Nothing Ever Mattered Quotes & Sayings

I had less control over my thoughts than I'd have liked. The little ring hung around my neck, under my gown, where nobody could see it. When I was alone, I took it out sometimes, wondering how he had judged the size, with nothing but my swollen, knotted fingers to go by. Wondering if my hands would ever be as they once were, small, white, and fine. By the time that happened, if it ever did, I would be long gone from here. I would have left behind both husband and wedding ring. It mattered little whether the size were right or no. Yet, when I thought this, I found my hand closing around the ring as if I did not want to let it go. It's mine, something inside me would say. — Juliet Marillier

To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed.
You could sneer at that, you could scoff, you could refuse to acknowledge it, but when it came right down to it, Conn decided it was the man who planted a tree, dug a well, or graded a road who mattered. — Louis L'Amour

I'm not sure what I am. I just know there's something dark in me. I hide it. I certainly don't talk about it, but it's there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he's driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness. I don't fight him, I don't want to. He's all I've got. Nothing else could love me, not even ... especially not me. Or is that just a lie the Dark Passenger tells me? Because lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else ... someone. It's like the mask is slipping and things ... people ... who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. It scares the hell out of me. — Jeff Lindsay

Something happen inside me as I looked out into the vast universe. Through that telescope, the world was closer and larger than I'd ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and- I don't know- it make me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now? — Mary Stewart

The Bible is not, in other words, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands - though it includes plenty of both. The Bible is not simply the record of what various people thought as they struggled to know God and follow him, though it is that as well. It is not simply the record of past revelations, as though what mattered were to study such things in the hopes that one might have one for oneself. It is the book whose whole narrative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God's people risen from the dead, this should come not as a surprise but as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along. — N. T. Wright

The tears that kept Buttercup company the remainder of the day were not at all like those that had blinded her into the tree trunk. Those were noisy and hot; they pulsed. These were silent and steady and all they did was remind her that she wasn't good enough. She was seventeen, and every male she'd ever known had crumbled at her feet and it meant nothing. The one time it really mattered, she wasn't good enough. — William Goldman

from the head honcho to the person who scraped shit from the toilets. He always saw the individual person rather than the job. There were only two types of people that mattered for Tom. Good guys and wanks. That was the only measure he took of anyone. — Mark Wilson

Conscientiousness on a survey seemed like a trifling matter. In life, it was a big deal. Conscientiousness - a tendency to be responsible, hardworking, and organized - mattered at every point in the human life cycle. It even predicted how long people lived - with more accuracy than intelligence or background. — Amanda Ripley

She had realized something over the recent months: it didn't matter who you were or what you'd accomplished in life; none of that mattered when tragedy struck. You had no pull; no power. You had no choice. There was nothing to gamble with; nothing to do to put the odds in your favor. You were there and then you were gone, leaving those around you to realize how insignificant they all really were; leaving them to try to pick up the destroyed pieces. — Lindy Zart

They would reach their destinations sooner and merely by sitting down. I would reach my destination later and merely by counting my steps, but someday I would sit down and console myself that we both had reached our destinations, and this was all that mattered. — Legson Kayira

All great people of history, all the heroes and leaders and innovators who lit humanity's way out of darkness and ignorance, forged within themselves the courage to overcome their internal conflicts when it mattered most. In many ways, they are just like us: They worried. They procrastinated. They sometimes had lower opinions of their fellow human beings. But what made them celebrated, what pushed society forward, what gave birth to their legend, was their sheer will to overcome such impulses and to faithfully, actively, and lovingly fight for a better life for themselves and others. Let us learn from them, let us master ourselves, and let us now add our own chapter of courage to the good book of humanity. — Brendon Burchard

Watching movies (Titanic, Flirting with Disaster, Mannequin, Thelma and Louise, Rushmore, The Goonies, She's Having a Baby, it mattered very little) was a kind of prayer: She knew the characters as well as she knew herself, as well as she knew anything there was to know, and she could chart and rechart their movements and secrets and misunderstandings endlessly, reflecting in any number of new permutations on all of it, each time. Again and again. They were acquaintances - people she'd known her whole life and understood well, people incapable of letting her down by changing or disappearing or offering up the unexpected. The League of Their Own tears were purely for catharsis. When she was done she would reemerge, reborn. She would make new mistakes. Or maybe none at all. Okay, — Elisa Albert

