Question What Makes Quotes & Sayings

Who the fuck are you? Davy, were you on a fucking date?" Kurt wasn't sure how to express the anger coursing through him without an assault charge, and even though the asshole was no longer kissing or touching Davy, he was getting more irate.

"What the fuck Kurt?"

Ripping his mouth away, Davy panted. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"Kissing you." Or perhaps devouring.

"What makes it okay for you to kiss me and not Andrew?" The words weren't a simple question, but a sneering mockery. Kurt's anger returned full force and his hands moved to Davy's hair, yanking his mouth back within easy reach. "You're mine," he snarled before shoving his tongue back in Davy's mouth. — K.C. Burn

When Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it. — John Locke

I'm serious," I say. "I don't want to lose him."
"Then maybe you should go away for a little bit. After all, absence makes the heart grow horny, right?"
"That's not exactly how the saying goes."
"But it should, because you know it's true. If you go away for a couple of days, Ben won't know what to do with himself."
"Maybe you're right," I say, tossing more candy corn into my mouth (therapy in a bag).
"Damn straight, I am. Now, the biggest question: Can I fit into your suitcase? Because I really don't feel like staying here by myself. — Laurie Faria Stolarz

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. — Richard Ford

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. — Dan Wilbur

When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume? — Eleanor Catton

don't fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine - and what's more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I'm free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth. — Kamel Daoud

Without a doubt, priority No. 1 is always my family. Whether it's my children or my husband or even my girlfriends who are also my family, I put them first no matter what. And it makes it easy to then juggle everything else because it's never a question. — Vanessa Lachey

Ask me anything, Bailey challenged.
What are you scared of? The question got out of Tibby's mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. I'm afriad of time, she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time, she clarified. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that eerybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.
Tibby looked at her in disbelief. She was struck by this new side of Bailey, this philosophical-beyond-her-years Bailey. Did cancer make you wise? Did those chemicals and X rays supercharge her twelve-year-old brain? — Ann Brashares

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin ... if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live? ... then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... — Tom Stoppard

I have a desire to help animals, the question of whether it makes financial sense, it's my money and I get to do what I want with it. It's an expensive hobby I picked up at the end of my life. — Sam Simon

Scientists have been trying to find an answer to the ancient question: What is it that makes a woman decide whether or not she's gonna roll in the hay with a guy she's met. And I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you all on this one, since although being a woman, it's been a mystery to me as well.
Yet one thing I know: the decision is made within the very first minute a girl meets a boy. No exemptions. — Gina Wings

Hana?" Lena says softly. "Are you okay?"
That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax me at once, and the tears they've been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath regulator's nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I don't even know what she's saying, and I don't care. JUst having her here - solid, real, on my side - makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that I've missed her, and that I've been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick — Lauren Oliver

I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us? — Steve Toltz

Let a man question the inspiration of the Scriptures and a curious, even monstrous, inversion takes place: thereafter he judges the Word instead of letting the Word judge him; he determines what the Word should teach instead of permitting it to determine what he should believe; he edits, amends, strikes out, adds at his pleasure; but always he sits above the Word and makes it amenable to him instead of kneeling before God and becoming amenable to the Word. — A.W. Tozer

What makes journalist so fascinating, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like? — John F. Kennedy

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power argues that if corporations have 'person hood' under the law, then it makes sense to question what kind of people they are. He posits that corporations behave with all the classical signs of sociopathy: they are inherently amoral, they elevate their own interests above all others', and they disregard moral and sometimes legal limits on their behavior in pursuit of their own advancement. Organizations of this type would thrive under the leadership of people who have the same traits: sociopaths. — M.E. Thomas

The problem with wanting is that is makes us weak. How right he was. I'd wanted so badly to belong somewhere, anywhere. I'd been so eager to please him, so proud to keep his secrets. But I'd never bothered to question what he might really want, what his true motives might be. I'd been too busy imagining myself by his side, the savior of Ravka, most treasured, most desired, like some kind of queen. — Leigh Bardugo

