In Any Way Quotes & Sayings

I'm not really interested in the audience's enjoyment,' Cave mumbles once he has changed into clean pants. 'It doesn't bother me one way or another. I just don't give a shit. People feel more and more disappointed with each concert because less and less happens. It's really easy to suck an audience in. Like, I can wiggle my bum and back-flip on my head and they love it. I could make an audience love me until the end of my days. There's just no point in it any more. I wish they'd just ... die. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever. — Quentin Tarantino

I would decriminalize marijuana, but you step out of your house high and you bother somebody else in any way, shape or form, I'm going to slap a fine on you that's going to curl your hair! — Bill O'Reilly

You have a mayor who hates guns. If it was up to me, we wouldn't have any handguns in the District of Columbia. I swear to protect the Constitution and what the courts say, but I will do it in the most restrictive way as possible. — Muriel Bowser

Imagine for a moment the result if everyone were to love one another as Jesus loves his disciples. We would have no bickering, quarreling, strife, or contention in our homes. We would not offend or insult one another either verbally or in any other way. We would not have unnecessary litigation over small matters. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Mary! Mary! My dear, let me reason with you.
I hate reasoning, John, - especially reasoning on such subjects. There's a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing; and you don't believe in it yourselves, when it comes to practice. I know you well enough, John. You don't believe it's right any more than I do; and you wouldn't do it any sooner than I. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

And infatuated be damned. He was near to being blinded by his attraction to her. He was in love, damn it all. He disliked her, he resented her, he disapproved of almost everything about her, yet he was head over ears in love with her, like a foolish schoolboy.
He wondered grimly what he was going to do about it.
He was not amused.
Or in any way pleased. — Mary Balogh

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds." — Renata Adler

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. — Randy Alcorn

I don't think any other city in the world ... the sun doesn't shine the same way anywhere as it does in New York. And then I guess everyone's very good at hanging out. Not in a crazy way, but you're just constantly interacting and learning. — Ben Lovett

I used to be told if I talked about my sexuality in any way that we wouldn't have a tennis tour. — Billie Jean King

From the beginning of my Reformation I have asked God to send me neither dreams, nor visions, nor angels, but to give me the right understanding of His Word, the Holy Scriptures; for as long as I have God's Word, I know that I am walking in His way and that I shall not fall into any error or delusion. — Martin Luther

That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious. — Philip K. Dick

Care for your infant business or career as you would care for your infant child - with loving attention, with no expectation of any reward, being in the moment with it, accepting it as is, watching it grow, enjoying every step of the way. — Marc Allen

I have these beautiful children and this extraordinary family, and to think in any way shape or form that that's wrong or that there's shame in that or that there's something to hide actually turns my stomach. — Sean Maher

Coldness in everything. It comes from a long way off; it gets into everything. One must get out of the way before it reaches the core. If it does that, one won't feel even the coldness any more. Do you see what I mean? — Christa Wolf

Handicaps are mindsets. Whatever it is that stands in the way of achieving something, that's when it's a handicap. I prefer to see them as obstacles or challenges. This is how I've been my whole life. I don't know any different. I just live my life through my feet. — Jessica Cox

I'm just saying that I think I chose to act the way I did in part because of you. Since I've met you, everything I've done has been in part because of you. I can't untie myself from you, Clary - not my heart or my blood or my mind or any other part of me. And I don't want to. — Cassandra Clare

I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me. — Richard Feynman

I've come to realize that I'm a image maker, not an object maker. Images come to me as photographs because I don't have any other way of express them. I have to translate everything into still or moving pictures. I've learned that reality is not important to me. In the end it is the representation of reality that I'm striving to capture. — Gerardo Suter

I might face death any minute now! But I should try not to put myself in harms' way as long as I can live. Of course it is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others? — Samad Behrangi

