Nothing's Easy Quotes & Sayings

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead — Harold Brodkey

Nothing in life that's worth anything is easy. — Barack Obama

Nothing's ever come easy to me and nothing ever will and that's okay. I'm used to that. I go with the challenges. I roll with the punches. — Naomi Campbell

I'll say this much for guys, gay or straight: it's easy to pick up a friendship and act like nothing's happened. I can only imagine how quickly Christianity would have collapsed had Jesus and the Apostles been a bunch of women. Jesus would never have gotten over the fact that they abandoned him during the Crucifixion. 'I can't believe you guys would do that to me. I'm never speaking to you again. Ever!' Then, out of spite, he would have run off and joined up with the Zoroastrians. — Ken Wheaton

I know you didn't see the violence and need for control in him in the beginning, but I'm sure it was there. Nothing you did turned him into such an abusive man. And you ... well, you just didn't see your own value before that. It's an easy thing for a woman to overlook. We're taught from the cradle that men rule. — Susan Crandall

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it.
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself
to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.
To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry. — Lauren Oliver

Once in power, Stalin's campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all - particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not good conversationalists. Nothing is more boring than to listen to a person talk in a monotone without feeling. We enjoy a conversation when there is a communication of feeling. We have pleasure in expressing our feelings, and we respond pleasurably to another person's expression of feeling. The voice, like the body, is a medium through which feeling flows, and when this flow occurs in an easy and rhythmic manner, it is a pleasure both to the speaker and listener. — Alexander Lowen

Forgiveness is not the act of doing nothing to the one who hurts you. It's easy to do nothing, but hard to forgive. — Ogwo David Emenike

Nothing that's worth it is ever easy — Erin Dutton

If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that's a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace. — Joss Whedon

I swear, there's nothing like saving a woman from death twice to make it easy to manipulate her. — Stephanie Rowe

They say that that's a difficult task, that nothing's amusing that isn't spiteful," he began with a smile. "But I'll try. Get me a subject. It all lies in the subject. If a subject's given me, it's easy to spin something round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers of the last century would have found it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever is so stale ... — Leo Tolstoy

For the perfect gentleman was out there somewhere, waiting for her. He would be nothing like Father, he would be an artist, with an artist's sense of beauty and possibility, who didn't care two whits about bricks and bugs. Who was open and easy to read, whose passions and dreams brought light to his eyes. And he would love her, and only her. — Kate Morton

The degree of notoriety I have is fine and easy. There's nothing hysterical about it. — Bill Nighy

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting. — Arne Jacobsen

I looked into his eyes and then down at his mouth before continuing. "Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person's entire day with just a few measly sentences?"My slight smile dropped. "But when you don't follow them up with any action, they're completely pointless. They're just sounds and syllables. But they mean absolutely nothing." My gaze glossed over as my mind wandered. — J. Sterling

It's easy to plant a seed and sprinkle it with water, but once the sun scorches the ground, and the earth soaks up all the moisture, you're left with nothing but a thirsty little flower trying desperately to make it out of the dirt. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

The hard way, of course. It always has to be that hard way, doesn't it? No easy paths in this life. There's nothing like losing the strongest love in the universe to realize that you can't live without it." I — Elizabeth A. Reeves

Guys," he says. "After this is over, can we go get a burger or something?"
"You're thinking about food now?" Carmel asks.
"Hey, you haven't spent the last three days fasting and doing herbal rue steams and drinking nothing but Morfran's gross chrysanthemum purification potions." Carmel and I grin at each other in the mirror. "It isn't easy becoming a vessel. I'm freaking starving. — Kendare Blake

We are so lucky to be surrounded by such open minded, well traveled individuals. Everyone has a different story and journey that we can learn from. We get to express ourselves in art and it can be crazy, but that's the beauty of it. A mixture of different people and personalities coming together to make one image. Our jobs aren't easy but there is nothing I'd rather do. — Candice Swanepoel

Yes, of course. But ... how?"
Kat felt her crew around her: Hamish's arm hung around Simon's shoulders; Gabrielle's delicate hands draped through the arms of Angus and Nick. Kat's own hand found Hale's, then, fingers interlacing, palms pressing together so tightly that Kat knew nothing could come between them. Nothing. She looked at him. No one.
"It's easy," Kat said, "when you don't have to do it alone. — Ally Carter

Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there. — Jeanette Winterson

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ... — Philip Larkin

The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them ... But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy."
... "What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here. — Aldous Huxley

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time — Julian Barnes

There's nothing easy about running for president, I can tell you. It's tough, it's nasty, it's mean, it's vicious, it's beautiful. When you win, it's beautiful. And we are going to start - we are going to start winning for our country. — Donald Trump

It's so easy to think that because you can't do something extraordinary, you can't do anything at all. It's easy to decide that if you can't overhaul your entire life in one fell swoop, then you might as well just do nothing. We started where we could, with what we had. I hope it's just the beginning for us. — Shauna Niequist

Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from. — Madeleine L'Engle

I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defenses. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it's difficult with old friends; difficult because it's so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged. 'Nothing's perfect. — Jeanette Winterson

When you had hopes once,' Hadley explained after a pause, 'it's always hard to go on after you give them up. It's not so hard to give them up; that part is easy. After all, you've got to, sometimes. But afterward . . .' He gestured, grunting, '. . . What takes their place? Nothing. And the emptiness is frightening. It's so big. It sort of absorbs everything else; sometimes it's bigger than the whole world. It grows. It becomes bottomless. — Philip K. Dick

When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go. — Jerry Spinelli

I took some voice lessons here and there as a teenager but nothing too serious. I started taking it more seriously when I was in Miss Saigon. I needed to improve my technique in order to survive doing that show as many time a week as I was doing it. It's not an easy show to sing, so I needed all the help I could get. — Lea Salonga

It is not hard to follow the 'WAY'..It is actually quite easy..
The difficult part is being yourself and doing your own thing..
Separating self from the blind masses & ignoring crowd criticism..
Go ahead to do what's right for you and let nothing at all stop you..
Let no judgment bother & allow no one to decide who you are,Never — Abha Maryada Banerjee

You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. ( ... ) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends? — James Baldwin

Nothing is easy, and life can be extremely tough, but there's always a yin to the yang, so to speak. It's up to you to seek it out, embrace it, and live happily ever after. No matter how bad the hand you've been dealt may seem, there's always a way to play it. — Alex Gaskarth

Elli-" Neve lies down next to him. "It is not easy being friend with someone who has depression. Not because it's a burden, but because you love them. So their pain becomes your own." She rests her hand on his chest. "You really expect me to just sit by and do nothing ? — Nelou Keramati

You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. — Ian Fleming

She wore a tan robe and headscarf, the clothes of a local... but didn't feel like a market regular. She moved slowly and gazed at everything with a child's wonder. Her eyes were large and clear, her hair as black as midnight. She had a warm smile on her pretty lips and was obviously murmuring 'hellos' and 'excuse mes' to people who really didn't care or want to talk. She walked with the grace of a cloud in the wind, like her body weighed nothing at all, and held her head high with easy dignity. Easy.
Aladdin felt his heart contract. He had never seen her- or anyone like her- before.
When the girl adjusted her scarf, she revealed an intricate diadem in her hair that had a ridiculously sized emerald in it.
'Ah, a rich girl, out for a day of shopping in the market without her servants. Living dangerously, playing hooky. — Liz Braswell

Creative business seminar. Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remains that it's nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives. — Haruki Murakami

I'm not saying it's going to be easy. Nothing in life is easy. But that's no reason to give up. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. After all, you only have one life, so you should try to make the most of it. — Louis Sachar

Do you think it's easy for me? No, I don't remember you. I don't remember holding you or talking to you or falling in love with you - but I walk around with a giant hole in my heart all the time. I feel your absence every second of the day. It aches and nothing soothes it. Losing you is bad enough, but I don't even get the comfort of remembering that I had you once.
-Haden — Gwen Hayes

Smut, if it's really smut, there's nothing backing it up. It's the easy way out. — Sandra Bernhard

MOST CITIES ARE designed on grids that fill them with hard angles. Not Amsterdam, which has a softness about it imparted by the watery curves of the 16th-century canals that fan out through the city. Though its gabled canal houses and narrow medieval streets give it an undeniable old-world charm, Amsterdam's thoroughly contemporary takes on arts, architecture and design show that it has modernity in a firm embrace. It's a city that invites wandering, with a tram system and a plenitude of bicycles (about as many as there are residents) that make navigating as fun as it is easy. Thanks to the locals, most of whom speak English, you'll feel instantly welcome and will be spared the indignity of trying to pronounce Dutch (don't even try). Spend as much time as possible on foot, the better to enjoy the city's theatrical quality: The huge, unshaded windows of the canal homes allow you to peer right in, testimony to the Dutch ethos of having nothing to hide. — Anonymous