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark. — James Rollins

In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. — Rollo May

Holmes," I asked as we stepped into the street, "I realise the question sounds sophomoric, but do you find that there are aspects of yourself with which you feel most comfortable? I only ask out of curiosity; you needn't feel obliged to answer." He offered me his arm and, formally, I took it. "'Who am I?' you mean." He smiled at the question and gave what was at first glance a most oblique answer. "Do you know what a fugue is?" "Are you changing the subject?" "No." I thought in silence for some distance before his answer arranged itself sensibly in my mind. "I see. Two discrete sections of a fugue may not appear related, unless the listener has received the entire work, at which time the music's internal logic makes clear the relationship. — Laurie R. King

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it? — Joss Whedon

In one way or another, almost every twentysomething client I have wonders, 'Will things work out for me?' The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twentysomething life so difficult, but it is also what makes twentysomething action so possible and so necessary. It's unsettling to not know the future and, in a way, even more daunting to consider that what we are doing with our twentysomething lives might be determining it. — Meg Jay

I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now ... if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period. — Jodi Picoult

That doesn't make any sense."

"Nothing makes any sense anymore. Like, why am I talking to you? Why am I telling you this when you don't care?"

This question, at least, I knew the answer to. "But that's why you're telling me." I knew it was true. If we'd had the opportunity to deliver our confessions to anyone who actually cared about their contents, there was no way either of us would've opened our mouths. Sharing revelations is easier when it doesn't matter.

She was quiet. I heard other girls' voices in the background, high, wordless streams of conversation, followed by the hiss of running water, and then silence again. "Okay," she said.

"Okay, what?" I asked.

"Okay, maybe you can call me. Sometime. Now you have my number."

I didn't even have time to say bye before she hung up. — Maggie Stiefvater

It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude ... — Michel Foucault

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness - one where we feel our best and perform our best - it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. — Steven Kotler

The voice is certainly important and you can hear if it's beautiful or not, it's the gods who decide; it's more a question of what you do with the voice, which is the mysterious element. It's the personality behind the voice which makes the artist. The voice is a gift of God, but if you're not able to use this gift, what's left? Nothing but a beautiful voice, without nuance or colour. — Cecilia Bartoli

If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as a string of unrelated events, then the question doesn't come up. — Missy Mazzoli

Next time I will ... "
"From now on I will ... "
- What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow? — Hugh Prather

The earth is not our home. We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia
should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive a pardon, let alone the sacrifice of human lives, for this original sin - a capital crime in reverse (very much in the same way that reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual's death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: "What are we still doing in this horrible place? — Thomas Ligotti

He was living, breathing poetry. Not love poetry, but the poetry which tears out your heart, rips it to shreds, pushes it back into your chest, and makes you question what the hell just obliterated your soul. — Tillie Cole

(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks
even pre-philosophically
is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens. — Rebecca Goldstein

I wasnt looking for anything when I found you & it somehow made me question what I wanted, was i ready for love? I don't think anyone is ever ready, but when someone makes you feel alive again it's kind of worth the risk ... — Nikki Rowe

Even in the darkest and most cruel person, there is still a kernel of good. And within the most perfect champion, there is darkness. The question is, will one give in to the dark or the light? It's something we decide with every choice we make, every day that we exist. What might not be evil to you could be evil to someone else. Knowing this makes us powerful even without magic. — Morgan Rhodes

Soldier on guard says they've identified "someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost". The other soldier, in the lookout, says "A girl about ten," but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[ ... ]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [ ... ]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to "if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?" [ ... ] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us. — Selma Dabbagh

We're all going to keep telling love stories, we're all going to tell hero stories. It's all a question of what your own thumbprint, your own DNA, is, and what it brings to the table that makes it unique. — Andrew Stanton

What makes a terrorist? Are the drivers primarily political or economic? Princeton economist Alan Krueger has made a great study of this question ... What Makes a Terrorist lacks a question mark. That's because Krueger, marshaling persuasive statistics and analysis, comes down firmly on the side of politics, noting most terrorists are middle-class and well-educated. — Thomas P.M. Barnett

