Room Ideas Quotes & Sayings

Never put a lid on God. You can give God a thimble and ask for a quart. It won't work. Your plans, your projects, your dreams have to always be bigger than you, so God has room to operate. I want you to get good ideas, crazy ideas, extravagant ideas. Nothing is too much for The Lord to do - accent on 'The Lord'. — Mother Angelica

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. — Alan Moore

I write all the time, even if it means recording in the hotel room. I write on the plane, anywhere, anytime I'm inspired or have ideas. — Flo Rida

In the United States we have all across this country, we have dozens of Halakha courts, in which particularly observant Jews can take these issues of family law to an orthodox Court and have that judge, judge for them. As long as the courts don't violate the laws of the land and as long as there's a room for appeal should one or two parties disagree with the verdict, I don't see how this would have anything to do with being incompatible with what we refer to as Western ideas of democracy. — Mark Durie

The stupidest person in the room might have the best idea. — Joss Whedon

He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. — Edith Wharton

Alma had grown as tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders ... This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile
at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.
It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

I feel as though, if I were to extend my hand just a little toward the pool where the ideas ferment, I could grab at the idea and pull it out of the pool and onto the floor where ideas must stand before the jury of the brain. There, it must present itself, still from the pool, and a bit shivery because new ideas are not given a towel to dry off with, towels being reserved for proven theories; new ideas are simply pulled and stood up, and asked to explain themselves - not a very pleasant thing really, which is why so many people go into the room where the pool is. The exercise is exhausting not to mention a bit difficult to watch, if you are at all a sympathetic creature. What was my idea, anyways? — Emilie Autumn

I couldn't figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem. But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you could se it made me think about all the ways I'd seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of ways to see her. I'd been focused on what had become of her, but now with my head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was who I was looking for. If "What is the grass?" has such a complicated answer, I thought, so, too, must "Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?" Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos. — John Green

Thank you for all your guidance and wisdom, for setting the bar so much higher than I thought I could reach, and for giving me plenty of room to run with my own ideas. You've been the best teacher I've ever had. — Lisa Genova

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Norman Cousins

In doing zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships. Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus having stopped the various functions of your mind, five up even the idea of becoming a Buddha. — Dogen

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance. — Erma Bombeck

The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American magazine contains an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room. Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. - Maxwell Maltz — David Allen

Teenagers don't know what love is. They have mixed-up ideas. They go for a drive and the boy runs out of gas and they smooch a little and the girl says she loves him. That isn't love. Love is when you are married twenty-five years, smooching in your living room and he runs out of gas and she says she still loves him. That's love. — Norm Crosby

If you have a good idea, use it so that you will not only accomplish something, but so that you can make room for new ones to flow into you. — Ming-Dao Deng

Occasionally, noticing an exact identity of thought between what I felt but could not articulate and the clearly expressed idea of a writer, I was so carried away by emotion that, dropping the book, I would stand up and pace the room for a while to compose myself before continuing to read. In this way my mind was moulded by degrees as much by my own inborn ideas about the nature of things, developed by the exercise of reason in the healthy atmosphere of literature, as by the influence of the great thinkers whose ideas I imbibed from their works. — Gopi Krishna

Convinced that their own ideas were the key to the future of the world, that the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of their own doctrinal struggles, the Russian intelligentsia divided up the world into the forces of 'progress' and 'reaction', friends and enemies of the people's cause, leaving no room for doubters in between. Here were the origins of the totalitarian world-view. Although neither would have liked to admit it, there was much in common between Lenin and Tolstoy. — Orlando Figes

I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin ... — Vincent Van Gogh

This religion gives you goals which are outside of reality. It enriches your fantasy life with ugliness. It fills you with ideas of guilt over the most common human experiences
usually related to sex. In this room, right now, each of you, in your own lives, has agonized over the fact that you have masturbated. Masturbation isn't sinful. If it feels good
do it. You have my blessing, and you yourself know how it relaxes you. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet. — Mary Midgley

Trees, little animals, a multitude of insects were sharing their dreams with me. There we all were, dreaming in chorus, like a crowd, in a tiny room, exchanging ideas and smells and caresses. I remember I was a spider advancing toward its prey and the fly caught in the web of that spider. I felt flowers blossoming in the sun, breezes carrying pollen. I awoke and was alone. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool, he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats, which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set anything on them ! And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious squares of crochet, which are useful for slipping down the moment you touch them ? How our fathers managed without crochet is the wonder; but I believe some small and feeble substitute existed in their time under the name of 'tatting'. — George Eliot