Acheron always says that our scars are there to remind us of out pasts, of where we've been and what we've gone through. But that pain doesn't have to drive or determine our future. We can rise about it if we let ourselves. It's not easy, but nothing in life ever is. -Sundown — Sherrilyn Kenyon

My heart was crazy now; it's too complicated to know what it was beating for, and how much of it was him and how much of it was the hunting - I think I cared about the deer that got shot - but it didn't matter then. Something was there and its source was irrelevant. It was so easy to feel nothing, all the time, and I held on as hard as I could, because the worst thing, I thought, now, would be for it to go away. — Patrick Somerville

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday's home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn't. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing. — Alex Gaskarth

I believe that God is making all things new. I believe that Christ overcame death and that pattern is apparent all through life and history: life from death, water from a stone, redemption from failure, connection from alienation. I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy. — Shauna Niequist

One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?"

... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same."

"How?" I asked.

"Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves. — Dawn Casey-Rowe

Nothing in life is easy. But that's no reason to give up. you'll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. — Louis Sachar

If I could fall in love with a girl, it'd be her. Those ifs are dangerous. You try them on in your head like dresses, so easy to slide in and out of. If I kissed girls, I'd kiss her. If we kissed, it'd go like this. At some point I dropped the if like a slip and just wore the feeling, nothing between it and my skin. When I kiss her. When it happens. All of it took place in my head, in silence, locked tight in skull bone and the frantic synaptic whispers between neurons, no clues popping out except the passive-aggressive haircut, the incriminating poem.
That's the problem with writers. Too much imagination.
The greater part of me knew it couldn't be real, but the hopeful part, which is more concentrated and condensed, rich in nine essential delusions, thought: It's not all in your head. — Leah Raeder

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking Program achieved for me a thing that I thought was not possible - to give up a thirty year smoking habit literally overnight. It was nothing short of a miracle. — Anjelica Huston

The mystery of God's providence is a most sublime consideration. It is easy to let our reason run away with itself. It is at a loss when it attempts to search into the eternal decrees of election or the entangled mazes and labyrinths in which the divine providence walks. This knowledge is too wonderful for us. Man can be very confident that God exercises the most accurate providence over him and his affairs. Nothing comes to pass without our heavenly Father. No evil comes to pass without his permissive providence, and no good without his ordaining providence to his own ends. — Ezekiel Hopkins

But here in my hometown, history was like a fine dust that settled out on everything. There was nothing to counter it. The culture had been hardened by a religion suspect of joy, yet fascinated by sin. Its moral acceptance of slavery eroded compassion. And gentility became a necessary pretense to cover the resentment created long ago when the North's industrial prestige trumped the agrarian South. It was not an easy place to feel lighthearted or triumphant. Nor was it an easy place to remember the beauty of wonder and awe. — Christina Carson

If you can show a person logical proof that essentianlly he's got nothing to cry about, he'll stop crying. That seems clear. Don't you think he'd stop crying?'
"That would make life too easy," Raskolnikov replied. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing. — Evan Sutter

Sentiments of your parents' throw pillows. You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it." "You're a hard person to comfort," Augustus said. "Easy comfort isn't comforting," I said. "You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember." For a moment, he said nothing. "You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace." "It's my privilege and my responsibility," I answered. — John Green

It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven
that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain
and wasted pain ... why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world
to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. — Ayn Rand

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

You're not very good at this," Emma said, laughing at the frustration on Sean's face.
He pulled his hand out from under the back of her T-shirt. "You're distracting me."
"How am I distracting you?" She shook the bag at Sean, reminding him to pull two letter tiles to replace the C and the T he'd used to make CAT.
"You look totally hot. And you did it on purpose so I wouldn't be able to concentrate and you'd win."
Emma laughed. Sure, she'd thrown on baggy flannel boxers and an old Red Sox T-shirt after her shower just to seduce him out of triple-word scores. "You not having a shirt on is distracting. And you keep pretending you want to rub my back so you can peek at my tile rack."
"Nothing wrong with checking out your rack." He craned his neck to see better and she shoved him away. It wasn't easy playing Scrabble sitting side by side on the couch, but after a long workday, neither was willing to take the floor. — Shannon Stacey