To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis. Here the tragedians speak to us with no uncertain voice. The great tragedies themselves offer the solution to the problem they propound. It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows. Endow them with a greater or as great a potentiality of pain and our foremost place in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. What do outside trappings matter, Zenith or Elsinore? Tragedy's preoccupation is with suffering. But, — Edith Hamilton

There's something about you, Valkyrie. I'm not quite sure what it is. I look at you and ... "
"And you're reminded of yourself when you were my age?"
"Hmm? Oh, no, what I was going to say is there's something about you that is really annoying, and you never do what you're told, and sometimes I question your intelligence, but even so I'm going to train you, because I like having someone follow me around like a little puppy. It makes me feel good about myself. — Derek Landy

No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy. — Paulo Coelho

We ought to be able to persuade on opposite sides of a question; as also we ought in the case of arguing by syllogism: not that we should practice both, for it is not right to persuade to what is bad; but in order that the bearing of the case may not escape us, and that when another makes an unfair use of these reasonings, we may be able to solve them. — Aristotle.

The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop. — P. J. O'Rourke

Many ask what difference does it make whether man believes in a God or not.
It makes a big difference.
It makes all the difference in the world.
It is the difference between being right and being wrong; it is the difference between truth and surmises - facts or delusion.
It is the difference between the earth being flat, and the earth being round.
It is the difference between the earth being the center of the universe, or a tiny speck in this vast and uncharted sea of multitudinous suns and galaxies.
It is the difference in the proper concept of life, or conclusions based upon illusion.
It is the difference between verified knowledge and the faith of religion.
It is a question of Progress or the Dark Ages. — Joseph Lewis

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous. — Neil Gaiman

Historiology, always understood in its claim to possess the character of modern science, is a constant avoidance of history. Yet even in this avoidance, it still maintains a relation to history, and that makes historiology and the historiologist bivalent. If history is not explained historiologically and calculated in terms of a particular image for the specific ends of supporting a position and imparting a conviction, if history is instead placed back into the uniqueness of its inexplicability, and if, through this inexplicability, all historiological bustle and all the opinions and beliefs that arise from it are placed into question and into decision with respect to themselves, then what is being carried out is what could be called historical thinking. — Martin Heidegger

Almost in the same way as earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to be able to master physics; we may say that young people today are suddenly in the position that ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that for its mastery an exceptional degree of understanding is required. For it is not enough any longer to be able to play the game well; but the question is again and again: what sort of game is to be played now anyway? — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn't feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That's my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story. — Jennifer Salaiz

When there's an authentic mystery, as opposed to just a question being asked, that's what makes you lean forward. — J.J. Abrams

Do
you miss a parent you never knew?" he whispered.
Kate considered his question for some time. His voice had held a hoarse urgency that told her there was
something critical about her reply. Why, she couldn't imagine, but something about her childhood clearly
rang a chord within his heart.
"Yes," she finally answered, "but not in the way you would think. You can't really miss her, because you
didn't know her, but there's still a hole in your life - a big empty spot, and you know who was supposed
to fit there, but you can't remember her, and you don't know what she was like, and so you don't know
how she would have filled that hole." Her lips curved into a
sad sort of smile. "Does this make any sense?"
Anthony nodded. "It makes a great deal of sense — Julia Quinn

You know, I've wondered if it's more painful to lose someone you love to death or to lose someone you love because she no longer loves you back." "I don't know," I said. "On the surface, it seems an easy question. It should be so much easier to lose someone who doesn't love you, because why would you want to be with someone who doesn't want you? But rejection's not an east road. A part of you always wonders what makes you so unlovable. — Richard Paul Evans

Calvin: Dear Santa, before I submit life to your scrutiny, I demand to know who made YOU the matter of my fate?! Who are YOU to question my behavior, HUH??? What gives you the right?!
Hobbes: Santa makes the toys, so he gets to decide who to give them to.
Calvin: Oh. — Bill Watterson

As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflective
about their activity do not instinctively ask the question 'Is it
reasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shape
rationality had to take. We have noted how 'unreasonable', in
classical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out to
be. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth-
seeking question takes the form, 'What makes you think that
might be the case? — John Polkinghorne

