Just Because Someone Has It Worse Quotes & Sayings

Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes. — Herta Muller

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people. — Bernie Siegel

The only good thing was that by midnight, even most of the bums had gone home to sleep it off. That was lucky for them, because Ray was the worst damn driver I'd ever seen. And that was after I jerked his head out of the duffel and parked it on the dashboard.
"Gah! That makes it worse!" he told me, as I tried to get the eyes facing forward.
"How can it possibly be worse?"
"Because I got double vision now! Get it off! Get it off!"
He batted at his own head and succeeded in sending it tumbling into Christine's lap. She immediately went into hysterics and slapped it away. The head fell out of the car; Ray hit the brakes and we came to a screeching halt.
"What are you doing?" I screeched, as he hopped out. "There are people firing at us!"
"Tough!" came from somewhere under the car. — Karen Chance

The last time I had sex," I said, "was Halloween."
He nodded slowly. "That was my birthday."
I choked on my waffle. This was getting worse and worse. "No!"
"Why do you think they called me 'Poe'?" I had always guessed it was because he was morose and taciturn and creepy.
"Um ... because 'Hotstuff' was taken? — Diana Peterfreund

Ordinarily during the stage of your life when you're going through your adolescence and you're completely awkward and uncomfortable, the rest of the world isn't watching you with bated breath. It's different when you're an actor and you choose to work your way through that period because it only makes it worse. — Tina Majorino

...spiritual dryness is not a problem. It only seems a problem because it's such a contrast with the good feelings of the honeymoon stage. ...this night will continue to go on, often getting worse, throughout our life. But if we persevere in our spiritual journey, we will be able to perceive in it positive meaning and learn to understand it. Then we can move beyond it to the freedom that places our feelings in proper perspective. — Monks Of New Skete

It's a false premise to say that most monogamous people have chosen monogamy. Most people belong to the religion they were raised in ... because that's what's familiar. That's the milieu they grew up in, and, for better or worse, they're just continuing the pattern. Until this traditionalist mindset is shaken loose, you would likely try from reflex to impose notions onto nonmonogamy that are not only untenable in the new context but spel sudden and messy doom even in situations that otherwise could be worked out. — Anthony D. Ravenscroft

I sure hope she's wrong, because one of the implications of her cosmology is that the many terrors we know here are an inoculation against worse in the world to come. — Dean Koontz

Because ... most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.'
'Too stupid.'
'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?'
'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.'
'Exactly.'
'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought.
'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food. — Nick Hornby

Because we live in a world under siege," I say. "Life sucks for mages and magicians- you taught me that. Bad things happen to those of us who get involved, but if we didn't fight, we'd be in an even worse state. None of it it's your fault, any more than it's the fault of the moon or the stars."
Dervish nods slowly, then arches an eyebrow "The moon or the stars?"
"I always get poetic when I'm dealing with self-pitying simpletons. — Darren Shan

But you're so easy to sneak up on." He crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall. "You should be honored that I bother, since there's no challenge to it."
"Right," I said dryly.
Tybalt has never made a secret of his contempt for changelings in general and me in particular. Not even the years I spent missing could change that. If anything, it made things worse, because when I came back, I promptly removed myself from all the places he was accustomed to finding me. Hating me suddenly took effort - an effort he's proved annoying glad to make. On the other hand, it's actually been something of a relief, because it is something I can count on. Dawn comes, the moon rises and Tybalt hates me. — Seanan McGuire

Why is it Americans are socially permitted to say 'fricking' when in fact everyone knows the word they're actually saying is 'fucking'?
... here you have some bland ho-bag telly presenter saying 'I'm so fricking mad' about whatever, while you, the home viewer, know she's three millimeters away from saying 'I'm so fucking mad'. But instead of being outraged because she basically said 'fucking' on TV, everyone giggles, like she's being cute.
... it's like ten times worse because the public is thinking 'fucking, fucking, fucking'. They're so full of shame or so socially conditioned that the mental effect of saying the word 'fucking' is technically amplified. By actually saying the word 'fucking' in real life, instead of 'fricking', you're doing American society a favor. — Douglas Coupland

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. — C.S. Lewis

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating. — Helen Brown

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse. — George A. Sheehan

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. — PatriciaV. Davis

Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile. — Elie Wiesel

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand. — Ray Bradbury

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

I'm in a complete state of panic before I begin something because I'm sure that it's going to be a complete disaster. I'm going to do a worse job than anybody could ever imagine anybody doing on the planet Earth. — Maira Kalman

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening — Arundhati Roy

It's like being dropped into a black hole. A vacuum of existence. When I turn around, I will be instantly orphaned because I'll know no one can hack it. And no one is in charge. But it's worse than being orphaned because at the same time I am tethered to his failure. His problems are tied around my heart. I will never get away. I am afraid. But I turn around. — Wendy Wunder

Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours. — Erin Morgenstern

If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment). — Chuck Klosterman

There is no peace precisely because there has been no justice. As painful and inconvenient as justice may be, we have seen that the alternative allowing accountability to fall by the wayside is worse. — Desmond Tutu

It could have been quite worse," he agreed magnanimously.
"And those two guys who felt up your butt while the maintenance dude was working on that hinge were kicked out because they violated the 'must have fondler's consent' rule, or so that pink-haired woman who spoke English said, so at least they won't do that to the next guy trapped in the stocks."
"I will sleep easier knowing that. — Katie MacAlister

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. — Theodore Dalrymple

Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You're like a gazelle that smells a lion and can't relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn't last because the "do something" feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you're successful in your survival efforts. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round of cell division, the older the man, the worse it gets. As the geneticist James Crow put it, the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. — Nick Lane

Many a criminal has finally given himself over to the authorities because the accusations of a guilty conscience were worse than prison bars. — Billy Graham

It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavour now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in tha lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. — Cassandra Clare

I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food. — Maria Popova