Only One Line Quotes & Sayings

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn't the only one who could quote Shakespeare. I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown - and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head. — Jeff Lindsay

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves ... )
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality is truth. — Jeanette Winterson

One of the reasons you take a role is because it's something you always wanted to do, from going to the movies as a kid. I always wanted to do a 1950s movie, for example. And I got a chance to be in 'Peggy Sue Got Married.' I would have taken only one line of dialogue to be in that. — Catherine Hicks

Despite all the advancements in science, and all things about religion that are disproved it still marches on. The bottom line is that the only real, absolutely provable answers about life and our place in the universe are provided by science, and religion has been holding down science since day one. — Joe Rogan

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars. — Anne Rice

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

At bottom, politics was a hullabaloo of equal and individual competitors who would only be guaranteed to cooperate for one cause: the elimination of anybody who threatened to step out of line and grab too much power for himself. It follows that there was nothing resembling today's political parties ... Since the fall of the monarchy in 510 BC, Roman domestic politics had been a long, inconclusive class struggle, suspended for long periods by foreign wars. during one never-to-be-forgotten confrontation over a debt crisis in 493 BC, the entire population withdrew its labor (14). — Anthony Everitt

And it was then that Cohen began to feel the weight of the others in this house on this dot on the map below the Line. He had always been aware that he wasn't the only one who had lost, but the losses for others seemed different to him, more true and exact, now that the losses of others had eyes and faces and arms and legs. — Michael Farris Smith

For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in front of a background that looked like Yosemite, sporting pink overalls and a lazy eye. "This is classic," Dad said. "That they shamelessly send me an order form so I can pay $69.95 for prints large and small of a photo in which my daughter looks as if she just suffered a great blow to her head - it just shows you, we are simply strapped to a motorized assembly line moving through this country. We're supposed to pay out, shut up or get tossed in the rejects bin. — Marisha Pessl

Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it. — Cory Doctorow

Grace doesn't sell; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line. — Robert Farrar Capon

I think one game we played the Oakland Raiders and Jack Tatum and I had an accident on the one-yard line. The only thing that Jack Tatum didn't do was wrap me up so I backed into the endzone backwards. — Earl Campbell

Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line. — Imre Kertesz

must reason your way through the problem. Using line only, draw one simple geometric shape, such as a square, triangle or circle. Without overlapping or intersecting, draw a different shape. Now, draw another. Choose your favorite. Make the other 2 like your favorite. Enlarge one of the shapes. Reduce one of them. Make one shape touch one edge of the page. Make the other — Paper Monument

I had read history too closely, read of Caesar and the Roman Empire. I had not noticed that in the books there were white spaces between each line; the white spaces are there to remind you of the unspoken, unwritten truth. When one only reads the words and does not read what is not written in the book, then one will never learn to understand. — Erik Christian Haugaard

She's only seventeen years old," Llarimar said. "I can't imagine being
married to the God King at her age."
"I can't imagine you being married to the God King at any age, Scoot,"
Lightsong said. Then he pointedly cringed. "Actually, yes I can imagine it,
and the dress looks painfully inelegant on you. Make a note to have my
imagination flogged for its insolence in showing me that par tic u lar sight."
"I'll put it in line right behind your sense of decorum, Your Grace,"
Llarimar said dryly.
"Don't be silly," Lightsong said, taking a sip of wine. "I haven't had one
of those in years. — Brandon Sanderson

See, Drew, there are three kinds of males in this world: boys, guys, and men. Boys - like Billy - never grow up, never get serious. They only care about themselves, their music, their cars. Guys - like you - are all about numbers and variety. Like an assembly line, it's just one one-night stand after another. Then there are men - like Matthew. They're not perfect, but they appreciate women for more than their flexibility and mouth suction. — Emma Chase

At what point did men decide that women are "on the market" to "be picked?" "Pick me! Pick me!" Oh really? Is it really like that? I shall be the one to do the picking, thank you. No one will in any way line me up against the wall and take a pick. Men do not do the picking. Women do the picking. Only stupid women wish to be "picked out." This is the ancient way, this is the way of gods and angels. Women are not "on the market;" women are seated on thrones. — C. JoyBell C.

