Preferable To Me Quotes & Sayings

Once this had been the life I'd wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn't believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I'd never known anything else...
My mother had to know I was unhappy. But it didn't matter: all she cared about was that I was her Macy again, the one she'd come to depend on, always within earshot or reach. I came to work early, sat up straight at my desk and endured the monotony of answering phones and greeting potential homebuyers with a smile on my face. After dinner, I spent my hour and a half of free time alone, doing accepted activities. When I came home afterwards, my mother w ould be waiting for me, stickingher head out of her office to verify that, yes. I was just where I was supposed to be. And I was. I was also miserable.
~Macy, pg 306 — Sarah Dessen

Defeat appears to me preferable to total Inaction. — John Adams

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. — Roger Zelazny

For me, coming to work and laughing is so much more preferable than coming to work and having to cry over a corpse or something. That's a drag. — Busy Philipps

Faith to you was more clay than mortar, and if you could interpret the gospel, so could I. So should anyone. If God wasn't mad at you for drinking wine and chain-smoking and being a homosexual, he might forgive me for stealing a kitten and trying to hide it under a blanket in the back of our station wagon. Certainly that God was preferable to others who wouldn't let you in Heaven if you said bad words or drank Mountain Dew. — Mary-Louise Parker

There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time.

Bacon is also an acceptable restorative. — Michelle Franklin

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable. — Clive Barker

We've been wed more than a month. Since it appears you mean to stay, I might as well give you leave to call me by my christian name. It is preferable, at any rate, to 'clodpole. — Loretta Chase

There is always this quarrel about what is preferable: the straight, naturalistic, epic storytelling or the modernistic, disjointed, slightly hermetic one. To me it does not matter, as long as it's good. I like both kinds. Although the common reader seems to prefer the first, which is to be expected, and who would blame her? — Per Petterson

After seeing how many people waste their lives, their whole lives (tongues wagging, wagging, wagging, and all the inevitable consequences), silence seems preferable to me, and more necessary than ever. And I well understand, Lord, why we have to give an account of all our idle words. — Josemaria Escriva

I'm enough of an optimist and a patriot to believe that in U.S. you have a lot of opportunity and can do pretty much anything you want in some form. For me, the idea of failure is far preferable to the idea of regret. — Michael Ian Black

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. — Donald Hall

It might have been preferable," Eddis admitted, dryly, "if you had thrown off your chains of bondage solely for love of me. It would certainly have been more flattering." Standing so near to him, she was looking up into his face and watching it closely. "I am willing to accept, however, that we are real people, not characters in a play. We do not, all of us, need to be throwing inkwells. If we are compatible with one another, is that not sufficient?"
"Were I a king in more than just name, it would be all, all I dreamed of," said Sounis, and it was Eddis who blushed.
"You wish to wait, then, until you are confirmed as Sounis?"
"If ... "
"When," said Eddis, firmly.
"Yes," said Sounis, "then. — Megan Whalen Turner

But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm's length or farther away.
I understood those mermaids.I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown. — Sarah Dessen

Sometimes I get lost in the rhythm of the paddling. I even count the strokes it takes to get me to a point of land, The play of the muscles in one's arms and shoulders, and the feel of palm against worn wood, are preferable to glancing at a speedometer — Richard Proenneke

Realities disguised as symbols are, for me, new realities that are immeasurably preferable. I make an effort to take them at their word. To grasp, to carry out the diktat of images to the letter. — Claude Cahun

We have developed a corollary that is neither love nor forgiveness - namely, tolerance. The problem with this is clear: I can "tolerate" you without it costing me anything very much. I can shrug my shoulders, walk away, and leave you to do your own thing. That, admittedly, is preferable to my taking you by the throat and shaking you until you agree with me. But it is certainly not love. — N. T. Wright

There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you're a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it's about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful. — Diriye Osman

At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction) — Michel Parry

Regardless of nationality, all men are brothers. God is "our Father who art in heaven." The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is unconditional and inexorable ... The lowly Nazarene taught us the doctrine of non-resistance, and so convinced was he of the soundness of that doctrine that he sealed his belief with death on the cross ... When human law conflicts with Divine law, my duty is clear. Conscience, my infallible guide, impels me to tell you that prison, death, or both, are infinitely preferable to joining any branch of the Army. — Ben Salmon

It's just like a big chunk of me has been ripped out and I'm not quite whole. I don't think I'm over dramatizing it, and I'm certainly deserving of it, but the way I feel now, it's just like you're talking to someone who is terminally ill and facing death. Death would be preferable to what I am facing. I just feel like imploding upon myself, you know? I just want to go somewhere and disappear. — Jeffrey Dahmer

Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order. — Roland Barthes

One day, a pretty, fresh-faced young lady - intelligent and sincerely concerned - asked me if abortion wasn't preferable to making a young, unmarried girl have a baby she didn't want and which would, therefore, grow up unloved and probably turn out to be a criminal. I gave an answer which apparently she hadn't considered. I told her there were literally millions of people in this country who wanted but could not have children and who waited eagerly, sometimes for years, to adopt the baby she had described. — Ronald Reagan

It's been my experience that people always assume that generalized anxiety disorder is preferable to social anxiety disorder, because it sounds more vague and unthreatening, but those people are totally wrong. For me, having generalized anxiety disorder is basically like having all of the other anxiety disorders smooshed into one. Even the ones that aren't recognized by modern science. Things like birds-will-probably-smother-me-in-my-sleep anxiety disorder and I-keep-crackers-in-my-pocket-in-case-I-get-trapped-in-an-elevator anxiety disorder. Basically I'm just generally anxious about f***ing everything. In fact, I suspect that's how they came up with the name. — Jenny Lawson

Excerpted From Chapter One
I decided staying put in the alley was preferable to keeping the dead guy company, so I went outside and lit a Lucky Strike. The night air had gotten damper and chillier during the short time I was in the warehouse, or maybe it was just me.
Wisps of lacy fog were now sinking into the alley, and a skulking cat in search of dinner moved slowly along the opposite wall until he noticed me. He scurried off in a furry blur, eager to be far away from the evil invading his domain. The cat had better sense than me and I wished I could follow his example. — H.P. Oliver

It is preferable to have a virgin mind than a virgin body. Each is good if each be possible; if it be not possible, let me be chaste, not to man but to God. — Ambrose Of Milan

I don't really differentiate between different genres: if there's a good part going, I'll go after it, and it's preferable to me if it's something I haven't done before. — Aidan Gillen

He grew vexed and asked if poverty and hardships with freedom, were not preferable to our treatment in slavery ... No, I will not stay. Let them bring me back. We don't die but once. — Harriet Jacobs

Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that makes me wonder why I ever agreed to speak at all; the Tomb and the Conqueror Worm seem preferable to delivering the stupid and piffling speech I have so carefully prepared. — Robertson Davies

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing
what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies. — Donald Richie

Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn't give up the ass for any reason. I can't, she said. I can't make any mistakes ... Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don't get in anywhere, she said. You'd still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable. — Junot Diaz