When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible. — Vicki Goldberg

It's weird: I was in a conference room, shouting out story ideas in the voices of different characters, and it was something I had to learn because I'd never been in that atmosphere. But I think I had a quick learning curve, because this is the job I was supposed to have. — Mindy Kaling

I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction). — Matthea Harvey

Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed. — Neil Peart

It's like when you climb a ladder. When you get to the fourth rung, you may think you are on the highest step and cannot go higher, so you hold on to the fourth rung. But in fact there is a fifth rung; if you want to get to it, you have to be willing to abandon the fourth rung. Ideas and perceptions should be abandoned all the time, to make room for better ideas and truer perceptions. This is why we must always ask ourselves, "Am I sure? — Thich Nhat Hanh

There wasn't even a bed in the room, just a narrow settee where Nina curled up every night. When Kaz had asked Nina why, she'd simply said, "I don't want anyone getting ideas." "A man doesn't need a bed to get ideas, Nina. — Leigh Bardugo

I hate America. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something. — Tony Kushner

I am asked to submit a 2-3 page synopsis to my publisher ahead of time, so by the time I begin writing, I have a fair idea of where the story will begin, the main conflicts, and the basic ending point. But that still leaves plenty of room for changes and discovery along the way. — Julie Klassen

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room. — Fernando Pessoa

I learned what a lot of women have to do is make the guys in the room think it was their idea, and then you back them up. — Bjork

I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room ... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch. — Dan Chaon

To follow Jesus is to pay the cost of discipleship, and then to die to ourselves, to our own interests, our own agendas and reputations. It is to pick up our crosses and count the cost of losing all that contradicts his will and his way - including our reputations before the world, and our standing with the people and in the communities that we once held dear. It is to live before one audience, the audience of One, and therefore to die to all other conflicting opinions and assessments. There is no room here for such contemporary ideas as the looking-glass self, and no consideration here for trivial contemporary obsessions such as one's legacy. — Os Guinness

I like the idea of having a calm, quiet room to work on my [art] while knowing that outside there's noise and a lot happening. It's reassuring to know the 'everyday' continues even though inside the studio you feel so disconnected from it. — Keren Ann

Get five or six of your smartest friends in a room and ask them to rate your idea. — Mark Pincus

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156 — Chuck Klosterman

In a time when everything can be next day and ordered and put on credit and paid for, music to me is promise, all promise, very little realization. It's the promise of walking into a room with a guitar and not being sure you will leave with an idea that will take, not being sure it won't slip away from you. — John Mayer

We are certain that for every one of these rock stars we meet in our daily work, there are dozens or even hundreds more who are doing their best to unseat us from our perch. Maybe all of them will fail, but probably not. Probably, somewhere in a garage, dorm room, lab, or conference room, a brave business leader has gathered a small, dedicated team of smart creatives. Maybe she has a copy of our book, and is using our ideas to help her create a company that will eventually render Google irrelevant. Preposterous, right? Except that, given that no business wins forever, it is inevitable. Some would find this chilling. We find it inspiring. — Eric Schmidt

You'd better take time for 'em, honey, otherwise you'll never grow. You'll be the same at sixty as you are now - then you'll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are. — Harper Lee

Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing ... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle. — Chip Esten

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent — H.L. Mencken

It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.) - not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members. — Ayn Rand

Every productive person you will ever come across believes in routine. Hand on my heart, I haven't yet met one who has found 'flying by the seat of their pants' to be an effective way to go about things. That's because having a routine reduces cognitive load. The more stuff you can do on autopilot, the more room you have for ideas and making stuff happen. Having — Kelly Exeter

Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack. — Doris Lessing

[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. (41) — Don DeLillo

When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it. — Vince Clarke

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life. — Chuck Klosterman

In order to make room for the new (whether it's new clothes or new thoughts and ideas), we must release the old and the outworn. — Louise Hay

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it. — Flannery O'Connor

The idea was that teachers need help from experts, but new ideas stick when teachers can also learn from one another and have room to tailor training to meet the specific needs of their schools and classrooms. — Anonymous

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. — Sherry Turkle

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract. — David Lynch

Don't wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary 'what if' scenarios dreamed up in a conference room. — Naveen Jain

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas. — Ray Bradbury

During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something]. — Woody Allen

It's important to know what you think, my dear, or else you will be so hemmed in by other people's ideas and opinions, you won't have room for your own. — Karen Cushman

The creative process is not like a situation where you get struck by a single lightning bolt. You have ongoing discoveries, and there's ongoing creative revelations. Yes, it's really helpful to be marching toward a specific destination, but, along the way, you must allow yourself room for your ideas to blossom, take root, and grow. — Carlton Cuse

