Liked By Many Quotes & Sayings

Alma had grown as tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders ... This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile
at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.
It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much. — Choire Sicha

One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages - no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions. — Marilyn Johnson

One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself. — Gertrude Stein

I was aware that he was laughing at me, but I told myself I didn't care what other people thought and would dress how I liked. Of course, like many self-consciously wacky people, I was in fact paralyzed by fear of the opinions of others and made the effort to appear as the maddest of the mad headbangers just in case anyone had the slightest lingering doubt as to the depth of my devotion. In fact, I think my disguise felt so fragile I couldn't allow it a single crack. If I did it might fall to bits and leave the real me shrivelling under the evaluating gaze of my peer group. — Mark Barrowcliffe

By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around. — Scott B. Pruden

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I'm sure you've noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others. — Harriet Lerner

Be hated. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it's often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one's own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. — Adrian Tan

It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleagured by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy? ... Miles liked the idea of a God who, when He at last had the oppotunity to return His attention to His children, might shake His head with wonder and mutter, "Jesus. Look what they're up to now." A distractible God, perhaps, one who'd be startled to discover so many of His children way up in trees since the last time He looked. A God whose hand would go rushing to His mouth in fear in that instant of recognition that - good God! - that kid's going to hurt himself. A God who could be surprised by unanticipated pride - glory be, that boy is a climber! — Richard Russo

Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company. — John Mole

Francie nodded shyly. The girl brought an eraser close to the mesh. Francie poked a finger through to touch the vari-colored felt layers blended together by a film of powdered chalk. As she was about to touch this soft beautifulness, the little girl snatched it away and spat full in Francie's face. Francie closed her eyes tightly to keep the hurt bitter tears from spilling out. The other girl stood there curiously, waiting for the tears. When none came, she taunted: "Why don't you bust out crying, you dockle? Want I should spit in your face again?" Francie turned and went down into the cellar and sat in the dark a long time waiting until the waves of hurt stopped breaking over her. It was the first of many disillusionments that were to come as her capacity to feel things grew. She never liked blackboard erasers after that. — Betty Smith

Oh. Right." We'd had an infestation of demons in the basement once. I'd never thought about having the place blessed to keep them away. Then it hit me. "I knew that new bug guy looked familiar. He was a priest or something, wasn't he?" Reyes tried to nod but cringed in agony instead. He must have had holy water in that canister instead of bug spray. "No wonder I've been seeing so many spiders lately." Holy water may fend off demons, but spiders were completely unfazed by it. I made a mental note to call a real bug guy ay-sap. Not that I had anything against spiders. I liked them as much as the next girl. Not. — Darynda Jones

The dictionary definition of popularity is "to be liked by many." Based on this definition, you might predict that popular students are the cheeriest and most agreeable people in a school: kind to everyone and always willing to lend a helping hand. Such a conclusion couldn't be further from the truth! In the novel How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot, the protagonist's mother naively asks, "Aren't the most popular kids the nicest at your school? — Alex L. Freedman

What I like about the internet, what I see there is that its much more democratic. I have much more control, and if what I write is liked by the public, I have immediate feedback. There are so many things I want to say - about events in the news, politics, the gamesmanship and manipulations I read about, thoughts that occur to me about the power game, advice, on and on. — Robert Greene

Slice Mango - something that, you know, is a phenomenal drink, but mango is not a flavour that is easily liked by many people in the West. People in Latin America like it. But we do a lot of Mango in India. — Indra Nooyi

When I was a child, I liked to create. I was told by many I was unique. I liked that word. I liked how it was spelled and I liked how it sounded on my lips. At a young age, I decided I wanted to be that. It helped that I had the right personality for it. — Lindy Zart

Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains.
But, said the more perceptive nineteenth-century critics, if this is how people live their lives at work, then how on earth can they think differently when they come home at night? How might it be possible to build a sense of moral community or of social solidarity, of collective and meaningful ways of belonging and living that are untainted by the brutality, ignorance and stupidity that envelops labourers at work? How, above all, are workers supposed to develop any sense of their mastery over their own fates and fortunes when they depend so deeply upon a multitude of distant, unknown and in many respects unknowable people who put breakfast on their table every day? — David Harvey

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one. — Stewart O'Nan

But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares."
"So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans."
"What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood? — Umberto Eco

