Nothing Is Handed To You Quotes & Sayings

Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow. — Countee Cullen

A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind. — Barbara Kingsolver

She handed him a glass of water and two Aleve gelcaps. "They're anti-inflammatories. They will dull the pain a little bit and keep down swelling and redness. Swallow the pills, don't chew."
"Well, I thought I'd stick them into my nose and impersonate a walrus, but if you insist, I'll swallow them. — Ilona Andrews

When a woman extends her hand for you to shake it, then you shake her hand. You do not turn it up and kiss it. And it is just so creepy. Because, you know, I handed it at this angle. I handed it at the handshake angle and so I'm not giving it to you to do whatever you want with it. I'm not loaning it to you. It's like if somebody borrowed your lawnmower and you're assuming they're going to use it to mow their lawn. You don't want to find out later they put it in the ocean! — Paula Poundstone

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree. — Corliss Lamont

Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain."Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a "bare stem"? — Jessica Valenti

Women have been looking for a cape and have been handed an apron for centuries.
But here was a man who wanted to help women swing their apron around, let it flutter down their backs and watch them soar through the clear blue skies — Twinkle Khanna

There is something I want to do. But it's something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What's the point of doing something if you know you've got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What's the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up? — Dorothy Koomson

Don't go empty handed when going to a temple or to see a spiritual master. Offer something as a symbol of surrender, even if it be a mere flower. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value. — Zhuangzi

The plain rule is, to do nothing in the dark, to be party to nothing under-handed or mysterious, and never to put his foot down where he cannot see ground. — Charles Dickens

Gee-word?"
"Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?"
"Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended. — Neil Gaiman

Once of the tricks about life is that it's always changing. Sometimes the changes are good. Sometimes you think they're good and you end up disappointed. Other times you think life has handed you a lemon and it turns out to be a diamond. And there are other times when it just is what it is. It's not what you wanted, but there's nothing you can do about it, so you just have to accept what's happened and go on. Those are the toughest times in my book, the times when you simply have no choice and life just does what it wants without even asking what anybody thinks. — Melodie Ramone

He handed me a rope and it was up to me whether I would climb it or use it to hang myself. — Amy Poehler

I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself. — Cory Doctorow

I didn't do anything.I fumble with tears."
"You listened." She handed him back his bandanna.
"Mostly because tears render me speechless.You've a bit of garden dirt here."
Keeley came down the path just in time to see Brian gently wipe her mother's face with a blue bandanna.The tearstains had her leaping forward like a mama bear to her threatened cub.
"What is it? What did you do?" Hissing at Brian, she wrapped an arm around Adelia's shoudler.
"Nothing.I just knocked your mother down and kicked her a few times. — Nora Roberts

Shh. Please don't cry. I'm so sorry. Here.
She opened her eyes to see him pull a tissue from his jeans. He handed it to her and she used it to press away her tears.
He carried tissues around in his pockets for her, even on nights when he had no expectation of seeing her. — Becky Wade

Many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. "It's ironic," she told me. "The Moore court's concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired - it just handed that commercial value to researchers." According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn't prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery. — Rebecca Skloot

Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. — Sara Maitland

Any ham-handed idiot can make a woman scream. I prefer to assess ... responsiveness. — Cherise Sinclair

Not the soul that's whitest
Wakens love the sweetest:
When the heart is lightest
Oft the charm is fleetest.
While the snow-frail maiden, 5
Waits the time of learning,
To the passion laden
Turn with eager yearning.
While the heart is burning
Heaven with earth is banded: 10
To the stars returning
Go not empty-handed.
Ah, the snow-frail maiden!
Somehow truth has missed her,
Left the heart unladen 15
For its burdened sister. — A.E.

This reality requires you to bury your nature and conform. This is the only way to survive. It is within this reality one often shares a minuscule of what one could share. Competition and scarcity dominate the mind and the heart shuts down. The lure with which one acquires is left with with subsequent hollowness. There was nothing to be had as all it was, was appearance. The conqueror leaves empty-handed. During a lonely moment, one can go and touch inside. It is here that the spirit shows how life is wasted by living a lie. — Elise Icten

When a man knows not how to read, or is left-handed, it — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection. — Lucio Russo

At first it was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is not reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will not be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West after all.
If you believe that dream you dream when you go there. — Robert Penn Warren

It's the same as if I just handed you a knife and offered you my balls, for God's sake. And I don't even give a fuck. Because I have no pride when it comes to you. There is nothing I wouldn't do or say to make you understand that I love you. I fucking love you. There, I said it. Do you believe me now? He sounded so pissed off and angry that the admission had been torn from him that she had to battle the smile forming on her lips. — Maya Banks

Beginning empty handed and alone frightens the best of men. It also speaks volumes of just how sure they are that God is with them. — Gene Edwards