I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith. — Spike Lee

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time. — Mark Vonnegut

One of my pleasantest memories as a kid growing up in New Orleans was how a bunch of us kids, playing, would suddenly hear sounds. It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis
maybe. The sounds of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn't be sure where they were coming from. So we'd start trotting, start running
'It's this way! It's this way!'
And sometimes, after running for a while, you'd find you'd be nowhere near that music. But that music could come on you any time like that. The city was full of the sounds of music. — Danny Barker

I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys can be unhittable for a year or two and then disappear? It's because it takes a ton of concentration, and self-belief, to stay in the moment in this way and not let the highs and lows mess with your psyche. — Mariano Rivera

As I continued to make content, a lot of YouTubers from within the community reached out and said, 'Hey, you're doing a great job. Would you like to do a collab? Can I help you out in any way?' — Rosanna Pansino

As I sat alone at my desk in the dark, I thought about suicide. Sometimes I did that, thought about suicide, though not in an active way - it was more like pulling a lucky stone out of your back pocket. It was a comforting thing to have with you, so you could rub your fingers over it, reassure yourself that it was there if you needed it. I didn't want to try to kill myself, didn't want the blood and the hysterical parents and the guilt, any of it. But sometimes I liked the idea of simply not having to be here anymore, not having to deal with my life. As if death could be just an extended vacation.
But now what I thought about suicide was this: If I died tonight, everyone would believe this journal was true.
Like Amelia, Chava, and Sally, everyone would forever believe that I had written that diary. Everyone would believe they knew how I "really felt." And how dare they? — Leila Sales

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar ...
... Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty? — Plato

A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar. — Roger Bacon

The precepts "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you" ... are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions - such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, "as the fruit from the tree." ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: "Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other" - but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment. — Max Scheler

In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.
In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea.
I liked the Irish way better. — C.E. Murphy

The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world. — Miranda July

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing. — Doris Humphrey

When you have a child, your relationship with every child in the world changes. It's like you're in a club you didn't know existed before a child came into your life. I believe you should make the world more beautiful for all children in any way that you can. — Matt Damon

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately. — Madeleine L'Engle

I would like to see ... an entirely different procedure which is that we vote on the budget and decide how much we are going to spend, first, the way any family does, and then fit our priorities into what we think we have to spend. Instead, what we do, is to do it incrementally, starting at the bottom, adding and adding and adding ... Until we get the support of all the authorities in this House to decide, first, what we think this country can afford and then decide where the amount is going to be allocated, we will never have common sense in this House. — Millicent Fenwick

By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what on has recognized to be true. It is evident that any restriction on academic freedom acts in such a way as to hamper the dissemination of knowledge among the people and thereby impedes national judgment and action. — Albert Einstein

It's flattering to be compared in any way to Tiger Woods, because he's the best player in the world. — Ivan Lendl

I've got a really great team around me. They're the ones that are in the restaurants on a day to day basis. Anyone that's good can't be stifled in any way. I don't baby people. — Todd English

Death can come at any minute, in any way. We do not know what is in store tomorrow, or, whether there is a tomorrow, or even a tonight! But still, we have the golden present. Now we are alive and kicking. What should we do now? Love all, serve all. — Swami Satchidananda

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week. — Douglas Coupland

I wear white or pale-blue shirts and black knit ties: They don't draw attention to me in any kind of peacockish way. — Charlie Siem

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits. — Michel De Montaigne

It knows you.Every soul is connected to it in the same way-nobody is closer farther.Doesn't matter what your beliefs were in that life or any of them.Only the soul can create distance between itself and what you call God ... and almost every one of us does,at one time or another.Then we just have to learn how to bridge the distance and find our way home again.There are lots of different ways. — Sheri Meshal

I'm always looking for something. Not in an unhappy way. I just like to try different things. I don't want to be morbid, but I'm not getting any younger. — Paul Weller

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse. — Margaret Atwood

I don't believe any religion should be exclusive or feel superior in any way, or be judgmental. It should be a quiet, private thing. — Catherine Hicks