If you agree with an outside person's interpretation of you, that's a happy bit of affirmation. It means you're communicating externally what you believe to be true internally. If you disagree, it helps clarify how you understand yourself. And maybe makes you productively question how to improve your communication skills. — Heidi Julavits

I think about this for a long time, secretly hoping he forgets he ever asked the question. His mind has a way of wandering, but something in the way he looks at me says he's not forgetting anything now, he's holding on tight to that thought, and he's waiting for my answer. I don't know what makes a man great. I've never thought about it before. But at a time like this "I don't know" just won't do. This is an occasion one rises to, and so I make myself as light as possible and wait for a lift. "I — Daniel Wallace

She asked me what made me do such a thing. That is an awkward question because I often can't tell what makes me do things. Sometimes I do them just to find out what I feel like doing them. And sometimes I do them because I want to have some exciting things to tell my grandchildren. — L.M. Montgomery

You've really earned it, he thought. You've played a losing game and actually enjoyed the idea of losing, almost like them freaks who get their kicks when they're banged around. You've heard tell about that type, the ones who pay the girls to burn them with lit matches, or put on high heeled shoes and step on their faces. That kind of weird business. And it's always the same question. What makes them that way? But you never took the trouble to figure the answer. What the hell, it was their private worry, it didn't concern you. — David Goodis

Science" as a prejudice. - It follows from the laws of order of rankle that scholars, insofar as they belong to the spiritual middle class, can never catch sight of the really great problems and question marks; moreover, their courage and their eyes simply do not reach that far - and above all, their needs which led them to become scholars in the first place, their inmost assumptions and desires that things might be such and such, their fears and hopes all come to rest and are satisfied too soon. Take, for example, that pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer. What makes him "enthuse" in his way and then leads him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability - that eventual reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" about which he raves - almost nauseates the likes of us; a human race that adopted such Spencerian perspectives as its ultimate perspectives would seem to us worthy of contempt, of annihilation! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Because the observer's only freedom is the choice of which question to pose (Shall I look up at the sky?), it is here that the mind of the observer has a chance to affect the dynamics of the brain. An examination of the mathematics, Stapp argued, shows that "the conscious intentions of a human being [reflected in the choices he makes about what question to put to nature] can influence the activities of his brain....Each conscious event picks out from the multitude of...possibilities that comprise the quantum brain the subensemble that is compatible with the conscious experience." The physical event reduces the state of the brain to that branch of it that is compatible with the particular experience or observation. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations. — Peter Singer

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us. — Eudora Welty

Compassion- which means, literally, "to suffer with"- is the way to the truth that we are most ourselves, not when we differ from others, but when we are the same. Indeed the main spiritual question is not, "What difference do you make?" but "What do you have in common?" It is not "excelling" but "serving" that makes us most human. It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Indeed, the real question is not, "Why greatness?" but "What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?" If you have to ask the question, "Why should we try to make it great? Isn't success enough?" then you're probably engaged in the wrong line of work. — James C. Collins

There's kind of a cool feel that happens every now and then. I guess that feel is the thing that makes the score its own score. But, I don't know exactly what that is. So, it's hard for me to answer that question. — Danny Elfman

In the classic children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes "real" because of a child's love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature. — Sherry Turkle

When somebody is flying airplanes into buildings and killing innocent people in the name of God, it makes you question why do they have that interpretation and somebody else has another interpretation, and how many people of Muslim faith would agree with that, and what are the different aspects of different people's religions that is so divisive, rather than being unifying? — Madeleine Albright

What makes a good book?
Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time. — Jane Yolen

How could you miss it? Just the sound of her voice makes my chest feel tight, my face gets hot and my mouth goes dry whenever she's near. It's getting so bad, all I have to do is see her and I'm already thinking, 'What does she want? What can I do for her?' She's got some power over me, there's no question, and what else could it be?
~Razo — Shannon Hale

Create desire. After all, desire needed no explanation. The heart wants what it wants, most people would say. But what makes the heart want in the first place? No one ever asked that question. — Tony Bertauski

How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it her suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father's actions. I feel an obligation to right my father's wrong. But why? Shouldn't my father's welfare come first? His welfare is my welfare. How does one weigh love for a parent against the urge to help someone in need? I feel like what is right should be done no matter what. This lack of doubt makes me feel inhuman. But it is not a question of my head for once. I hear the right note. I recognize the wrong note. Maybe the right action is a lake like this one, green and quiet and deep. — Francisco X Stork

In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant - what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs - and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

If we were all looking for something 'easy come and easy go', then all of our lives would be easy. The problem is that we look for something real, don't we? And it is this longing for what is real, that makes finding the right person to be the most difficult task in the world. You can marry someone and promise the rest of your life to the person, only to find out later that this person makes you feel lonely. If we had no innate longing for true love and for true partnership, then none of us would have any problems! Therefore, the most frightening question to ponder upon, is, 'what if true love does not exist; what if the real stuff isn't real at all?' In such a case, life would be meaningless. I suppose I would rather believe in love relentlessly, than live in this world meaninglessly. — C. JoyBell C.

Either you're lying again or you're as stupid as you look. You ditch me first year for him when you were a girl. You ditch me second year for him when you were a boy. You lie and cheat and steal for him while he treats you like crap, and I help you and care for you and worship you like a queen while you treat me like crap! What does that guy have that I don't? What makes him so lovable and me so unworthy? Know how many times I've asked myself that question, Sophie? How many times I've studied him like a book or sat in the dark picturing every last shred of him, trying to understand why he's more of a person than me? Or why the moment he's gone, you take a ring from the School Master - or Raphael or Michelangelo or Donatello or whatever you want to call him to make yourself feel better - just because he looks like you want him to look and says what you want to hear? When you could have had someone who's honest and kind and real? — Soman Chainani

What makes humans valuable in the first place? Science can't answer that question because science deals only with things we can measure empirically though the senses. If you want an answer, you'll have to do metaphysics. — Scott Klusendorf

Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse? Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering? Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. What makes you say that? I replied. — Plato

I hold him close, and don't even question the love I feel for him. I can't. It's heavy and palpable. It's everything I have been missing and makes up for all the time I had been avoiding what was in me. What I was. What I am. — E.K. Blair

Anyhow, there'll be plenty of jam in heaven, that's one comfort, he said complacently.
Perhaps there will ... if we want it, she said, But what makes you think so?
Why, it's in the catechism, said Davy.
Oh, no, there is nothing like that in the catechism, Davy.
But I tell you there is, persisted Davy. It was in that question Marilla taught me last Sunday. Why should we love God? It says, Because he makes preserves, and redeems us. Preserves is just a holy way of saying jam. — L.M. Montgomery

No great question will ever be settled in dollars and cents. Great questions must be settled on moral grounds and the tests of what makes free men. — Herbert Hoover

What makes 'good tape'? That is the question that has consumed my life for the past 20 years, and I have an answer for you — Alex Blumberg

Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see.
All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them.
What is a sentence mostly what is a sentence. With them a sentence is with us about us all about us we will be willing with what a sentence is. A sentence is that they cannot be carefully there is a doubt about it.
The great question is can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence. Who calls him to come which he did.
... What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value. — Gertrude Stein

By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: "What makes it move?" The proposed answer - "Energy makes it move" - enraged him. That — James Gleick

I don't yell back at my mother. When I'm angry or scared or upset, I don't yell. I stay quiet. I've seen how she is, how she would get with Kent and with me and with other people, life if someone at the pharmacy got in the wrong line or asked too long a question, or if someone on the bus accidentally bumped her. I've watched her my whole life, the way people react to her. It doesn't actually help you get what you want, yelling and being like that. It only makes people think bad of you. — Sara Zarr

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war. — Carson McCullers

Second, clarify what you really don't want. This is the key to framing the and question. Think of what you are afraid will happen to you if you back away from your current strategy of trying to win or stay safe. What bad thing will happen if you stop pushing so hard? Or if you don't try to escape? What horrible outcome makes game-playing an attractive and sensible option? — Kerry Patterson