In a journal entry the famed philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote about some tame geese who, week after week, attended church and heard teachings on God's great gift to geese - wings. With wings, the preaching gander reminded them, they could fly and experience the many blessings known only through the utilization of that gift. But, laments Kierkegaard, week after week they waddled home without flapping their way to the flight they were told was their destiny. In a sobering conclusion Kierkegaard reports that these waddling geese were very well liked by the humans of the land. They grew fat and plump and were then butchered, and eaten. And that, says the philosopher, was the end of that. Lesson? God gives us wings — Matt Friedeman

A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Should you have liked your sister to have been noticed by a grocer's assistant for doing so?"
"In the first place, as it is not many years since I myself was a draper's assistant, the mere circumstance of a grocer's assistant noticing any act does not alter the character of the act to me. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Narcissus's thoughts were far more occupied with Goldmund than Goldmund imagined. He wanted the bright boy as a friend. He sensed in him his opposite, his complement; he would have liked to adopt, lead, enlighten, strengthen, and bring him to bloom. But he held himself back, for many reasons, almost all of them conscious. Most of all, he felt tied and hemmed in by his distaste for teachers or monks who, all too frequently, fell in love with a pupil or a novice. Often enough, he had felt with repulsion the desiring eyes of older men upon him, had met their enticements and cajoleries with wordless rebuttal. He understood them better now that he knew the temptation to love the charming boy, to make him laugh, to run a caressing hand through his blond hair. But he would never do that, never. — Hermann Hesse

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true. — Ian McEwan

[H]alf blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling. — Per Petterson

By this time the Vietnam War was such a confusing issue to most Americans that Nixon could take as many positions as he liked and find support somewhere for them all. Roughly equal numbers wanted to expand the war as negotiate a peace. — Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

I had painted a lot of landscapes, had stood before many while they burned their remote beauty into my skin, but had never done both at the same time. Don't know why. I was comfortable painting indoors and I liked best to retrieve those images from memory where they might be stained by awe and jumbled together with other things I loved. Now that I had tried the other, I wanted to do more. — Peter Heller

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

[Y]ou are not ashamed of your sin [in committing adultery] because so many men commit it. Man's wickedness is now such that men are more ashamed of chastity than of lechery. Murderers, thieves, perjurers, false witnesses, plunderers and fraudsters are detested and hated by people generally, but whoever will sleep with his servant girl in brazen lechery is liked and admired for it, and people make light of the damage to his soul. And if any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behaviour is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he's not a real man; for man's wickedness is now of such proportions that no one is considered a man unless he is overcome by lechery, while one who overcomes lechery and stays chaste is considered unmanly. — Augustine Of Hippo

We have the whole concept of popularity backward. We imagine it as a small and exclusive club of people we idolize or envy. But most popular people are hated by the majority. So, if you are despised by everyone outside your little clique, and liked only by those inside it, you are vastly unpopular by any objective measure. The key to ultimate popularity is not to be loved or envied by as many people as possible but to be loved or envied by the right people. — Tonya Hurley

bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn't hold the ground; when the hard rains fell - it — J.J. Henderson

I felt ugly, chubby, and stupid until I talked to my mom about it and she had me do a very good exercise that I recommend to every girl. She had me take a piece of paper and write down everything I liked and everything that I didn't like about my body and my life. By the end of the exercise, I realized that I had so many more things in my likes column. It showed me that while there are a few things in my dislikes column, I was giving ALL my attention to those few things! — Coco Rocha

I think that deep down all I have been looking for is to be accepted and liked by as many people as possible. — Paul Giamatti

It is not known that Litvinoff's favorite flower was the peony. That his favorite form of punctuation was the question mark. That he had terrible dreams and could only fall asleep, if he could fall asleep at all, with a glass of warm milk. That he often imagined his own death. That he thought the woman who loved him was wrong to. That he was flat-footed. That his favorite food was the potato.That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, "Good day," Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh the evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone.
These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down. — Nicole Krauss

The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here's one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an "I Voted" icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the "I Voted" icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn't, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn't even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results. — Bruce Schneier

Hours passed. A man came by twice and poked his head into my theater and looked at me questioningly. The third time, he came in and sat next to me and asked, "How many times you plan on watching this crap?" I shrugged my shoulders. He was wearing corduroy pants, and I would have liked to drag my fingernail across his thigh. "You hiding?" "I'm just sitting here," I said. "Yeah, never mind," he said. "I guess you're a bit young for that. What about your folks? — Justin Torres

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations ...
The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. The long-recognized blood-relations and connexions by marriage made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness. — George Eliot

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most. — Paul Auster

THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists' golf course, during a round of Anarchists' Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence - in fact, no fixed number - of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, "Do you mind if we don't play through?" then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. "This is kind of fun," Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear. — Thomas Pynchon