Prided Quotes & Sayings

I, who had always prided myself on my ability to accept the fallacy of love, with all my commas, parentheses, and qualified statements, felt love grab me violently by the back of the neck and fling me straight into her arms. This blooming helplessness, which flooded me to my teeth, made me feel a lot of things, but mostly, it made me feel like a girl. — Jay Caspian Kang

Dylan prided himself in the gift of reading women's minds. They were such fickle little creatures, as apt to change their minds as their thongs. — Cat Byrd

Sure...the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meanwhile the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work. — Lionel Shriver

Flaubert prided himself on his frankness; it was indeed brutal. — W. Somerset Maugham

I come from a family who prided themselves, both sides, on memory. And I was told growing up, constantly, that I was born with a really good memory. — Robbie Robertson

I've always prided myself on being myself and trying to stick true to who I am and how I was raised. — Patrick Kane

The hair on the back of Kiara's neck stood up. Did they know about Chris? Since becoming a couple last year, the two worked hard at keeping their relationship under wraps. She wasn't ashamed, just cautious. Copper Road University was a Southern school and certain types of relationships were frowned upon. She kept her love life under wraps out of a love of privacy. She also didn't want it to interfere with becoming a Kappa. While on the national level the organization prided itself on its diverse membership, on the local level everyone may not be so accepting. — LaToya Hankins

Laguna prided itself on being an artist's colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them. — Dean Koontz

Humility is something I've always prided myself on. — Bernie Kosar

Getting shocked was a badge of honor for Woz. He prided himself on being a hardware engineer, which meant — Walter Isaacson

It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction. — Pearl S. Buck

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on. — Eugene Jarecki

I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment. — Jane Smiley

They always prided themselves on looking youthful. "Forty's the new thirty," they'd joke.
Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty's the new one hundred. — Melina Marchetta

It's funny because all through the '80s I didn't do TV and movies very much. I prided myself that I was making a living in the theater. — Charles Kimbrough

It's the one thing that the Devils have always prided themselves on. That comes from recruiting. We try and pick out the players who not only have the on-ice skills, but the off-ice skills too. I think in any job, if you have good people and you work together, you work better. — Gerad Adams

All his life Tyrion had prided himself on his cunning, the only gift the gods had seen fit to give him, and yet this seven-times-damned she-wolf Catelyn Stark had outwitted him at every turn. The — George R R Martin

When the enemy gets to your citadel, your prided epicenter, everything's in play. — Bill Maher

I went to Columbia University because I knew I wanted to go to a school that was academically rigorous. I prided myself on getting good grades, but I also hated it. — Ezra Koenig

In the UK what we've found is that even businesses which prided themselves already on their efficient management find that a really beady-eyed scrutiny of their resource management, with an eye to environmental best-practice and long term sustainability, produce fresh efficiency and fresh savings that actually shock those in the company — Margaret Beckett

Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty
self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken
by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they
considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others
who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided
themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their
righteous judgments. — Radclyffe Hall

Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family
the monkey. — Leo Tolstoy

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn't make Gabriella and me the "mavericks" we'd both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy - a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now - to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there's someone around to inherit the place when the party is over - has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction — Lionel Shriver

I've sort of prided myself on playing characters with conscience. The first way I go about creating a character is looking at that area of conscience. What have they done, and what has it cost. — Lorraine Toussaint

I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong. — Mark Leibovich

He had always prided himself on his ability to bargain, to bluff, to contain his ever-aching heart within the folds of his robes where no one could see his pain and his shame. Unconsciously, he reached up and fisted the little black pearl in his fingers, searching for words, praying to the Almighty for the words that would let him have her. But they would not come.
They were not needed, when the truth was in his eyes. — V.S. Carnes

The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human. — Warren Ellis

What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch. — Jeffrey Eugenides

May I drive?" "You think I'd consider handing over the reins of this remarkable equipage?" He replied with feigned superiority. For generations, the Earls of Blackmoor had prided themselves on having the most current and impressive modes of transportation. The most recent earl was no different, and the brand-new curricle in which they were riding was certain to be the envy of many. "Indeed. I think you'd enjoy the experience of teaching me how." "I've had this curricle for less than a week, Alex. You're not driving." Alex replied with a comic pout, "I shall convince you otherwise, my lord. I warn you." "Indeed? Well you are welcome to try, my lady." He — Sarah MacLean

I prided myself on working as hard as I could, trying to overcome a learning diability. — Jeremy Bonderman

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts. — Stacy Schiff

If nothing else, Prophet prided himself on his ability to be irrational. Everyone was always raving about how being cool, calm, and collected was the best way to be. Prophet found the exact opposite worked most of the time. Tommy — S.E. Jakes

And the slaves prided themselves on their master, saying: 'There is no better lord than ours under the sun. He feeds and clothes us well, and gives us work suited to our strength. He bears no malice, and never speaks a harsh word to any one. He is not like other masters, who treat their slaves worse than cattle: punishing them whether they deserve it or not, and never giving them a friendly word. He wishes us well, does good, and speaks kindly to us. We do not wish for a better life. — Leo Tolstoy

Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled "Me, who does the telling" and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled "Everyone else. — Terry Pratchett

I'm a shepherd, not a sheep, and I've always prided myself on being a leader and not a follower. — Dustin Diamond

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance. — Anthony Hiss

He'd always prided himself on being more civilized than his brothers, but so much for that; he was becoming aroused in a damned sewer. — Larissa Ione

She stood by the bed and stroked her father's hand, knowing how desperately afraid he must feel at this moment. He'd always prided himself on being the kind of man who could be counted on, a man to whom others looked for advice and support. Dependence would wither his spirit, and the thought of that, of her father being diminished or broken, was almost as unbearable as the thought of losing him. — Hillary Jordan

