

I don't understand,' Dad says. 'You were such happy children.'

'I was never a happy child,' George says.

'True, but Henry was.'

'I'm not anymore. It's actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,' I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she's reading. The Road.

'Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that's a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit. — Cath Crowley

Have you noticed how the Republicans and Democrats try to copy each other at their conventions. Like at the Democratic convention John Kerry's daughter told a story about how he once gave CPR to her hamster. At the Republican convention the Bush girls are going to tell a story about how when their hamster was bad, their dad built them a little electric chair. — Jay Leno

This isn't your average book, it's pure gold: Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches. Explains everything you need to know about girls. IF only I'd had this last year I'd have known exactly how to get rid of Lavender and I would've known how to get going with ... Well Fred and George gave me a copy, and I've learned a lot. You'd be surprised, it's not all about wandwork, either. — J.K. Rowling

Alby had a gruff, unavailable way of teaching. He did the action as he wanted it done and your job was to copy it. He didn't suffer questions well and preferred to increase the work rather than stop and clarify technique. It was early March when I started. The only other students were a myopic woman, who was clearly better suited to yoga, and Crazy Chris. Alby called him this openly. Chris didn't mind. He was crazy. He couldn't generally remember his right from his left and anything past the most basic punches was beyond him. It didn't stop him talking constantly about how he was going to join the Turkish army. It didn't stop him hitting anything he could as hard as he could whenever he could, either. — Heath Lander

The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit. — Will Advise

All religions worthy of the name are now making great efforts to purify their doctrines and return to their original standpoint, - all except Christianity! You surely know that the nineteenth century Christianity is not the religion taught by Christ. Christ's religion has been changed and corrupted. But Christian clergymen are well aware that if they were to attempt to purify Christianity and bring it back to the religion of Christ, the result would be to reform it out of existence. Christianity stands to-day completely explained. Every step in its development is laid bare and shown to be due to purely natural causes, and it is easy to see how much Christianity adopted from other and older religions. — Virchand Gandhi

And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to espress (sic) myself" - I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same she was a geological (sic) relation; there is always the respect due to your geology (sic)," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life. — Marcel Proust

I'll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face. I think I'm really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are. — Cindy Sherman

So my approach to troubleshooting is I go into the plant. The first thing I do before we change anything on the equipment is make the people operate it correctly. Stop screaming, stop poking all the animals with electric prods, bring up smaller groups. And then I see how it works. Then I go, "Okay. He's balking at seeing a lady standing there writing down cattle IDs. All right, get a big piece of cardboard, I'll cover her up. He'll balking at the restrainer. I'll turn a light on the restrainer entrance. 'So I just do a lot of little things, a lot of modifications with lights and cardboard to see if I can get it to work. And then after I've done that I go, "Well this is hopeless. You're going to have to build a new system, or we can fix it with these changes." There's an awful lot of systems where it's certainly not a system I would want to copy, but I can make it work. The plant can live with it. — Robert Greene

The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe. — Douglas Adams

And books! ... she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. — Jane Austen

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see. — Patricia McCormick

When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?' — Steve Toltz

So this was how our assistant directors were finding their guidance? Dug up from five-year-old e-mails? Later I learned that the staff members had to print out their e-mails in order to store them in safety. Evidently, the New York office server was scrubbed periodically to free up storage space. Dawn couldn't save e-mails on her computer for long. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A five-year-old crumpled paper copy of an e-mail in one employee's files held crucial documentation for a federal agency? If SEC inspectors ever arrived at a financial firm for an examination and discovered that the firm had no manual on how to comply with federal securities laws, that firm would immediately be cited for deficiencies and most likely subject to enforcement action. — Norm Champ

The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript "Double-wide what?" tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, "Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?" Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, "Well, you see, it's a recipe that's been in my family for some time. — Sally Mann

I wonder how many times we've been on this precipice only to delete what we can't understand. And then thinking we can just copy it back, and find that it's been lost. I wonder if this is why downloading the human consciousness has been such a dead end. Like there's some bit of complexity there that can't survive duplication. — Hugh Howey

Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided. — P.D. James

If you look at the history of how information flows, there was a time that newspapers were kind of in the place that Google and Facebook are now - how do we get more people to buy a copy? Then there was a shift in the early 20th century. They needed to do better, and readers and consumers demanded that of them. — Eli Pariser

But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting. — Daniel J. Levitin

Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one's own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem - how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer - this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo. — Catherynne M Valente

You watch movies and see bands you like and copy them and see what you can hold. I mean, it's all down to how you hold what you wear. — Albert Hammond Jr.

Sometimes this habit of using an entire book to tackle a single issue seems positively reckless. When the captain of your little pleasure cruiser spots a ferry hull looming over the horizon, do you really want him to reach for a copy of How to Avoid Huge Ships? Or would you rather that he kept his attention on the wheel? — Joel Rickett

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, "Calculating how many rental helium tanks you'd have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft." Sorry, Wolfram. — Randall Munroe

[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith. — Michael Stipe

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? — Charles Stross

When I was fifteen or sixteen I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's 'Republic', front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say... I didn't know what exactly.

from: 'The Examined Life, Philosophical Meditations — Robert Nozick

If you just do something, then you're a five-year wonder and, goodbye, you're gone. But if people feel it's worthwhile, not only do they copy but they want to learn how to do it To me, that's what it's all about. If someone were to ask me, 'What's the number one thing, in essence, that you left behind?' It was the teaching of others so that they could take my work and take it further. — Vidal Sassoon

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes. — Erma Bombeck

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well
they certainly are
but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed
there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases. — David Byrne

How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, "creating" a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant. — Chuck Palahniuk

This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition
an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [ ... ] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [ ... ] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.' [ ... ] He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed ... — Geraldine Brooks

We were all grinning and everyone had their eyes open for once. Ian must have been moving - his hand was blurred. It was exactly how I imagined us, right down to Kieran's arm around me and the peace sign he was making above Matty's head. The big carving was behind us, and the other trees leaned into the picture, like giant people.