The sacred books of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the Veda are the best repositories of the ideas that mattered most to our ancestors, and to ignore them is an act of childish conceit. But it is equally naive to believe that whatever was written down in the past contains an absolute truth that lasts forever. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Love happened. Love came to show you that you could be more than you could ever imagine, because love forced you out of the narrows of yourself and thrust you into a vastness that stretched from one end of time to the other. Nothing mattered except being in the presence of love, the greatest beauty of all. — Julius Lester

As a teenager, I was teased at school about my height and long legs, but now they are my best assets. Kids can be mean. When I was at school, I considered myself ugly, but that was when I was silly enough to believe that what other people thought mattered. Now I think I am pretty. I'm not beautiful. There is a difference. — Jasmine Guinness

I just sat there, staring out towards the darkness of the ocean and the starlight flashing off the crests of the waves and knew that we were all part of this bigger whole. That somehow I mattered in the course of things and a part of me would always have left its mark on this world. — Carrie Ryan

The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences ... — Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Making her smile, that was my new life calling because really, what else mattered? — Nicole Williams

I had never fully understood our tradition- why women wailed so loudly and for so long after someone died. It was only now I realized that women wailed more on account of everything they never had a chance to say. All the questions they never asked. All the times we never really talked about the things that mattered most.
It was the one time that women could be angry. Be loud. Say anything. Yell. Purge the soul. And no one thought less of them. Everyone expected it. — Eucabeth A. Odhiambo

He forgave you though,' said Claire. 'He never held it against you, ever. All he cared about was that you lived, and that you got better. He would have given everything for that. Everything. Nothing else mattered. — S.J. Watson

It's a strange thing to discover how much you matter to people you didn't really know you mattered to. — Kiera Cass

This two-bit bar, this worn-out town, just a speck in the middle of a lonely grassy prairie with the stony hills beyond, the small fix-it-yourself house I'd bought for us - that was all ours, our world, our high life. It wasn't name-brand, shiny, or white picket fences, but none of that mattered. As long as we were together, it was good, it was clean, it was ours. — Cat Porter

The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone. — Ken Grimwood

Because the air had smelled so sweet, and the sky had been black velvet, spangled with points of diamond light that didn't flicker at all, only burned constant and cold. Because the grass had been wet with dew, and the trees had been heavy with fruit. Because she had wanted to know what was at the end of the long path between the trees, and because she hadn't wanted to turn back before she understood everything. Because for the first time in forever, she'd felt like she was going home, and that feeling had been enough to move her feet, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she had been running through the clean night air, and nothing else mattered, or would ever matter again. — Seanan McGuire

...the terrible though occurred to her that perhaps she'd always unconsciously believed that because Sam didn't cry, he therefore didn't feel, or he felt less, not as profoundly or deeply as she did. Her focus had always been on how his actions affected her feelings, as if his role was to do things for her, to her, and all that mattered was her emotional response to him, as if a "man" were a product or service, and she'd finally chosen the right brand to get the right response. Was it possible she'd never seen or truly loved him the way he deserved to be loved? As a person? An ordinary, flawed, feeling person? — Liane Moriarty

He set off right away, glad of his boots, an old army pair. The leather had outlasted three complete sets of stitching. They were the most comfortable footwear he had ever known. There's no happiness like a good pair of boots, he thought as he walked. Boots, if they were just exactly right for you, changed the way you felt. In fact, there was no happiness like marching alone up a track towards evening in the desert. His limbs tingled. For a while he didn't care if he ever found what he was looking for, if he had to give it all up tomorrow. Nothing mattered but this march through the wide open air of the desert hillside. — Henry Shukman

Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren't even real. All I ever wanted was you. — Sarah Rees Brennan

But then she remembered something else, just a flash: looking up at Damon's face in the woods and feeling such - such excitement, such affinity with him. As if he understood the flame that burned inside her as nobody else ever could. As if together they could do anything they liked, conquer the world or destroy it; as if they were better than anyone else who had ever lived.
I was out of my mind, irrational, she told herself, but that little flash of memory wouldn't go away.
And then she remembered something else: how Damon had acted later that night, how he'd kept her safe, even been gentle with her.
Stefan was looking at her, and his expression had changed from belligerence to bitter anger and fear. Part of her wanted to reassure him completely, to throw her arms around him and tell him that she was his and always would be and that nothing else mattered. Not the town, not Damon, not anything.
But she wasn't doing it. — L.J.Smith

