Not Your First Choice Quotes & Sayings

Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones. — Neil Gaiman

Shoes, unlike feet, are not something you're born with. So you can choose what you want. At first be guided in your choice by people with experience, later by your own experience. Before long you will become so accustomed to your shoes that every nail will be like a finger to feel out the rock and cling to it. They will become a sensitive and dependable instrument, like a part of yourself. And yet, you're not born with them; when they're worn out, you'll throw them away and still remain what you are. — Rene Daumal

Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. "I'm afraid of committing myself," she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life. — Paulo Coelho

I think early on it's important to put that at the back of your mind and make your own choices. Sometimes you do pick the same choices, just as a matter of course - not because someone else did it first, but because it was the best choice to make. But any actor worth his salt makes something their own. — Jacki Weaver

You speak of being afraid. Yet fear is something you generate in yourself, from your mind's lack of control; and you will learn to look at it and discover for yourself when you choose to be afraid. The first thing you must do is acknowledge that the fear is yours, and you can bid it come and go at will. Begin with this; whenever you feel fear that prevents choice say to yourself: 'What has made me feel fear? Why have I chosen to feel this fear preventing my choice, instead of feeling the freedom to choose?' Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you ... [Y]ou have chosen to do nothing, so that none of the things you fear will come upon you; so your choices are not made by you but by your fear ... I cannot promise to free you of your fear, only that a time will come when you are the master, and fear will not paralyze you. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

There have been so many interpretations of the story that I'm not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. The only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher's, not your professor's, not mine, not a critic's, not some authority's. The only thing that matters is, first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then any interpretation you like. If it's yours, then that's the right one, because what's in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it. — William Golding

Yesterday when I got off the bus, I walked to your taxicab first. I was attracted to the black-and-white squares along the roof and the bright green paint, but otherwise, there wasn't any reason for my choice, was there?"
"No," he said.
"Was there a reason that you were at the bus station rather than somewhere else in the city?"
"I guess not."
"This is the charming coincidence. When things in the world that are unconnected suddenly connect, and a pattern emerges."
He exhaled. "But what if the pattern wasn't what you'd call charming?"
"It's not the pattern that's charming," she said. "It's that there is a pattern at all. — Lisa Tucker

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story. — Jeannette Walls

If you are preaching on the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me") or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that "everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."32 He goes on to say everyone has to "tap real meaning in life," and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can "eat you alive." If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next. — Timothy J. Keller

Are you trying to tell me - in your own typically macho way - that you want to make love again?"
He glanced at her. "I'm not trying to tell you anything. I want you. You want me. Someone is going to end up wearing nothing but a satisfied smile on her lips."
"I don't know, Nick, I might talk afterward. Do you think you can handle it?"
"I can handle anything you can think up, and a few things you've probably
never even thought of."
"Do I have a choice?"
"Sure, wild thing. I have four bedrooms. You can choose which one we use first. — Rachel Gibson

I'm not going to try and change your mind."
"If you're here, you accept it's my choice. This is the first thing I've been in control of since the accident."
"I know."
And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak ... — Jojo Moyes

As a dad, you are Vice President. You are part of the Executive Branch of the family, but you are the partner with the weaker authority. In your children's eyes, you mostly fulfill a ceremonial role of attending pageants and ordering pizza. I'm never the first choice. My kids don't even mask it, which I respect them for. "Let's see, the crabby guy with the scratchy beard or that warm soft lady that tells us stories for eight hours?" It's not even close. — Jim Gaffigan

Here's my heart Shaw. You have it in your hands and I promise you're the first and last person to ever touch it. You need to be careful with it because it's far more fragile than I ever thought and if you try and give it back I'm not taking it. I don't know enough about love to know for sure that's what this between us is, but I know that for me it's you and only you from here on out and I can only promise to be careful and not push you away again. Life without you in it is doable, but if I have a choice I want to do it with you by my side and I'm telling you I'm not running away from the work it takes to make that happen. Shaw I'm not scared of us anymore. — Jay Crownover

I think you would prefer to be happy in your choice,to make your first marriage be your only marriage.
Maria was right,of course. Going from marriage to marriage was not much different than going from man to man. Anastasia,at least,didn't see much difference in the two.She saw love as lasting forever. Anything less could not really be love. — Johanna Lindsey

The first rule is never to split your forces unless it is necessary to survival. The second rule is to attack if you are going to fight, and if you are not going to attack, avoid battle. The third rule is to choose the time and place of battle and never leave that choice to the enemy. The fourth rule is to avoid encirclement at all cost. And the final rule is to attack and destroy the enemy where he is weakest. — Howard Fast

Do you have a weekly prayer meeting in your church? Your answer reflects how spiritual you are and how much you are depending on God or on human ability and organization. The first thing the early church did was pray. It's the last thing the modern church does today. The early church saw mighty things in answer to prayer. We see little today because of the neglect of prayer. Prayer was their first choice. Today it's our last resort. Before the early church did anything else, they prayed. We do everything else but pray. It was their first priority. It's our last priority. The New Testament saints had divine enduement without any equipment. Today we have the equipment but not the enduement. If we are weak in prayer, then we are weak everywhere. — Mack Tomlinson

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault. — Hanya Yanagihara

Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I'll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time. — Samuel Beckett

It's the easiest thing in the world to be kind to someone, to show love, to forgive. You are born with this instinct - it should be your first reaction. NOT violence, anger and hatred! That is something we are taught, it's a Choice You Make. — Michelle Horst

Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone ... if you didn't migrate then your father did, and if your father didn't need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him ... — Jose Saramago