The twin sister to autonomy and freedom is responsibility and accountability. You cannot have one with out the other. If someone is given an area of responsibility, not only must they be set free to do it, they must also be held accountable for what they do. Accountability clarifies freedom. In the teams and companies where you see boundary confusion, power struggles, control, over-reaching of one's line of responsibility, you will also see lapses in accountability as well. — Henry Cloud

What you accomplish in life is limited only by your imagination and the fear of reprisal. Life is too fleeting and unrewarding to have to live with the added anus of indignity. The denial of one's inevitable demise is what causes most of the astringent blandness in the world. When your existence ends most certainly in death, there is no such thing as 'going too far'. There are no 'lines' you should fear to cross except the finish line. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you could do. — Jim Goad

I'm not saying a hunt isn't something we crave, but to a man, we hate to be manipulated. And this is our town, as much as any human's. Our home, and our neighbours and perhaps even our friends. You fall into the trap of thinking as Fallon does, that there are only heroes and villains, monsters and victims, and nothing between. We all stand in that space, crossing the line to one side, then the other. Even you. — Rachel Caine

In hockey, nearly everyone plays with a partner. The offense forward line is made up of a left wing, a center, and a right wing. The defense skates in pairs. Only the goalie is alone and he's always weird. Always.

Kenny Simms, who graduated last year, was one of the greatest goalies at Briar and probably the reason we won three Frozen Fours in a row, but that guy had the strangest fucking habits. He talked to himself more than he talked to anyone else, sat in the back of the bus, preferred to eat alone. On the rare occasion that he came out with us, he'd argue the entire time. I once got into it with him over whether there was too much technology available to children. We argued about that topic for the entire three hours we were knocking back beers at the bar.

Sabrina reminds me of Simms. — Elle Kennedy

The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown. — Nick Flynn

It only takes one line, from one poem to change your world...What has poetry done for you lately? — David S. Cross

Four wings, two hearts, but only one soul. They connect in the middle, but are separated by a thin line of ash. Its what brings them together, yet rips their feathers apart. They can never truly be together as light and dark. Unless one makes the ultimate sacrifice. Blows out their candle, and joins the other in the dark. Or if the other dares to fly across the line and steals the others light And force them to cross over the line and join the darkness of life. Im not gone, princess. I will come back for you until you give in. — Jessica Sorensen

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use
high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject
there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. — Richard Rodriguez

I'm glad you feel that way." His breath tickled my jaw line before he ran his tongue along it. "But I'm sorry about your back."
"What about my back?" I murmured, lost in the trance of where his tongue was going to go next.
He shoved my back against the mattress, pulling my arms above my head before he crawled on top of me, straddling my hips. "I'm sorry that it might be sore in the morning. — Magan Vernon

A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. — Milan Kundera

In the front was a man he knew only as "Samson," a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held together with nails and twine. Behind him in a rough line were the flagellates: five men also stripped to the waist, holding various chains, heavy corded ropes, and one with what looked like a leather whip from the S&M sex shop. They beat their backs as they slowly walked down the center of the street. — Joseph M. Chiron

I come from a long line of architects. I'm the only one who did not become an architect, but I've been around the drawing aspect and construction my whole life. — Kym Whitley

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

Mitt Romney's only bottom line is the one at the end of his own bank statement. The problem is that he confuses his own narrow, self-interest - and that of people like him - with the national interest. He thinks as long as we do right by the Mitt Romneys of the world, America will be just fine. — Chuck Schumer

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. — Anthony Burgess

I have studied your lips
every line, dip and bend
and
have come to realize
one truth:
the way you move
is in perfect
unison with
the perk
and pout
of your mouth
orating coded syllables
only I can make out. — Adrian Michael

I've always thought that there are no couples in love nor any love triangles, only an Indian file where you love the person in front of you and that person in turn loves the one in front of him, and so on, and where the one behind me loves me and that one is loved by the one behind him and so on, but always loving the one whose back is turned to us. And the last one in line isn't loved by anyone — Jorge Franco

I'm not into the money thing. You can only sleep in one bed at a time. You can only eat one meal at a time, or be in one car at a time. So I don't have to have millions of dollars to be happy. All I need are clothes on my back, a decent meal, and a little loving when I feel like it. That's the bottom line. — Ray Charles

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.
'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch. — Italo Calvino

If there is something you want to be, have or do in this life, there is only one sure way to find out if you have it. Put your butt on the line!!. — Patrice

The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line. — Maggie Stiefvater

...unlike Aretha, [Al Green's] only rival vocally, Al never sold himself short in the studio. Where the albums follow the vagaries of genius, the hits exploit Al's personal production line, every one a perfect soul record and a perfect pop record in whatever order suits your petty little values. Brashly feminine and seductively woman-friendly, he breaks free in a register that darts and floats and soars into falsetto with startling frequency and beguiling ease. He's so gorgeous, so sexy, so physically attractive that only masochists want to live without him. — Robert Christgau