What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do. — Ben H. Winters

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer. — Sandra Cisneros

My daddy had told me once that people were gonna give me shit all my life. The monster had told Joe that his family didn't want him anymore. We'd have to live with that, those things that were whispered in our ears. Maybe we'd never be free of those shadows. Not completely.
But we'd still fight like hell.
And maybe that's all that mattered. — T.J. Klune

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And then they were kissing. Something exploded within his chest burning away the tension and confusion and fear. Burning away the hurt of seconds earlier. For a moment it felt like nothing mattered anymore. Like nothing would matter ever again. — James Dashner

All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I'd just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I'd also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn't care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us. — Richelle Mead

I remember all of these things happening and the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year. But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next. The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end. But finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered. — Ernest Hemingway,

Martin is always telling me to put all of this behind me, to get on with my life. But the thing is, before Jesse, I never really had a life. I had a routine. I did things. But aside from the accident" - he gestured with his prosthetic arm - "nothing ever happened to me. But she happened. And it was like a train wreck. It was big and painful and beautiful and every second mattered. You know what Beaudelaire said about love? It's 'an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.' But it's still an oasis. Our time together - that's the story of my life. Everything before her was just the boring setup. Like the first hour of a miniseries, the part that's just padding to stretch it out for three nights. And the time since she's gone - that's just been some sort of weird, dragged-out anticlimax. I can feel myself sitting in the audience watching my life and wondering, 'Why isn't this movie over? — Phoef Sutton

I also knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I could never walk away. I needed him. I love him. More than I ever imagined I could love another person. And, apart from that love, nothing else mattered. — M. Leighton

I am so sorry. I'm more sorry than I've ever been in my life. I don't mind being on restriction and having to clean the school. I can even live with the fact that everybody's mad at me, but I hate that I hurt you."
"Do you love this guy?"
"No! He means nothing. The kiss meant nothing."
Tristan looked me straight in the eyes, his stare pinning me to the ground. "That makes it worse, you know. I know you think that somehow it will make me feel better, but it doesn't. You threw away everything, and it wasn't even for someone that mattered. — Eileen Cook

Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality. — Robertson Davies

I'm not ready to give you a clear answer on whether electoral politics holds any particular hope for progressives. It would mean that nothing I did ever mattered. — Tom Hayden

I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered but two bodies moving together. The past and the future rendered irrelevant by the beauty of the now, the sum of the self transmuted into a moment. Oh, was there ever a more seductive definition of madness? — Alexis Hall

Nothing human has ever mattered to this world. Nothing human has ever excited the interest of rivers or flowers. Everything fades away in the specks of this blurred haze that the fire of the sun has added to the heat of the light. — Pascal Quignard

When you meet the right person, it's like nothing else - nobody else. No one in your past ever mattered. — Melissa De La Cruz

The rose, however, made us girls somewhat fainthearted, because it really was something we felt mattered, the white bridal dream with the wedding bouquet and the kiss from the man who was to be ours forever. But then Laura said that the lady who had given it to us had gotten divorced only five years later. And since many of our parents were also divorce, if indeed they had ever been married at all, that dream clearly wasn't worth our time. — Janne Teller

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity - happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes. — Albert Camus

Only one thing mattered: this was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that horrible potion for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl. — J.K. Rowling

Scarlett was not fond of fate. She liked to believe if she were good, good things would happen. Fate left her feeling powerless, and hopeless, and with an overall feeling of lessness. To her, fate seemed like a larger, omnipotent version of her father, stealing her choices and controlling her life without any regard for her feelings. Fate meant that nothing she did mattered. — Stephanie Garber

Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know. — Tao Lin

It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable - his "Orphic Sayings" - for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages. — Megan Marshall