Passing is contagious. There's nothing better than making the pass that gives someone an easy hoop. — Jason Kidd

Most girls take one look at you and swoon. You've never had to really work for someone's affection or put effort into maintaining it. In many ways, your natural gifts have done you a disservice
they've stunted your sensitivity and charm! You've never had to develop insight into what will make a girl laugh and come to love you for reasons that aren't handsome or heroic. That's why smees are experts on the subtle arts of courtship and seduction; nothing comes easy to us, but we do understand and live by the Lover's Maxim."
"And what on earth is the Lover's Maxim?" asked Maz, feeling very uninformed.
The smee cleared his throat. "If you can't be handsome, be rich. If you can't be rich, be strong. If you cant be strong, be witty."
"But what if you can't be witty?" Max wondered.
"Learn the guitar. — Henry H. Neff

Your secret was not the craftsman's delight in process,
which doesn't distinguish work from pleasure
your way was not to exalt nor avoid
the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant:
everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside
the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence
your being had opened to. Where it shone,
there life was, and abundantly; it touched
your dullest task, and the task was easy. — Denise Levertov

I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom. — Shauna Niequist

It's not always easy to get over some of those bumps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It's going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage. Sometimes nothing but faith in God and say, I refuse to be trapped in the past. I'm not going to let the past destroy my future. I'm pressing on. I'm straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me. — Joel Osteen

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it. — Natasha Trethewey

One of the great things about being recognized is that you receive this feedback from people. It is easy to see how sincere people are. It's nothing fake or jive. They're giving sincere appreciation. And it's not that easy to express. — John Astin

Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it's too easy to notice how insignificant you are. How quickly you might go from something to nothing. — Megan Miranda

It's not so easy for people to end their own lives. It's not like in the movies. There, they do it like nothing, no pain, and it's all over, they're dead. The reality is not like that. You lie in bed for ten years with the piss oozing out of you. — Haruki Murakami

I've been a professional for I think 13, 14 years. It's not easy hitting balls every day and staying really motivated throughout the whole period. It's normal [that] you're going to have ups and downs. But I found my way again. And I love the sport. I love competing. I love battling. I love being out there and playing in front of crowds. This is what I've been doing since I was a child. There's nothing else that I want to do. — Jelena Jankovic

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write — George Sand

My career is built around a pattern that just keeps repeating itself over and over again. There's nothing surprising about it at all. My changes are as easy to predict as the sun coming up and down. — Neil Young

The real challenge in acting is in comedy. It's easier to get that gasp in a drama. Not easy, because you still have to find that emotional pitch. And when you do something in drama and you hear that sob from the audience it's so fulfilling. But as a comic actor, when the laugh is supposed to come and you punch in that line and nothing happens it is dreadful. It's horrific and you feel like dying right there. — George Takei

There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle. — Khaled Hosseini

It's a time of war, Alera. [ ... ] Nothing is fair, and nothing is right, and it isn't easy to understand or accept. — Cayla Kluver

I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe! ... the impotent are bloated with ideas! ... they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp! ... and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas! ... philosophies, if you prefer! ... yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

It is easy for Christians to allow themselves to be squeezed into the world's mold ... When nonbelievers see nothing different in the lifestyle of believers, they wonder if our profession of faith is sincere. — Billy Graham

And my thought looking down at the Earth was Wow. How much God our Father must love us that he gave us this home. He didn't put us on Mars or Venus with nothing but rocks and frozen waste. He gave us paradise and said, "Live here." It's not easy to wrap your head around the origins and purpose of the universe, but that's the best way I can describe the feelings I had. — Mike Massimino

"Vell," said Mr. Weller, "Now I s'pose he'll want to call some witnesses to speak to his character, or p'raps to prove a alleybi. I've been a turnin' the bis'ness over in my mind, and he may make his-self easy, Sammy. I've got some friends as'll do either for him, but my adwice 'ud be this here-never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi. Nothing like a alleybi, Sammy, nothing." — Charles Dickens

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about. — Bob Dylan

SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder ... his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field. — P.D. James

Haven't you learned by now?" Damon asked, glancing sharply at me. "Nothing's easy — L.J.Smith

Nothing is more easy than to deceive one's self, as our affections are subtle persuaders. — Demosthenes

It was easy to find things she would like. Our taste was the same, it had been from the first. It would be impossible to live with someone otherwise. I've always thought it was the most important single thing, though people may not realize it. Perhaps it's transmitted to them in the way someone dresses or, for that matter, undresses, but taste is a thing no one is born with, it's learned, and at a certain point it can't be altered. We sometimes talked about that, what could and couldn't be altered. People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed. When you found someone who was tremendously appealing but not quite perfect, you might believe you could change them after marriage, not everything, just a few things, but in truth the most you could expect was to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been. — James Salter

Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars. — Robert Beer

Life becomes a habit. You get up, dress, eat, go tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday. Life's easy when you're a robot. — Alasdair Gray

No," he said in his deep, rumbling voice. "It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult."
"What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?"
"It's your own deepest secret and you yourself don't know it."
"How can I find out?"
"By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want."
"That doesn't sound so hard," said Bastian.
"It is the most dangerous of all journeys."
"Why?" Bastian asked. "I'm not afraid."
"That isn't it," Grograman rumbled. "It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there's no other journey on which it's so easy to lose yourself forever. — Michael Ende

Beneatha: Love him? There is nothing left to love.
Mama: There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. (Looking at her) Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him: what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so! when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is. — Lorraine Hansberry

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn't an INS officer.
I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn't see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it's so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger. — Sergio Troncoso

It's really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally. They demand nothing of you. It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you. — Amanda Palmer

"You couldn't be more wrong", I said. "You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents' throw pillows. You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it." "You're a hard person to comfort" , Augustus said. "Easy comfort isn't comforting", I said. "You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember." For a moment he said nothing. "You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace." "It's my privilege and responsibility," I answered. — John Green

Oil patch lore suggests that on the sixth day, God made oil. He rested on the seventh day, because there's nothing easy about makin' oil.. — Greig Grey

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for "personal intercourse," substituted the safer "personal influence," and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.
Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life's duties. But here is a subject in which we must
inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie's line, so he abandoned these
subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. — E. M. Forster

It's easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing. — Tim Kreider

Dex gasped, his back arching at the feel of strong hands kneading his ass cheeks, pushing them apart as the head of his lover's slick cock aligned itself then pushed in slowly, the pressure both painful and exhilarating. God, it had been too long. Dex palmed his erection as he was entered, his lover burying deep inside him inch by inch. Hard muscles pressed up against his back, lowering Dex onto the mattress, his breath coming out ragged as his lover buried himself to the root and started rotating his hips, drawing out then pushing back in painfully slow. Dex moaned, his stomach filled with butterflies, the anticipation building like nothing he'd ever felt before. His whole body was on fire, and he writhed with need beneath the deliciously heavy weight. He couldn't remember Lou feeling like this. Had it always felt this damn good? Dex moaned when lips pressed against his skin beneath his ear. "Easy there, Rookie." Dex's — Charlie Cochet

I think what's happened, Marlee, is that you've realized the world isn't an addition problem. We tell kids that sometimes. We pretend the world is straightforward, simple, easy. You do this, you get that. You're a good person and try your best, and nothing bad will happen. But the truth is, the world is much more like an algebraic equation. With variables and changes, complicated and messy. Sometimes there's more than one answer, and sometimes there is none. Sometimes we don't even know how to solve the problem. But usually, if we take things step by step, we can figure things out. You just have to remember to factor the equation, break it down into smaller parts. — Kristin Levine

Nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that. — Nicholas Sparks

Your muscles know nothing. It's your brain. Exercise is something you've got to do the rest of your life. It's a lifestyle. Dying is easy. Living is a pain in the neck. You've got to work at it. — Jack LaLanne

It's always something that's going to be a part of me. It's the reason why I work so hard each and every day. It's the reason I come to work dedicated to become the best that I can be. Nothing's going to come easy in life, and I've learned a lot of lessons, some the hard way, and I think just the things that I've been through have helped mold me into the person I am and what (is in) my future and that's continuing to do things the right way. — Michael Vick

So it was all like, Caroline continues to have behavioral problems. She struggling a lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are frustrated about these things, too, of course, but we have more socially acceptable ways of dealing with our anger). Gus has taken to calling Caroline HULK SMASH, which resonates with the doctors. There's nothing easy about this for any of us. but you take your humor where you can get it. Hoping to go home on Thursday. We'll let you know ... — John Green