It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line. — Kurt Vonnegut

There was also no longer any sense of my moving along a time line. Time was no longer a path with the past behind me and the future before me, as we commonly conceive of it. Instead there was a sense of an eternally unfolding present moment. Rather than time being a journey along a linear path, change appeared to be mandala-like. It seemed to be like a flower seen from above, endlessly unfolding from within, or like a kaleidoscope's image forever rearranging itself. It struck me as highly misleading to think in terms of there being a past behind us and a future ahead of us. Instead there was only this one present moment, eternally unfolding according to its nature. I found myself in an eternal, timeless present. — Bodhipaksa

Buddhas can take you to the boundary line of meditation and samadhi. That is the only difference between meditation and samadhi. If your mind has become utterly quiet and silent, but only the master is there, then it is meditation. If your mind has become so quiet that even the master has disappeared, it is samadhi. The last barrier is going to be the master. He will take you out of the world, but one day you will have to leave him too. And the real master will always keep you alert that you have to leave him one day, at the final stage. — Rajneesh

Even if we don't want to admit it, the ability to overcome most obstacles is within our hands. We can't blame family, society, or history if our work is meaningless, dull, or stressful. Admittedly, there are not too many options when we realize that our job is useless, or actually harmful. Perhaps the only choice is to quit as quickly as possible, even at the cost of severe financial hardship. In terms of the bottom line of one's life, it is always a better deal to do something one feels good about than something that may make us materially comfortable but emotionally miserable. Such decisions are notoriously difficult, and require great honesty with oneself. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

There is a fine line between self-confidence and Ego
If you have self-confidence you will know that you are good ,, excellent if you want ,, but you will also know that there is other people as good as you , or not , but some one is good somewhere , and Respect that
but If you have Ego , you will only see your self as the best , and only you , no one else is good or as good as you , you won't even stand the idea — Iman Ahmed El Sawalhy

Our tree's only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process. — Hope Jahren

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about. — Wes Montgomery

You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work - one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a 'line'. It must be like still being a student, with an essay to do after a week's drinking, only you haven't had the drinking. Quite clearly, to me, you aren't a voluntary worker, from the will: you do it by intuitive flashes, more like an act of creation, & when the flashes don't come, as of course they don't, especially when the excess energy of undergraduate days is gone, then it is a hideous unnatural effort. — Philip Larkin

Yes, in the commercial world there's room for both McDonald's and Whole Foods, but in the realm of politics, we're told, it's either Filet-o-Fish or line-caught salmon: only one can prevail - and which is up to you. — Walter Kirn

Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you're worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt. Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate. Never attempting to do the impossible - but everything up to that line. Simply flipping the obstacles that life throws at you by improving in spite of them, because of them. And therefore no longer afraid. But excited, cheerful, and eagerly anticipating the next round. — Ryan Holiday

There's only one way to break the color line. Be good. I mean, play good. Play so good that they can't remember what color you were before the season started. — Hank Aaron

But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you're deluding yourself. For one thing, it's easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. — Ed Catmull

No, Tiny. Words. Passion. The danger of falling in love is you mistakenly believe the loved one is the only source of passion in your life. But there is passion everywhere. In music. In words. In the stories you tell and the stories you see. Find passion everywhere, and share it widely. Don't narrow it down to one thin line. — David Levithan

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It's the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. — Gloria Steinem

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning's famous poem, 'The Lost Leader,' in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line 'Just for a handful of silver he left us.' A few more of the poem's lines were:
'We shall march prospering, not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,' and
'Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.'

There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai's photograph! — Bipan Chandra

You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you ever move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessations from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? — J.D. Salinger

Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume. — Henri Matisse

Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait - for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ... — Jean Rhys

The biggest battles in human history can only ever be seen through the eyes of the bloke on the front line, and that's by definition a very focused view and one that will vary from individual to individual. — Karen Traviss

I was indignant. "She called me a dork. She just met me. How could she possibly make that call after only one dinner?" Mom eyed my outfit critically and then said, "You do realize you're wearing your Gryffindor jersey, right?" I opened my mouth to tell her it was a collectible straight off the Harry Potter official clothing line, but Mom cut across me. "And you know that when Daisy walked in, you had your right hand up, fingers splayed in that strange Star Trek signal." Yeah, — Cookie O'Gorman

It isn't a circle
it is simply a long line
as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end
we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes
who dream, who will not give up
are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"! — Lorraine Hansberry

Who says only long tedious novels are good to read when all that can be summed up in one line — Priyansh Shah

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be? — Henry James

I want a hardened man, not a mass-murdering, pathologically vengeful one," Vlad said. "There's only room for one of those in my line right now, and that's me. — Jeaniene Frost