He came to believe that this was the very sort of thing that happened when you let yourself get caught in one culture's insistence that love ought to be like this or that. The key for people like him, he ultimately concluded, in this as in most matters, was to be nimble. Your privilege as an immigrant was to pick and choose your inheritance, maintain what suited you and participate merely to the extent of your patience and interest. It was not in your nature to align with one side fully, and so you couldn't help but make a life that was both apart and among. You didn't make one choice and stick with it but, rather, hundreds of minor choices with which you created a unique path through the corridors of old traditions and the avenues of the new. And you cultivated this dividedness because you carried always the imprint of that first move -- the decision to leave home. Indeed, this initiating choice, more than anything, was your true inheritance. — Saher Alam

Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other. — Arthur Conan Doyle

ROSE: I married your daddy and settled down to cooking his super and keeping clean sheets on the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. For my part in the matter. But at that time I wanted that. I wanted a house that I could sing in. And that's what your daddy gave me. I didn't know to keep up his strength I had to give up little pieces of mine. I did that. I took on his life as mine and mixed up the pieces so that you couldn't hardly tell which was which anymore. It was my choice. It was my life and I didn't have to live it like that.But that's what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it. I grabbed hold of it with both hands. — August Wilson

The process of miraculous change is twofold. One: I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. Two: I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, your best thinking got you here. You're the problem but you're not the answer. The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him. He won't work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed. — Marianne Williamson

McReynolds emphatically shook his head. "No way. Legal's all over that deal. It's squeaky clean. Even the woman signed off. Trammel. I could make her a three-hundred-pound whore who likes black dick in the movie and she couldn't do a thing about it. That deal is perfect." "Yeah, well, what Legal's missed is the part about neither one of them having the rights to the story to sell you in the first place. Those rights happen to reside here with me. Trammel signed them over to me before Dahl came along and took second position. He thought he could move up one by stealing the original contracts out of my files. Only that's not going to work. I've got a witness to the theft and Dahl's fingerprints. He's going to go down on fraud and theft charges and your choice here is to decide whether you want to go down — Michael Connelly

It's not about you, okay? This time, it's about me. Not you. All my life, Lissa ... all my life, it's been the same. They come first. I've lived my life for you. I've trained to be your shadow, but you know what? I want to come first. I need to take care of myself for once. I'm tired of looking out for everyone else and having to put aside what I want. Dimitri and I did that, and look what happened. He's gone. I will never hold him again. Now I owe it to him to do this. I'm sorry if it hurts you, but it's my choice! — Richelle Mead

Said. Karen inhaled deeply and blew until there was no more air in her lungs and smoke filled the room but there wasn't a single candle still burning. "Never underestimate the power of a strong woman," she said breathlessly. "Amen," Hannah murmured. Kim motioned toward the bar. "Momma's choice tonight. Mexican buffet, which comes before cake." "Not for me. I'm having a slice of that cake right now. It's my birthday and I want dessert first. Momma always let me do that on my birthday when I was a little girl," Karen said. "Yes, I did, and if you want your cake first tonight, then have at it," Hannah agreed. "Well, I'm getting into those tacos," Edith said. "Y'all have to try my watermelon salsa. I hadn't made it in years, but it turned out pretty good considering that the watermelon wasn't as good as I like it to be." "What's in it?" Sue asked. — Carolyn Brown

I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particular
God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond
the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of
built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not
merely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: until
now I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union or
Poland or the Baltic states. In your country I see an
abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But
there's a difference between our countries that is also a
similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different
faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don't
have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for your
survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, and
I would not want to exchange that for your abundance. — Henning Mankell

It was excruciating at first, getting over Trip. Not that I ever really did, mind you. But during those first years, I had no other choice but to go on with my life. Because do you ever really get over your first love? Even during your twenties, when you experience that initial taste of being a grown-up ... that teenager still lives inside you. That person you were before the world started telling you how to be, what to say, who you should be with. Before you lost yourself in expectations and plans, and could just be a work-in-progress with only the vaguest results in mind. — T. Torrest

Dear You, The odds of your reading this are slim to none. Who would choose uncertainty and vaguely worded warnings over a new life of wealth and luxury? I can only assume that you were put under a massive amount of stress, touched someone's skin, and they were paralyzed. Or blinded. Or lost the ability to speak. Or befouled themselves. Or one of several other effects that I won't outline right now. In any case, I know what it's like the first time it happens. It's like a door opening up inside of you, isn't it? Like you've been hit by a truck. It can't be ignored. So even if you would have preferred to open up the other box (which, by the way, would have had you living out the rest of your life as Jeanne Citeaux), I'm glad you made this choice. Take both suitcases with you and go to the address below. The key in this envelope will get you in, and you should be safe there. It has no connection to me, officially. Open the next envelope when you are established. Try not to be followed. — Daniel O'Malley

The first kill would be the hardest, but the next would be easier, and the one after that easier still, because it's true: Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing.
Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.
He pushed that thought away. To call what he was doing cruel implied he had a choice. Choosing between your kind and another species wasn't cruel. It was necessary. Not easy, especially when you've lived the last four years of your life pretending to be no different from them, but necessary. — Rick Yancey

Plato spoke of the Sisters of Fate on the last 3 pages of his book, "The Republic" when he said: "Then the Sisters of Fate take all of our choices and weave them on their loom into the fabric of destiny. Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors' or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser - God is justified" [Quote from Plato's Republic written 360BCE In the Public Domain] — D.M. Hoover

The most ironic thing in the world is having no say when your name is determined for the first time (which is also for the last time for most), because newborns are not necessarily known for speaking their minds. — Pawan Mishra

If you're like most people, you'll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then - somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale - you'll see a need to fully commit to something that's a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to 'cast your whole vote,' you're reasonably confident you're not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you're on is really yours, and not someone else's? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way - holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome - you're less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger." Yikes! — Marina Keegan