I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it - but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it 'like' my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a colour. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee - not ever - that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red. — Andre Brink

I think people are too often misinformed and, in some cases, deceived. We don't have a full marketplace of ideas in this country that in any way reflects the broad, real range of ideas. — Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Geeks tend to think they can learn any language in a couple days and be immediately productive, but hiring companies don't always see it that way. — Dave Fecak

Rightly conceived, time is the friend of all who are in any way in adversity, for its mazy road winds in and out of the shadows sooner or later into sunshine, and when one is at its darkest point one can be certain that presently it will grow brighte. — Arthur Bryant

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. — David Foster Wallace

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. — Rob Sheffield

There is, indeed, nothing more vexing than to be, for example, rich, of good family, of decent appearance, fairly well educated, not stupid, rather good-hearted even, and at the same time to possess no talent, no special quality, no eccentricity even, not a single idea of one's own, to be precisely "like everyone else."
One is rich, but not so rich as Rothschild; of a good family, but one which has never distinguished itself in any way; of decent appearance, but an appearance expressive of very little; well educated, but without knowing what to do with that education; one is intelligent, but without one's own ideas; one is good-hearted, but without greatness of soul, and so on and so forth. There are a great number of such people in the world, far more than it appears. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In every way that mattered, we lost and we lost big. Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out. Some cases
ask any cop
are malignant and incurable, devouring everything they touch. — Tana French

If you dread tomorrow it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up being today don't you see ... We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's now that matters: to build something now at any price using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present with real plans made by living people. — Muriel Barbery

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life. — Garth Risk Hallberg

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. — Thucydides

To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time.
That's better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life
while you're living. — Mitch Albom

So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this?"
"Oh, there's definitely happiness," Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. "But it's just about moments, not ever-afters." He grinned. "Like when you're right in the middle of the ocean with your friends, with no one trying to kill you in any kind of horrifying way. You have to appreciate these moments when they happen, 'cause obviously we don't get many of them. — James Riley

With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw. — Mark Ruffalo

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat ... I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. — Sylvia Plath

Accepting a religion, any, is a lot like someone in love. It doesn't matter what the beloved does or says, he or she will get a pass ... Forever. It's easier that way. It's too difficult to accept fault or to admit contradictions or falsehoods. Someone who is religious is in love, and there is no talking them out of it, regardless of what others would take as silly notions or irrational thinking. I no longer try. Life is brief, despite what those longing for an afterlife might really need to believe. Peace and acceptance is something, however, I'll always back, no matter what vehicle it rides in on. — Benjamin Kane Ethridge

Monsanto actually emerged as a war chemicals industry. It is known for Agent Orange, and for toxics. It wasn't ever in seed and agriculture. This is a recent entry, because they realized controlling the seed means controlling the entire food chain and the profits they can make from that are so much more than they can make at any other level. So in a way they brought war to our farmlands. They brought war against our farmers. The economics of it are first and foremost the economics of a monopoly, created by a highly undemocratic, international trade treaty, which brought clauses on control over the seed. — John Robbins

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. — Paul Auster

I'll speak any goddamn way I like. This is my bloody place, and because of you, it's got fucking gunshot holes in the walls and dead bodies all over. Not to mention, a rabid rabbit bit my leg. A wolf, that's respectable. A caribou gore, a fine battle wound, but getting chewed on by a bloody bunny, I won't have it. I want you out! — Eve Langlais

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. — Alexander Schmemann

The modern Establishment relies on a mantra of 'There Is No Alternative': potential opposition is guarded against by enforcing disbelief in the idea that there is any other viable way of running society. — Owen Jones

I think of how she lives alone, just like me, and how she never had any real family, and how she only has sex with people. She never lets any love get in the way. I think she had a family once, but it was one of those beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other situations. There's no shortage of them around here. I think she loved them, and all they ever did was hurt her. — Markus Zusak

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

We also rejoice in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope." Romans 5:3-4. Suffering develops in us, qualities of Christian character, which cannot be developed in any other way. — Christian Love