The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line. — George Orwell

When you are awake, your mind is limited. When you are dreaming, your mind is unlimited. Creation is a genius. The mind is a powerful aspect to reality, but no one can truly tell you what reality is, or how reality should be. You can only tell yourself. However, what if you can tap into your mental functions, and truly blur the line to the point, that whether you are awake or asleep, your mind makes the world real? What's the difference between bending the world in your dream, and bending the world in reality? The truth is, there is no difference, when you live in imagination. — Lionel Suggs

When I was young, I was a hunter, walking wooded hillsides with confident steps and a gun in my hand. I knew the blur of wings, the rocketing form, and the Great Moment that only hunters know, when all existence draws down to two points and a single line. And the universe holds it breath. And what may be and what will be meet and become one - before the echo returns to its source. — Pete Dunne

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. — Richard Russo

Now I've done it. Only one line to say I love you. And I do. Be safe. XO Rita — Suzanne Hayes

Then came my favorite line of all: "you are to give him the name Jesus" (v. 31). Do you realize this was the first proclamation of our Savior's personal name since the beginning of time? Jesus. The very name at which every knee will one day bow. The very name that every tongue will one day confess. A name that has no parallel in my vocabulary or yours. A name I whispered into the ears of my infant daughters as I rocked them and sang lullabies of His love. A name by which I've made every single prayerful petition of my life. A name that has meant my absolute salvation, not only from eternal destruction, but from myself. A name with power like no other name. Jesus. — Beth Moore

...an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, and interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, an intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to stop thinking. This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in leisure activities. Such a conclusion would put pleasurable absorption beyond the ken of any activity that is undertaken for the sake of making money, because although money is undoubtedly good, it is not intrinsically so. — Matthew Crawford

To live a fulfilling life is an endurance event, and the only way to get to the finish line is to focus on the present, checking from moment to moment that I am still heading in the right direction. The Atlantic taught me that no matter how huge and seemingly impossible the task, anybody can achieve extraordinary things, by simply taking it one stroke at a time. — Roz Savage

There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment. — Susanna Kearsley

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste. — A.S. Byatt

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Well ... " He leans across the basket to place the necklace over my head. It falls in line atop my key. He drags my hair free, smoothing the strands to cover both chains. "I thought this could be symbolic. It's made of the same kind of metal, looks vintage like the key. Together, they prove what I've always known. Even when we used to come here as kids." "And what's that?" I watch him, intrigued by how the tunnel's opening tints one side of his smooth complexion with bluish light. "That only you have the key to open my heart. — A.G. Howard

All right, Jeffy. Here are some big-boy pants. Put 'em on and crank out fifty miles for me. By the way, the iPod only has one playlist on it. Press play when you leave the starting line, okay? — Jordan Sonnenblick

Had he stood outside my door as I'd stood outside his, fists at his sides, lips drawn back? Did it have him as bad as it had me? Was it eating at him, gnawing at him with the same sharp vicious little teeth that wouldn't let me sleep?
Yes, it was. I could see the rage of insatiable uninvited lust in every line of that dark, stoic face that had once been too subtly etched for me to read. I wasn't the only one lying awake at night, fevered with memories, tossing, turning, soaking my sheets, burning up
not for Fae sex, but him, damn it all to hell, him. — Karen Marie Moning

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. — Lin Yutang

Ford was humming something. it was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. if anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. it would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons that he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the "About the Boy" bit. he was annoyed that nobody asked. — Douglas Adams

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book. — James Hynes

In Euclid's Elements we meet the concept which later plays a significant role in the development of science. The concept is called the "division of a line in extreme and mean ratio" (DEMR). ...the concept occurs in two forms. The first is formulated in Proposition 11 of Book II. ...why did Euclid introduce different forms... which we can find in Books II, VI and XIII? ...Only three types of regular polygons can be faces of the Platonic solids: the equilateral triangle... the square... and the regular pentagon. In order to construct the Platonic solids... we must build the two-dimensional faces... It is for this purpose that Euclid introduced the golden ratio... (Proposition II.11)... By using the "golden" isosceles triangle...we can construct the regular pentagon... Then only one step remains to construct the dodecahedron... which for Plato is one of the most important regular polyhedra symbolizing the universal harmony in his cosmology. — Alexey Stakhov

Yes, an actual full-sized camel. If you find that confusing, just think how the criosphinx must have felt.
Where did the camel come from, you ask? I may have mentioned Walt's collection of amulets. Two of them summoned disgusting camels. I'd
met them before, so I was less than excited when a ton of dromedary flesh flew across my line of sight, plowed into the sphinx, and collapsed on top
of it. The sphinx growled in outrage as it tried to free itself. The camel grunted and farted.
"Hindenburg," I said. Only one camel could possibly fart that badly. "Walt, why in the world - ?"
"Sorry!" he yelled. "Wrong amulet!"
The technique worked, at any rate. The camel wasn't much of a fighter, but it was quite heavy and clumsy. The criosphinx snarled and clawed
at the floor, trying unsuccessfully to push the camel off; but Hindenburg just splayed his legs, made alarmed honking sounds, and let loose gas.
I moved to Walt's side and tried to get my bearings. — Rick Riordan

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay? — Tom Robbins

It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers a second. Anything like a regular schedule is out of the question; there are times when one must forget the whole idea and stay in port - or at least in orbit - waiting for the Solar System to rearrange itself for the greater convenience of Mankind. — Arthur C. Clarke

I made the out of town trip once, walked a mile, and endured product placement rather than putting an item where it made sense. There were plastic smiles of overworked, underpaid employees who not only didn't want to help you, they didn't want to be there. Crowds, lots of crowds, because everything was always on sale. And after I'd wandered aimlessly for a couple of hours, running from one side of the store to the next caught in some perverse scavenger hunt, I stood in the line. Then there was the one open line in a row of fifty closed ones trying to check out a store full of tired suburbanites, their screaming kids, and clueless teenagers. — Adrienne Wilder

God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn't have to take us in the line. You're as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He'd ever created. — C.S. Lewis

He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath. — Victoria Schwab

EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. — Richard Stallman

There's only one of him, she thought, and he's right here.
He knows I'll like a song before I've heard it. He laughs before I even get to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes me want to let him open doors for me.
There's only one of him. — Rainbow Rowell

In material things, there are seven wonders; in human beings there is only one wonder - and that's you. — Amit Kalantri

It was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.
That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one's will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen. Of course there was Eve and the Fall; but there was nothing about falling in that story, which was only about eating, like most children's stories. — Margaret Atwood

The Constitution is quite clear that no person "except a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president of the United States, but there is no such restriction placed on a president's wife. Louisa Adams is the only one of a long line of First Ladies who were born abroad, and although her father was an American and citizenship her birthright, it became an issue that was used against her husband, John Quincy Adams, when he ran for the presidency. It was a whispering campaign, to be sure, because most people knew very well that Louisa was as much a citizen as they were. A large number of people didn't understand that children born to Americans abroad inherited their parents' rights, and in Louisa's case, even some of those who did know this weren't so sure that the rule applied to her because her mother was a British subject. — Bill Harris

Nobody had ever even stepped out onto the surface, she read in school, leading to a broken line of memorable first statements. "That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind," on Luna, "I wish that the peace I see here could bless the Earth again," from Mars, "This one's for you, Mark Twain," on Halley's Comet. And from the only manned landing on Venus, "Oh my holy fucking shit I think we're on the fucking ground! Get us up we're gonna fucking die! — Ari Bach

Barnet was a man with a rich capacity for misery, and there is no doubt that he exercised it to its fullest extent now. The events that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance. That his few minutes of hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his suffering now. The sun blazing into his face would have shown a close watcher that a horizontal line, which had never been seen before, but which was never to be gone thereafter, was somehow gradually forming itself in the smooth of his forehead. His eyes, of a light hazel, had a curious look which can only be described by the word bruised; the sorrow that looked from them being largely mixed with the surprise of a man taken unawares. — Thomas Hardy

If there is a large voter turnout, not only do we retain the White House, but I think we regain the Senate. We win governors' chairs up and down the line. So I believe if you want to retain the White House, if you want to see Democrats do well across the board, I think our campaign is the one that creates the large voter turnout and helps us win. — Bernie Sanders

Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds of ways without contradicting any truth already known. I will dwell now on only one possible line of explanation, not that I see any way of elucidating all the new phenomena I regard as genuine, but because it seems probable I may shed a light on some of those phenomena. All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the very heart of nature , are likely to be of use in our gradual discovery of facts which lie deeper still. — William Crookes

How can you seek God if he's already here? It's like standing n the ocean and crying out, 'I want to get wet.' You want to get over the line to God. It turns out he was always there." Francisco's eyes began to gleam. "Grace comes to those who stop struggling. When it really sinks in that there's nothing you can do to find God, he suddenly appears. That's the deepest mystery, the only one that counts — Deepak Chopra

Voice acting is very different from live-action. You only have one tool to convey emotion. You can't sell a line with a look. It's all about your vocal instrument. — Felicia Day