When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down. — Jay-Z

The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new conception. The idea of force governing the world, of pre-established law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other in equilibrium. — Peter Kropotkin

I think time is a constraint to destroy and then reinvent. If you give me a constraint, I'll accept it. But I always try to move it around, or to readapt it. Ecco! If you lock me in a room, well I'll go out through the window! I always remember Achille Castiglioni, one of my mentors, and he always said that in industrial design you have the idea, the fantasy, the concepts - that's the marmalade! - but the constraint of the brief is the bread. You need both in order to find structure for your ideas. — Patricia Urquiola

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about. — Michelangelo Antonioni

One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very descriptive picture of who the characters are while still letting us have freedom to put in our own ideas. — Richard Harmon

Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way. — Harvey Keitel

Your words are unique to you.
A God given gift of thoughts and ideas that only you can share with the world. Share on! There is room on these shelves for your book!
B.Villareal 2014 — Becky Villareal

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. — Stephen Jay Gould

I get very, very anxious on the set. I have a thousand ideas and I don't censor myself. I wind up cutting some of them out in the editing room. I shoot needless footage and then don't use it later on in the process. — Steven Spielberg

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. — Neal Stephenson

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?
They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. — Jane Austen

Augustus: "You probably need some rest."
Me: "I'm okay."
Augustus: "Okay." (Pause.) "What are you thinking about?"
Me: "You."
Augustus: "What about me?"
Me: "'I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.'"
Augustus: "God, you are sexy."
Me: "We could go to your room."
Augustus: "I've heard worse ideas. — John Green

Science is a good thing. News reporters are good things too. But it's never a good idea to put them in the same room. — Scott Adams

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68] — Anne Lamott

The last thing she wanted was to see her friend getting ideas in her head. There was such a lot of room in there for them to bounce around and do damage. — Terry Pratchett

Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas. — Tom Robbins

How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful touch of their ideas? — Jean Baudrillard

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out. — Brian Posehn

I love the idea of literature as a room or series of rooms that allow you to be present as it slowly unfolds itself in all its capacities. — Gregory Allen Howard

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
- Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475 — Norman Cousins

An idea so luminous flashed across her brain that she almost thought the room had leaped into light. — E.F. Benson

You don't want to be the smartest person in the room; you want to be the dumbest in the room. You want to be surrounded by other thinking people who are going to say something that makes you think, "Oh, my God, that's an amazing idea. Why didn't I think of that." — Madonna Ciccone

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity. — Rebecca Miller

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over. — Margot Lee Shetterly

You need to turn your room into a place of power. It's a good idea to have flowers around, candles, incense, you know, happy things. Make your room into a beautiful place and keep it impeccably clean. — Frederick Lenz

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly. — Merilyn Simonds

Information can be harmful when you're not ready for it. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes'] — Richard Walter

I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. — Siri Hustvedt

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. — Howard Zinn

The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it. — Philip Pullman

Father Latour began to tell them about his friendly relations with Protestants in Ohio, but they had not room in their minds for two ideas. — Willa Cather

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine. — Patrick Stewart

I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm not obstructing anyone's access. When I have a crowd I make sure that the crowd makes room for people. I'm an artist who cares about the cultural fabric of New York City. I care about New York as a harbor for street culture - and I care about street culture as a base-level populist diffusion of ideas. And I believe in making those ideas accessible to everyone. — Kalan Sherrard

Smite," she asked softly, "do you have any idea what to say to me in a situation like this?"
"Of course I do," he retorted. "I have plenty of ideas." He met her gaze ruefully. "Of course, they're all wrong, and so I'm totally at sea."
She patted the cushion next to her. He crossed the room and lowered himself down. And then, because he didn't seem inclined to do it himself, she picked up his hand and slid it around her shoulders. — Courtney Milan

My friend had a brilliant idea. This impressed me. It reflected an immense deal of credit on his brain. But when he expressed it,it lost all value, and enjoyed but a commonplace status. My friend blamed this devaluation on the language. "I hate English," he said. So he studied another language. He mastered it so perfectly that there was no room left in his brain for a brilliant idea. Now he has a grudge against words. He refuses to use them. He prefers to shrug or grunt. A new crop of ideas is growing. They show promise of future refinement. — Marvin L. Cohen

To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do. — William Safire

I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer. — Rosanne Cash

There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room. — Ethan Hawke

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information. — Margaret Millar

What is difficult about learning - any kind of learning - is that you have to give up what you know already to make room for the new ideas. Children are much better at it than grownups. — Monica Furlong

Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest.
Hey
what's the gun for? — Eric Foner