I'd never really believed in terrorists before
I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me
starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia
that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning. — Cory Doctorow

The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong, for nothing is spread almost but false matters by color of the law for reward, dread and favor and so no remedy is had in the Court of Equity in any way. — Jack Cade

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way? — Richard Dawkins

Every time I set my face to seeking God in a fresh way, God begins to change my heart, my mind, my preaching, and my leadership skills. When any believer commits his or her heart to seeking the Lord, everything is going to change. — Daniel Henderson

What's happened to my life? These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you in passports are a cruel form of memento mori. How many more new passports will I have? One (1965)? Two (1975)? Such a long way off, 1975, yet your passport life seems all too brief. How long did he live? He managed to renew six passports. — William Boyd

The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people
they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. — Henry Ford

Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention. — Gavin De Becker

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. — Anselm Kiefer

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK - desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers") - whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? — Maggie Nelson

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. — Bao Ninh

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some — Pema Chodron

I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.

"Not if they're over eighteen," he said, shutting the till of the cash register.

By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. "You take someone's breath away," I stressed. "You rob them of the ability to utter a single word." I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. "You steal a heart."

He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. "Any judge would toss that case out on its ass."

"You'd be surprised."

Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. "Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me."

I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. "No way," I said. "Once you're in, it's for life. — Jodi Picoult

The air of Paris is quite different from any other. There's something about it which thrills and excites and intoxicates you, and in some strange way makes you want to dance and do all sorts of other silly things. As soon as I get out of the train, it's just as if I had drunk a bottle of champagne. What a time one could have surrounded by artists! How happy those lucky people must be, the great men who have made a name in a city like Paris! What a wonderful life they have! — Guy De Maupassant

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn't want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory's fugging son. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. — John Zorn

While I think men in general should not fuss over how they look, I do feel as though they should make more an effort to find a way to look good in their own individual, but natural way. I think it's a shame that it's become acceptable to wear jeans and a T-shirt to any place and function. — Thom Browne

Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another. — Vaclav Havel

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop ...
It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. — Nelson Algren

The real power of this book comes from its documentation from major sources. In fact, you will quickly discover that most of my documents about Jewish Supremacism are from Jewish sources. They argue more convincingly for my point of view than anything I could write. I encourage you to go to the sources that I quote and check them out for yourself. In this book I take you along with me on a fascinating journey of discovery in a forbidden subject. I urge you to courageously keep an open mind while you explore the topics ahead, for that is the only way any of us can find the truth. — David Duke

After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way. — Isaac Asimov

That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind. — Thomas Ligotti

For years, i lived my life, waiting for the other shoe to drop ... i thought control was something i could have over my life. My goal was to live life, in such a way, that i would never again have to suffer any form of trauma or abuse that would remind me of my painful past. I was living life on a tightrope of tension. I was only happy when things went smoothly and came apart at the seams when i was thrown a curveball.
NOW, i realize, that the key to happiness is surrendering to the illusion of control. And to trust that, no matter what happens to me, i have the infinite inner-wisdom and strength to find my way through. — Jaeda DeWalt

I just express myself in any way I feel is appropriate at the moment. — Herbie Hancock

President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame. — Glenn Hubbard

Simon: You're in a dangerous line of work, Jayne. Odds are you'll be under my knife again, often. So I want you to understand one thing very clearly: No matter what you do or say or plot, no matter how you come down on us, I will never, ever harm you. You're on this table, you're safe ... 'cause I'm your medic. And however little we may like or trust each other, we're on the same crew. Got the same troubles, same enemies, and more than enough of both. Now, we could circle each other and growl, sleep with one eye open, but that thought wearies me. I don't care what you've done, I don't know what you're planning on doing, but I'm trusting you. I think you should do the same. 'Cause I don't see this working any other way.
River: Also, I can kill you with my brain. — Ben Edlund

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. — Herman Melville

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt