Ruined Lives Quotes & Sayings

If other people do not understand our behavior - so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself - to his reason and his conscience - and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation. — Erich Fromm

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate. — Paz Marquez Benitez

CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives. But I knew CGI was gonna start taking over. — Quentin Tarantino

We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). — Susan Cain

At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). Those who live the most fully realized lives - giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves - tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies. — Susan Cain

Words alone can effect great good as well as evil. A few apt words have swept candidates into office, ended as well as started wars, paved the way for peace and carried with them both hope as well as despair. Words alone have ruined lives, but have also brought forth healing. It is well known the harm words can cause, but the good they can bring is equally impressive. — Steve Goodier

You want to hear it? Fine. It's a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn't enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn't pretty, but it also wasn't scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren't just scary, they're fucking terrifying, and I can't do it. I can't live like this, knowing all that I've ruined and that it can't be fixed. — Cora Carmack

Think about it - one in every 37 adults. There are probably more than 37 adults in your apartment building or on your block. We could infer from this study that at least one of the people on your block probably has spent time in prison, if it were not for a sad quirk in the system: many convicted people's lives are so ruined by prison that later, they are not able to live in a decent neighborhood. They can't get jobs, and they have emotional and family problems. So, too often, they end up living a twilight-zone existence in neighborhoods that most of you have been fortunate enough to avoid. — Elaine Halleck

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this. — Kary Mullis

Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you're going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They're not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake. A crackhead did it is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. — Mat Johnson

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. — Clarence Darrow

You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! - and that! - and that! - and that! — Arthur Conan Doyle

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realisation that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social conventions to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports. — Douglas Coupland

'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives. — Scott Adsit

Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli-tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours wold be, too. — Katherine Center

I wondered ...if meeting people with creativity and passion when you were at an impressionable enough age actually kind of ruined you for life among normal people.

For a long time, I'd searched the world, thinking I could start up new friendships like the ones I'd had before. But I never met people like that again. I know people will think that's what everyone believes about their college friends, but it's true. Maybe we're like flowers that open up at that brief moment in our lives, and after that, we close up again, one by one. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could. — Mona Simpson

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely - perhaps never - furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives. — Joyce Carol Oates

What if she cried? Of course she would cry. They would all cry. They'd wail. It would be horrible. The kids' lives would be ruined. Tens of thousands of people would die. Israel would be destroyed. He wanted all of that, not because he craved horror, but because imagining the worst kept him safe from it - focusing on doomsday allowed for the day to day. On — Jonathan Safran Foer

No-knock police raids destroy Americans' right to privacy and safety. People's lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people's lives in order to control what others ingest. — James Bovard

Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen who'd ruined their lives, getting drunk of neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic offer. — Patrick McGrath

Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words. — Robert Harris

Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:
'Women hold up half the sky.'
Chairman Mao Tse Tung — Geoff Ryman

I have this fantasy that the second movie would begin with a brief statement by all of the young actors who had played the children in the first movie, explaining how it had ruined their lives, so we would catch up with Emily Browning drinking heavily in the back of a burlesque bar, and maybe Liam Aiken would be living underneath a bridge, and then instead of the twins who played Sunny, we would just try to find the oldest woman in the world, and get an interview with her sitting in a trailer park. — Daniel Handler

Women have to be careful and teach their girls to be aware of their surroundings and never be alone with testosterone-crazed boys. A lot of little lives are being ruined and our society is to blame. Our kids are just searching and being curious but they are dangerously looking for the wrong kind of attention. — Pamela Anderson

I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it. — Kevin Myers

We forget how to be a whole person all by ourselves. We feel like we are only half a person and that we need someone else to make us whole. That is a lie we tell ourselves and unfortunately, that lie has ruined so many people. We get in a relationship, we get hurt and then we run to someone else to cover up the pain or fill that void in our lives, not realizing that running to the wrong person will just make it worse. — Tony A. Gaskins Jr.

{T}hen he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless--and that Reed wouldn't tell about until years later. 'You're the one lied about Meadow Creek,' Kelly said. 'Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?'

We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world. — Matthew Neill Null

Visa for Avalon is a testament to the power of fiction. It illuminates the truth at the heart of what is commonly called reality. This account of lives transformed and ruined by the triumph of a totalitarian rule is a timely reminder of how moral and intellectual laziness and apathy can pave the road to the reign of terror brought on by such a system. — Azar Nafisi

The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking
someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lives, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved. — Denis Johnson

We've got thousands and thousands of people in jail on minor drug violations and they really don't need to be in jail. They're people whose lives are ruined. If drugs were legal there would be a lot less people using them. — Sonny Barger

It's ugly in there, decayed by lies and shame, endlessly bleeding for all the lives I've ruined. You're the eighth reason I don't deserve affection." Eight slaves worth of guilt. — Pepper Winters

We all have a stake in the truth. Society functions based on an assumption that people will abide by their word - that truth prevails over mendacity. For the most part, it does. If it didn't, relationships would have a short shelf life, commerce would cease, and trust between parents and children would be destroyed. All of us depend on honesty, because when truth is lacking we suffer, and society suffers. When Adolf Hitler lied to Neville Chamberlain, there was not peace in our time, and over fifty million people paid the price with their lives. When Richard Nixon lied to the nation, it destroyed the respect many had for the office of the president. When Enron executives lied to their employees, thousands of lives were ruined overnight. We count on our government and commercial institutions to be honest and truthful. We need and expect our friends and family to be truthful. Truth is essential for all relations be they personal, professional, or civic. — Joe Navarro

Critics have told me I've ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can't be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me. — Timothy Leary

Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives. — James Altucher

Gossip and slander are not victimless crimes. Words do not just dissipate into midair ... Words can injure and damage, maim and destroy - forcefully, painfully, lastingly ... Plans have been disrupted, deals have been lost, companies have fallen, because of idle gossip or malicious slander. Reputations have been sullied, careers have been ruined, lives have been devastated, because of cruel lies or vicious rumors ... Your words have such power to do good or evil that they must be chosen carefully, wisely, and well. — Wayne D. Dosick

When your world falls apart and everything's ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives. — Sophie Hannah

The senseless destruction that war brings," he explains. "The ones who always pay the price of another's greed is the simple man who just wants to go about his life, take joy in his family, and find peace at the end. They didn't ask for it, don't understand why it's happening, but theirs are the lives ruined, turned upside down, families destroyed. — Brian S. Pratt

Spirituality is a mixed-up, topsy-turvy, helter-skelter godliness that turns our lives into an upside-down toboggan ride of unexpected turns, surprise bumps and bone shattering crashes ... a life ruined by a Jesus who loves us right into his arms. — Mike Yaconelli

The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different perspective, her clothes magically disappeared to reveal the girl's naked body. When we are bombarded by the heartwarming news of a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic, just move the postcard a little to catch a glimpse of the obscene figure of the liberal communist at work beneath. — Slavoj Zizek

... as I said; the Nazi party was built on ruined lives - a failed career, the bitterness that feeds on injustice, redemption promised by a radical political movement. — Alan Furst

I know people whose entire lives are ruined by fame. If you make yourself exclusive, people want to break that down, but if you go about doing your shopping, no one bugs you. — Jonathan Pryce

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable. — Thomas Hardy

We live in a disposable world. There's no point in investing yourself too heavily.
Love doesn't fix anything ... it destroys more than it fixes. and when the dust has settled, it's just an afterthought. Lives still get ruined, people still leave, and life goes on and on and on.
the first forty-eight hours are the worst. the ego's taken a bit of a kicking. what you need is a constant supply of alcohol.
today was a day for taking tranquilizers washed down by vodka. — Kathleen Tessaro

The idea that love is something magical, almost supernatural, in your heart, that has nothing to do with the day-to-day encounters with a real person
that understanding of love has probably created more unhappiness and ruined more marriages than just about anything.
Love is what happens between people living their lives together, becoming close through contact and actual partnership and it's what survives through difficulties and imperfections. An idealized, imagined, faraway person in your heart
that's not love. That's a daydream. — Misha Glouberman

But being ruined by taxes is not the worst you have to fear. What security would you have for your lives? How can any of you be sure you would have the free enjoyment of your religion long? Would you put your religion in the power of any set of men living? Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fail of course. — Alexander Hamilton

It is unwise to trust your own judgment. "He who trusts in himself is a fool, but he who lives by wisdom will escape" (CJB, Proverbs 28:26). Many people have made bad financial investments because they based their decisions on their own judgment and pride. The Tanakh warns, "Pride goes before destruction, and arrogance before failure" (CJB, Proverbs 16:18). "Before being ruined, a person's heart is proud" (CJB, Proverbs 18:12). The — H.W. Charles

Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in those miniscule genes. For a moment we protect them with our lives, then like relay runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendents. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bomes, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all those boneyards. — Jonathan Kingdon

People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth — Malcolm Gladwell

Do not stop your lives. Otherwise, this disease will have ruined three of us instead of one. — Mitch Albom

Stories and cigarettes ruined lives of lesser girls. — Pete Yorn

It was hoped we might have two lives - the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after. — Nova Ren Suma

Innocent people's lives were ruined, where there are necessarily lots of idiots. — Mehmet Kececi

One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more extensive houses and unimpeded views. It was almost as if a rich person couldn't begin work on a grand house until he had thoroughly disrupted at least a few dozen menial lives. Oliver — Bill Bryson

Life is larger than any principle. Morality is an idea, but life is what we live. How can we fit it into this idea without damaging it? More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself."
"Should we live in sin then?"
"No. But prohibiting it doesn't help at all. It creates hypocrisy and spiritual cripples."
"So what should we do?"
"I don't know. — Mesa Selimovic

Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives. — Chuck Klosterman

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts.
In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives. — Laini Taylor

Who was it who said childhood was a thing that ruined everyone's life? Why was it, I wondered, that the human species spent their entire lives trying to figure themselves out? — Wendy Jean

And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can't fix anyway. Telling — Richard Ford

Liz looked back and counted the bodies, all those lives she had ruined simply by existing. So she chose to stop existing. — Amy Zhang

I've never considered myself a femme fatale as I've never seduced anyone and ruined their lives. At least as far as I know. — Scarlett Johansson