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know - what'll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there's nothing to be well adjusted to! — Terence McKenna

True to the precepts handed down to her by her mother and grandmother - to wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised - Miss Marple merely raised her eyebrows and shook her head, — Agatha Christie

On the one hand I have very traditional values: I'm looking for love and want a baby one day. On the other hand, I have a secret and rebel side, that I maybe took from an Australian mom who handed down to me the love for adventure and freedom. And sometimes I feel a bit offbeat. — Kristen Stewart

Work hard but work smart. Always. Every day. Nothing is handed to you and nothing is easy. You're not owed anything ... No job or task is too small or beneath you. If you want to get ahead, volunteer to do the things no one else wants to do, and do it better. Be a sponge. Be open and learn. — Bobbi Brown

Everything that has value has its price. Nothing worth having is ever handed to you gratis. — Gertrude Lawrence

She tilted her head, looking back down at Del's notes as she absently tore the crust off her pizza.
And then she reached across the table and handed it to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
He glanced down at the crust and then back at her; her eyes were still on his notebook as she flipped a page and began reading again, and he felt something settle in his chest. It was pathetic, but that was probably the nicest thing anyone had done for him in a long time. — Priscilla Glenn

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about ... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading. — Daniel Pennac

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience! — Terry Pratchett

Sometimes the changes are good. Sometimes you think they're good and you end up disappointed. Other times you think life has handed you a lemon and it turn out to be a diamond. And there are other times when it just is what it is. It's not what you wanted, but there's nothing you can do about it, so you just have to accept what's happened and go on — Melodie Ramone

For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Talos), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.
If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. — Robert Penn Warren

I brought you Diet Coke to compensate," he said, opening the cooler. "Also, this conversation is boring." "Right. Sorry." She took the can he handed her and popped it open. "Really sorry. There's nothing more boring than talking about food." "No," Cal said. "Talking about food is great. Talking about not having food is boring. — Jennifer Crusie

There is the staircase,
there is the sun.
There is the kitchen,
the plate with toast and strawberry jam,
your subterfuge,
your ordinary mirage.

You stand red-handed.
You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass

What are you supposed to do
with all this loss?

In the daylight we know
what's gone is gone,
but at night it's different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning;
the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunks
lurching sideways through the doors
we open to them in sleep;
these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,
even those we have loved the most,
especially those we have loved the most,
returning from where we shoved them
away too quickly:
from under the ground, from under the water,
they clutch at us, they clutch at us,
we won't let go. — Margaret Atwood

It's still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own." "Sure - provided somebody tells him when he's young enough that there is a Money River, that there's nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. 'Go where the rich and the powerful are,' I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Go to other countries. Not a typical backpacking tour. Planned tour
means you will hang with Americans on bikes and flirt with drunk
Germans and someone will steal your Levi's in the hostel and a guy
from Poland will sock you in the face while bad techno plays
everywhere and you will learn nothing except that your face hurts and
not everyone showers. Get into other cultures and talk politics and
love. Meeting other people is the only way to know if you believe what
you believe cause it's been handed to you, or if it really rings true
in your heart.
Getting lost should be seen as a sweet chance to be found.
Remember, you belong everywhere. — Derrick Brown

Nothing is going to be handed to you
you have to make things happen. — Florence Griffith Joyner

Hands full of sand,
I say: take this,
this is what I have saved;
I earned this with my genius,
and because I love you...

Take this, hurry.
I am dropping everything
and then I listened:
I was not saying anything;
out of all that had gone into
the composition of the language
and what I knew of it
I had chiselled these words
- take this, hurry-
and you could not hear me.
I had said nothing.
And then I am leaving,

making ready to go to another street,
when you, mingled between sleep
and delirium, turned

and handed me an empty sack:
Take this, my friend;
I am not coming back.
The ghost of a flower poised on your lip — James Tate

[ ... ]
"What were you going to do if he'd refused ?"
Jaenelle looked at him and smiled.
Butterflies filled his stomach and tickled unmercifully before turning into heavy, sinking stones.
"Well," his darling said, "you have a wonderful deep voice too. So if Papa refused, I was going to ask you."
Saetan walked into the sitting room where he'd asked Geoffrey and Draca, the Keep's Seneschal, to meet him.
"My friends, this bottle of wine arrived this evening, compliments of Prince Sadi. Since it came from the wine cellar at the Hall, I can assure you it is a very fine vintage, one best enjoyed when shared."
He called in three glasses and opened the wine.
Draca said nothing until he handed her a glass. "What iss the occassion ?"
Saetan grinned. "My son has just realized how much his father loves him. — Anne Bishop

She felt like a world-class musician standing before a full auditorium and handed a kazoo. — James S.A. Corey

He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature. — Margaret Atwood

She looked in the mirror and her hopes fell. "Our friend is behind us again and he's coming up fast. Closing the distance."
Then he knows we're on to him."
Christ! He's got a gun, Red! He's stuck his arm out the window."
Don't worry," Red told her. "Shooting a pistol left-handed from a moving car at another moving car at sixty miles an hour at this distance? Hell, he'd be lucky to hit that mountain."
There was a sharp crack and the rear window disintegrated into flashing shards. Something buzzed in the air between them and smashed into the tapedeck. Fee howled and ducked into his console.
Unless," Red continued thoughtfully, "that's Orvid Crayle behind us. He's very good. — Michael Flynn

Many people believe that the free market, despite some admitted advantages, is a picture of disorder and chaos. Nothing is "planned," everything is haphazard. Government dictation, on the other hand, seems simple and orderly; decrees are handed down and they are obeyed. — Murray N. Rothbard

Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.
You're afraid of the King. Admit it.
Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.
Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.
My lady, it read,who isn't?
Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands.
"All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller.
"Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."
Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now? — Heather Dixon

This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Pull-heavy, right-handed hitters should also have seen shifts, but rarely did. According to BIS's database, the first shift employed against a right-handed hitter in the modern era didn't occur until June 11, 2009, when the Phillies shifted left against Gary Sheffield. — Travis Sawchik

I was blessed in the sense that I got handed so much early on in life. I got a lot of the things people go through their 20s and 30s craving. — Sheena Easton

Where I grew up, I could be a punk rocker and a jock. But in college, it became apparent that those two worlds didn't mix. When I brought my guitar back to school after Thanksgiving break, a friend handed me his bass and said, 'Listen to the Ramones.' — Jeff Ament

I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler. — Jack Kirby

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. — Fern Schumer Chapman

As Mary said that, Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She found a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster. She had never been on a roller-coaster, or anything like one, but if she had, she would have recognised the sensations in her breast: they were exciting and frightening at the same time, and she had not the slightest idea why. The sensation continued, and deepened, and changed, as more parts of her body found themselves affected too. She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn't known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on. She sat trembling, hugging her knees, hardly daring to breathe, as Mary went on... — Philip Pullman

Then, all of a sudden, here I am in the Press Room in the White House and walking in with the guards, who handed me three little pieces of paper asking me to send pictures to the guards at the White House. — Majel Barrett

I'd rather be an adviser. I don't wanna become a trainer because I think with the knowledge and the business sense that I've accomplished through my career and have credibility, why would I reduce myself down to being in a gym with a bunch of training which is not a bad thing to give advice, but I can do that with a suit and tie on and also be there when the cheques are written. I don't wanna be there when the cheques are handed down from 3 or 4 people's hands and then it hits mine as a trainer because 9/10 times, deductions have come out of that. — Bernard Hopkins

[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. — C.S. Lewis

I stood for parliament with the amazing support and help of my ex-husband, but it's not something that was handed to me like a peerage. I worked hard and was elected. So my achievements, such as they are, are my own. — Louise Mensch

I didn't get to stop missing her. Ever. It was the thing that my life had handed me, and no matter how heavy it was, I was never going to be able to set it down. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to be okay. Or even happy. I couldn't imagine it yet exactly, but maybe a day would come when the hole inside me wouldn't ache quite so badly and I could think about her, and remember, and it would be all right. That day felt light-years away, but right at this moment I was standing on a tower in the middle of Tuscany and the sunrise was so beautiful that it hurt.

And that was something. — Jenna Evans Welch

But I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another — Haruki Murakami

Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein is thrown as a historically determined project: and tradition derives its importance from the fact that Being, as a horizon of disclosure in which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words or as an announcement that has been handed down to us. — Gianni Vattimo

He used to say that life was all about a boy finding the perfect girl; he was lucky enough to have been handed his in a labor and delivery room. — Jodi Picoult

Seamus walked a direct line to Frank and handed him the gun, backwards, with the barrel open. — Amy Vansant

Teddy risked a look backward and nodded as he handed Henry his hat. The two men shook hands and then walked past each other Teddy moving in the direction of Henry's room and Henry the hat pulled down over his face toward the Cutting carriage that was waiting by the curb. — Anna Godbersen

Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed. — J.D. Salinger

I didn't want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved the conditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it's true, those who have it tend to be professionals
like chefs. But I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human. (313) — Bill Buford

Very well. My name is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz," said the demon smugly.
"Where were you when the vowels were handed out? Behind the door?" said Nanny Ogg. — Terry Pratchett

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. — John Updike

When the humours were handed out, Ankh-Morpork got the one for joking and Quirm had to do make do with their expertise in fine dining and love-making. — Terry Pratchett

Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated - Dad's told me - there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And - "
"All right, I've got the point," said Harry. — J.K. Rowling