Then a cloud went over the sun and Ian said he had better get going. I wished we had taken five pictures so that we could all have a copy. When I looked at the image again, the colours had already started to fade, as if it was a moment we could never have back. — Inga Simpson

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution. — Niklas Zennstrom

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future. — Natasha Pulley

Look under the passenger seat in a black plastic bin. There should be a book."
Raphael hopped out, dug under the seat, and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Almanac of Mystical Creatures.
"Got it," I said into the phone.
"Page seventy-six."
Raphael flipped the book open and held it up. On the left page a lithograph showed a three-headed dog with a serpent for a tail. The caption under the picture said CERBERUS.
"Is that your dog?" Kate asked.
"Could be. How the heck did you know the exact page?"
"I have perfect memory!"
I snorted.
She sighed into the phone.
"I spilled coffee on that page and had to leave the book open to dry it out. It always opens to that entry now. — Ilona Andrews

The image of how power shows itself to the public is important ... CNN was an inspiration to do the project in color because power confirms itself through television ... I thought it would be interesting to copy the same language. large color pictures are framed in heavy wooden frames with golden plates and hung slightly higher than normal. So viewers get a sore neck watching these events, this is also the case when looking at paintings of saints in cathedrals. — Carl De Keyzer

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas. — Jan Koum

Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I've heard since school got out." I couldn't even look at him. "Cheer up," he said. "I brought some real entertainment." He pulled a brittle copy of The Godfather from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven - he knew the sexy page numbers by heart - in which some imaginary woman described how big this imaginary Sonny was to — Jim Lynch

Naomi's my girlfriend," I say aloud, just to test the words, see how they feel fucking across my lips. Ronnie flips a page in an old copy of Rollin' Strong magazine and ignores me.
"Yeah, we heard. Sixteen times since we came in here," Josh bitches. — C.M. Stunich

It's like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line. — Binyavanga Wainaina

People like to say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. There tends to be a whispered reverence around the expression, as if it has magical healing powers. Better to be hated than ignored by that angry ex of yours; better to be hated than ignored, generally.

Otherwise, you may spend your life staring straight down the barrel of the opposite of love.

But I think that's bullshit. Nonsense print copy for a paper towel. A sound bit e to needlepoint on a throw pillow. Could indifference really be worse than hate? How depressing to think we could be spending most of our days surrounded by people who feel something worse than hate toward us. — Julie Buxbaum

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," he recited from memory. — John Irving

You don't know how much I need such a friend," she said. "My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women - my best friends - well, they use me or abuse me; but they don't care a straw what happens to me. I've been about too long - people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry. — Edith Wharton

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve. — Austin Kleon

I don't like to think of her as pretend Peabody anymore. The more we find out, the meaner and crazier she gets. It's like it's bad enough fake Peabody got murdered, but now fake Peabody is a dead, blackmailing asshole on top of it. It's depressing."
"Yeah, it's all really too bad for you."
"Well, it kind of is. How am I supposed to enjoy the vid now, when I'll be thinking how behind the scenes I was trying to blackmail McNab into bed, and the whole time he's in love with you? And that maybe there's a vid of the two of you all naked and sexy and - "
"Stop right there before I boot."
"Hey! Maybe there's a vid of fake Peabody and fake Roarke all naked and sexy. That would definitely make up for it. Maybe I can get a copy."
"There's going to be a vid of me tearing strips off your ass then using them to wallpaper my office. I'll make copies for everybody. Get Marlo down here. I'll start on Julian. — J.D. Robb

Clovis Fossey has asked if you would send the society a copy of your prizewinning essay on chickens ... I'd like to read it too, chickens being the reason I fell off a henhouse roof. They'd chased me there. How they all came at me with their razor lips and back to back eyeballs. People don't know how chickens can turn on you, but they can, just like mad dogs. I didn't keep hens until the war came, but then I had to, but I am never easy in their company. — Mary Ann Shaffer

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks. — Bridget Riley

Sir, do you know how they were used to fill balloons, and how they now do it?"

"No," said Alverstoke. "I've no doubt, however, that I soon shall."

He was right. From then on Felix, who had acquired a tattered copy of the History and Practice of Aerostation, maintained a flow of conversation, largely informative, but interspersed with eager questions. — Georgette Heyer

When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate. — Clayton M Christensen

Copy everything you see on television, from hair styles to the clothes and don't think too often, just do exactly how you were told, how your parents told you, and you will make your own personality that is you. — Auliq Ice

Everly sighs and crosses her arms across her chest. "No, I didn't catch anything at the wedding except Finn's house key."

"Professor Camden gave you his house key? I though you said he was going to require additional convincing before, and I quote, he accepted what was best for him?"

She waves a dismissive hand. "No, I made myself a copy."

"Everly, no." I am shaking my head at her in disbelief. "No, you did not. How? Does he know?"

"Sophie, it's like you don't even know me. I borrowed his car." She stops at the look on my face. "Fine, I stole his car and ran over to Home Depot and made copies while he was busy with his best man duties. — Jana Aston

something happened to you, think how helpful it would be for your loved ones left behind to have a copy of the key — Mark Gavagan

I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief. — Christian Fennesz