I tried to explain what I thought I was seeing: that the four gospels had, as it were, fallen off the front of the canon of the New Testament as far as many Christians were concerned. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being "biblical." As far as I could see, that word was being used, in an entire Christian tradition, to mean "Pauline." And even there I had questioned whether Paul was really being allowed to speak. That's another story. — N. T. Wright

I've prided myself on being in excellent condition-as good as any man in my profession. Now this doesn't come from sitting around on your rear end. This comes from hard, hard work. — Wilt Chamberlain

I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism. — Kerry Washington

When the nazis came to power, I looked to the universities that prided themselves upon their intellectual freedom, and they failed me. I looked to the German press, which prided itself on the freedom of the press, and it failed me. Until at last the churches stood alone, and that for which I once had little regard earned my respect. — Albert Einstein

But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ. — Michael Chabon

All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He'd prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species. — Nicole Krauss

My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together. — Ruth Reichl

His growing lack of concern for the others hardly surprised him, whereas previously he had prided himself on being considerate. — Franz Kafka

For the entire first part of my career, I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances. — Norman Schwarzkopf

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer and precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsbility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. — Friedrich Hayek

If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven't, tell me, won't you?" This was rather thrilling: Robin prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living. — Robert Galbraith

I don't think you should write a book until you tell the absolute truth. You can't do that until you're 85, and I don't want to live that long. I've always prided myself on knowing when to get off, and I hope it works out that way. — Lucille Ball

When I was very young, I was disgracefully intolerant but when I passed the thirty mark I prided myself on having learned the beautiful lesson that all things were good, and equally good. That, however, was really laziness. Now, thank goodness, I've sorted out what matters and what doesn't. And I'm beginning to be intolerant again. — Gladys Bronwyn Stern

I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once. — Jane Smiley

It is something we have always excelled at and prided ourselves at - the excellences of our stage performance. — James Young

One looks back to what was called a 'wine-party' with a sort of wonder. Thirty lads round a table covered with bad sweetmeats, drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch-- smoking--ghastly headache-- frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco--your guardian, the clergyman, dropping in, in the midst of this--expecting to find you deep in Algebra, and discovering the Gyp administering soda-water.

There were young men who despised the lads who indulged in the coarse hospitalities of wine-parties, who prided themselves in giving recherche little French dinners. Both wine-party-givers and dinner-givers were Snobs. — William Makepeace Thackeray

There are very few comics that understand about exciting the crowd, and that's what I always prided myself on: giving a more confident macho attitude towards delivering material. — Andrew Dice Clay

Kansas has always considered itself a "rock band" - some people might say "symphonic rock band," others might say a "classical rock band," but we've kind've prided ourselves on being a rock band. Kansas rocks. — Phil Ehart

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength. — Gertrude Atherton

My father prided himself on maintaining traditions that were hundreds of years old. You'll feel as if you've stepped back into the eighteenth century."
Her brows lifted in surprise. He could see the wheels turning in her clever brain, but she chose merely to nod, and perversely, though he knew he would not like it, he wanted to know what she was thinking. "Go on. Say it."
"It is nothing. Only - you are very much a man of the nineteenth century."
"You mean you're not surprised I left such a backward place."
"Such a backward place must be crying out for a man like you." Ainsley pushed her windswept hair out of her eyes. — Marguerite Kaye

I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday. — Libba Bray

I have prided myself with striving for objectivity, something many literary-minded critics dismiss as impossible. But in Washington, reporters are practically the only people who actually spend time talking to Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and I find the longer I report in Washington, the mushier and less conclusive my own views are. I like it that way. — Jon Weisman

What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she was in for. Nicola had lived deliciously, but she was promiscuous on principle, as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedom from men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herself on her passionless brilliance in bed. But then the subtle rearrangement, and the abject whisper ... and it poisoned everything, somehow. — Martin Amis

Galen went so far as to assert that no one could be a good doctor unless they were also a philosopher, and he prided himself, with justification, on his own philosophical ability. — Brad Inwood

One is born to be a dancer. No teacher can work miracles, nor will years of training make a good dancer of an untalented pupil. One may be able to acquire a certain technical facility, but no one can ever 'acquire an exceptional talent.' I have never prided myself on having an unusually gifted pupil. A Pavlova is no one's pupil but God's. — George Balanchine

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up. — Tom Lehrer

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk. — Salman Rushdie

I always thought Christians were the weak people. When you can't make it in life then you have to ask God. I really prided myself on being a self-made man. — Paul Henderson

Faith was certain they were breaking several telecommunications laws. Laws that in some states might well count as pornography and probably carried a mandatory prison sentence. Faith was a law abiding citizen. She prided herself on that. She didn't litter, she didn't cheat on her taxes and she gave up her seat for little old ladies and gentlemen on the bus. She'd never even jaywalked.
And she lived in New York for Christ's sake!
But then his hand reached down and fondled his balls. — Amy Andrews

Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport. — Orson Scott Card

While like most men, Sam prided himself on being equipped with a supernatural internal compass that kept him from ever being lost, he'd also learned to concede those rare times when that compass seemed to be temporary disrepair. — Clive Cussler

Here's how I work: It's 2013, and most marketers are operating like it's 2009. I'm always trying to market like it's 2015, but not like it's 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren't practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality. — Gary Vaynerchuk

I've always prided myself in not reveling in past accomplishments and focusing on future achievement, instead. That's been my career motto. — Ichiro Suzuki

The Night Times has prided itself throughout its long history in telling the truth, the whole truth, and as much gossip as it could get away with. — Simon R. Green

He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them ... — Nathaniel Hawthorne

He prided himself on being a man without prejudice, and this itself is a very great prejudice. — Anatole France

The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science. — Adam Leith Gollner