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

There will be ribbons in a range of colors with placings noted and records kept. Ribbons aren't worth much more than that; they're only a symbol. It's your partnership that mattered. That the two of you spent weekends challenging yourselves to improve, always competing against your last show, and balancing winning and losing into a place of faith and trust. That the two of you built a special relationship that made a difference, if not in the huge world, certainly in your own hearts. You persevered through joy and pain, thrill and dread, and in the end, there was a place that the two of your shared. Ribbons say it was worth celebrating. In a world where horses struggle, suffer, and die for the whims of humans, it says that you saw past the surface and shared breath and heart with another soul. You lifted your eyes higher. — Anna Blake

I didnt pay atteniton to times or distance, instead focusing on how it felt just to be in motion, knowing it wasn't about the finish line but how I got there that mattered. — Sarah Dessen

The cream of a generation was lost in the mud of Flanders. Etonians went over the top with the Illiad in their knapsacks and Athens in their hearts. To protest that such men were statistically not even a trace among the British soldiers killed is to miss the point. At all times the great majority of people have been ignorant of the classics; but the men who mattered; who governed, declared wars and resisted innovation have always had Latin and Greek. — William Donaldson

I stared at them while my control unraveled. I wanted to throw them in the trash. I wanted to return them. I wanted to keep them. I was a mess of wants, none of which mattered, because she didn't want me. — Cora Carmack

You knocked the door down." Disbelief rang in his matter-of-fact tone.
"I know," she answered,unable to say anything else. Unable to look away from his body.
"But it's solid oak."
"I know." She felt the solid oak beneath her and a little shocked that she'd done it, too. If it mattered at all, her shoulder felt a little bruised. And it was the slight pain that brought some reality back into the moment.
"You don't have any clothes on." Oh, God, did she really say that? — C.C. Hunter

It didn't matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it. — Peter Buffett

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. — Patrick Ness

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure
as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.
There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been. — John Edward Williams

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

My grandfather had given me Mr. Darwin's book to read. He had given me the possibility of a different kind of life. but none of it mattered. Instead there was The Science of Housewifery for me. I was blind; I was pathetic. The century was about to change, but my own little life would not change with it. — Jacqueline Kelly

She couldn't have cared less when she got home or if she ever got home. All that mattered was this moment & that this moment continues. — Beth Harbison

So for me the creative world isn't what you do after your day job, though many professional musicians do this to make ends meet, but it's something that IS a job. Perhaps that's why I'm not as disheartened by the more cold blooded aspects of the industry. Over the course of watching my mother navigate the creative world I've seen just about every trick pulled that could have been and I've seen her deposit the checks received for a job well done. When I recently asked her why she chose the creative world she said: "Early on I decided that if I had to work I was going to work at something that I loved."

I'm glad she did. As difficult, chaotic, dysfunctional and crazy as the world in music and the arts can be I always knew that they mattered deeply to her, as they do to me. — Jamie Freveletti

Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee. — Jim Gleeson

The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it, but that no longer mattered because the light was now obliteration the darkness. — Ted Dekker

It didn't matter who you were, it only mattered what you were. I was wrong, and soon I believe you're going to see you're wrong too. It isn't about what kind of monster you are; it isn't about whether or not you're a monster at all. It's about who you are and what you represent. — M.R. Merrick

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass. — Steven Johnson

Both battered to shit, both broken. But they were broken together now. Him, her, and their son or daughter. His very own family. And that's all that mattered. They were together, and together — Lucian Bane

We were leaving a pleasant region, an Oriental farmer's paradise, that was more prosperous and secure under communist control than the area around Bong Son was under ARVN control. I wondered if the form of government really mattered to those peasant farmers. — Matthew Brennan

Yet as bad as she felt, it was nothing compared to the stark despair she saw in Rafferty's eyes. It was so total, and went so deep, that it made her forget her own hurt to see it. It was the look of a man who'd given up deep inside where it mattered most, and for Maggie, who was a survivor to her very toes, it was profoundly disturbing. — Caroline Cross

For Leon, who had long grown used to having two wives,one at his side and one in his head, nothing much changed, but Yvonne's soul found peace at last. For her too, the question of whether or not they were destined for one another had now been settled, and it no longer mattered whether they were really passionately or only half-heartedly in love, or whether they only pretended or wrongly believed that they loved one another. All that mattered was the actual status quo. It was as simple as that. — Alex Capus

I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine. — Laurence Fishburne

She would hurt and be unhappy when she woke up, but she would live. That's all that mattered. That's everything that mattered. — Thea Harrison

The secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. - Quentin — John Green