The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste? — Dave Barry

Whats it like, to be in love? The servants speak of it when they think I can't hear. I only wonder."
Lia turned around and tossed the cushion back to the chaise lounge. She found she didn't have an answer to Mari's question. She couldn't say what she'd heard her sisters always say, It's thrilling, or It's bliss, or He makes me so happy. She raised her head and swallowed the strangeness in her throat, walking to the fireplace, to the pianoforte, pressing a finger against the honey-buffed wood.
"It is," she said at last, "the most terrible feeling in the entire world."
And she meant it.
"Yes," the girl agreed, examining her face. "I think it must be. — Shana Abe

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity. — Peter Singer

Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- ... -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail. — George Akerlof

Q What makes a question "beautiful"? A beautiful question reframes an issue and forces you to look at it in a different way. It challenges assumptions and is really ambitious. Often, these questions begin with the phrase "How might we..." They have a magnetic quality that makes people want to answer them, to talk about them, to work on them. They make the imagination race. The Polaroid camera came out of a 3-year-old girl's asking, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" That's a beautiful question. — Anonymous

Another question I am frequently asked is, "What do you mean by recovery?" It has taken me a while to answer that one. I had been depending on other people's definitions of recovery until I developed one that worked for me (just as you must come to one that makes sense for you.) Mine is simple. For me, it is about freedom.
Recovery is the freedom to make choices in your life that aren't determined by the abuse.
The specific choices will be different for each of you; the freedom to choose is your birthright. — Mike Lew

I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question — George W. Bush

What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question. — Dean Kamen

When we prefer to believe something, we may approach the relevant evidence by asking ourselves,"what evidence is there to support this belief?" ... Note that this question is not unbiased: It directs our attention to supportive evidence and away from information that might contradict the desired conclusion. Because it is almost always possible to uncover some supportive evidence, the asymmetrical way we frame the question makes us overly likely to become convinced of what we hope to be true. — Thomas Gilovich

What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question. — Michael Crichton

I really believe that 'Saw' makes us stop and think and question our motives and what we're doing here on Earth. — Betsy Russell

What followed was a great treat for me. This was Irish traditional music as I had hoped to see and hear it, spontaneous and from the heart, and not produced for the sake of the tourist industry. As I sat there with my pint in my hand, enjoying the jigs and the reels, I watched the joy in the player's faces and in those around them who tapped their feet and applauded enthusiastically. Music the joybringer. No question of being paid, or any requirement to perform for a certain amount of time. Just play for as long as it makes you feel good. This was self expression, not performance. Someone would begin playing a tune and the fellow musicians would listen to it once through, hear how it went and join in when they felt comfortable, until, on its last run through, it was being played with gusto by the entire ensemble. This process provided each piece with the dynamic of a natural crescendo which could almost have been orchestrated. — Tony Hawks

I landed about one a year. Just enough to make me question the gas money and all the driving in rush hour. When you audition for commercials, it's a lot of driving. What I netted wasn't exactly matching the hours I was putting in. I figured I'm not a face that makes people want to buy Lysol. Then I auditioned for Progressive. — Stephanie Courtney

What I can't stand is that arrogance of yours," said Hatsumi in a soft voice. "Whether you sleep with other women or not is beside the point. I've never really been angry with you for sleeping around, have I?"
"You can't even call what I do sleeping around.It's just a game. Nobody gets hurt," said Nagasawa.
"I get hurt," said Hatsumi. "Why am I not enough for you?"
Nagasawa kept silent for a moment and swirled the whisky in his glass. "It's not that you're not enough for me. That's another phase, another question. It's just a hunger I have inside me. If I've hurt you, I'm sorry. But it's not a question of whether or not you're enough for me. I can only live with that hunger. That's the kind of man I am. That's what makes me me. There's nothing I can do about it, don't you see? — Haruki Murakami

There is a little narrowing to his eyes at the end of it that makes me understand that this is a test. Whether or not I'm brave enough to go into the stall with Corr after yesterday morning, after I've had time to think about what happened. The thought of it makes my pulse trip. The question is not if I trust Corr. The question is if I trust Sean. — Maggie Stiefvater

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?' — Gina Rodriguez