Sills Quotes & Sayings

Why let one high C ruin your whole evening? — Beverly Sills

As soon as I arrive at the house, Laurie starts running, hits my chest, knocks me down, and licks my face. It's become a family ritual. — Beverly Sills

What we can say for sure is that, at the very least, God calls every Christian to live with a missionary heart. — David Sills

I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up. — Beverly Sills

Jon Spiro had not hired Pex and Chips for their debating sills. In the job interview, they had only been set one task. A hundred applicants were handed a walnut and asked to smash it however they could. Only two succeeded. Pex had shouted at the walnut for a few minutes, then flattened it between his giant palms. Chips had opted for a more controversial method. He placed the walnut on the table, grabbed is interviewer by the ponytail, and used the man's forehead to smash the nut. Both men were hired on the spot. They quickly established themselves as Arno Blunt's most reliable leiutenants for in-house work. They were not allowed outside Chicago, as this could involve map reading, something Pex and Chips were not very good at. — Eoin Colfer

I'm not happy, I'm cheerful. There's a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them. - Beverly Sills — Deborah Smith

One-third of the planet's population, over two billion people, has never heard the gospel. And of that number, over 50,000 die daily, separated from God forever. — David Sills

Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting. — James Sallis

A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn't let them get her down. — Beverly Sills

God will not lead you where He will not provide for you. — David Sills

Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice. — Beverly Sills

There were times in my career ... when I felt like a trapeze artist doing dangerous somersaults without a net underneath. When you execute those somersaults flawlessly, the audience feels the same sense of triumph the performer does. — Beverly Sills

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls ... — Woody Guthrie

I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar. — Beverly Sills

In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us. — Beverly Sills

Attachment to spiritual things is ... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. — Beverly Sills

There are an awful lot of skinny people in the cemetery. — Beverly Sills

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment. — Beverly Sills

Opera is music AND drama. I'm prepared to sacrifice the beautiful note for the meaningful sound any time ... I can make a pretty tone as well as anyone, but there are times when the drama of a scene demands the opposite of a pretty sound. — Beverly Sills

Taking Root

I am no stranger to roots. In third grade, I punctured
a sweet potato's middle with toothpicks, suspended
it halfway in a cup of water until sprout-like whiskers

swam along its bottom. On day nine leaves crowned it.
I scooped out soil with my hands and buried it up
to its neck. I've laid down my own in places

where corn and tomatoes grow in vacant lots,
where cilantro and basil thrive on window sills
and in cities balanced on ancestor's bones.

Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable: they float
on water, cohere to wood, burrow deep beneath
foundations, challenge floorboards.

from Second Skin — Diana Anhalt

God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness. I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only Supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness. The cathedral crumbled in my vision; the saints listed and fell. Rats ate the Holy Eucharist and nested on the sills. A solitary rat with an enormous tail stood tugging and gnawing at the rotted altar cloth until the candlesticks fell and rolled on the slime-covered stones. And I remained standing. Untouched. — Anne Rice

Just sing it. Don't prove you can sing it. I know you can, you know you can. So just do it, because if you try to prove it, you'll lose. — Beverly Sills

There is a growing strength in women but it's in the forehead, not the forearm. — Beverly Sills

When you're in love, the whole world is Jewish. — Beverly Sills

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality. — Beverly Sills

Drawing a breath, I flung myself across the door sill. That was the artless way I navigated the hurdles of girlhood. Everyone thought I was a plucky girl, but in truth, I wasn't as fearless as everyone assumed. I had the temperament of a tortoise. Whatever dread, fright, or bump appeared in my path, I wanted nothing more than to drop in my tracks and hide. If you must err, do so on the side of audacity. That was the little slogan I'd devised for myself. For some time now, it had helped me to hurl myself over door sills. — Sue Monk Kidd

Any excess in life is a substitute for something that's missing. — Beverly Sills

My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. — Beverly Sills

Some Christians genuinely wrestle with the missionary call, but come to understand that God is calling them to stay and serve in their current location. For others, this call to go will not go away. They see it written between the lines as they read their Bibles. The question of the missionary call is on their mind when they watch the news or when they examine their career paths. — Michael Sills

Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance. — Beverly Sills

She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self. — Pat Conroy

Hearing the missionary call has a great deal to do with what you are listening for. — David Sills

The dangers that exist are real, but only illustrate the fact that men and women need Christ. The suffering and dying of missionaries advance the Kingdom as nothing else could and the blood of the saints has ever been the seed and fuel of gospel advance. — David Sills

My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't. — Beverly Sills

The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen. — David L. Sills

I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity ... I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not -more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving. — Beverly Sills

When you love the Lord, you long to glorify Him and see the nations fall at His feet in worship. When you love your neighbor as yourself, you share the gospel with him and seek to meet his needs in every way you can, which includes seeing him fall at Jesus' feet in thanksgiving for salvation. — David Sills

Some of us are senders and some are goers. Neither is more important than the other. Neither is possible without the other. — David Sills

DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist's wax, the organ has been gutted. — James Salter

The first of these houses appeared to be occupied. The next two were vacant. Dingy curtains, soot-grey against their snowy window-sills, hung over the next. A litter of paper and refuse-abandoned by the last long gust of wind that must have come whistling round the nearer angle of the house - lay under the broken flight of steps up to a mid-Victorian porch. The small snow clinging to the bricks and to the worn and weathered cement of the wall only added to its gaunt lifelessness. (Bad Company — Walter De La Mare

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time? — Josephine Humphreys

It didn't seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they'd quickly haul to particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they'd get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they'd be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you would wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sills in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the trail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it. — Vivek Shanbhag

Art is the signature of civilizations. — Beverly Sills

Don't get me started on critics. — Beverly Sills

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. — Beverly Sills

If someone does not have a missions heart at home, nothing magical happens when they buckle the seat belt on the airplane. — David Sills

As Global Warming raises temparatures, it takes longer to cool pies on window sills, and I wonder if this whole thing was caused by hobos. — Dana Gould

Can you play the piano like Beethoven? Or sing like Carly Simon? Can you take fie pages' worth of quotes and turn them into a usable story ten minutes before deadline? I don't think so, unless you have more hidden talents I don't know about. We all have our special sills. They don't make us better or worse than each other. Just different — Jennifer Estep

When God calls His child to live the life of a missionary, He gives him the desire with the calling. — David Sills

You don't always get what you ask for, but you never get what you don't ask for ... unless it's contagious! — Beverly Sills

I've always tried to be cheerful, because I think people who whine are boring, and I never could tolerate bores. — Beverly Sills

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light. — Beverly Sills

If you are sure that He is calling and you can be sure that He will also remove the barriers that would preclude your service, in His perfect timing. Rest in that. — David Sills

I know that anybody who does all this and doesn't have to, everything thinks she's very driven. The truth is, I enjoy it all so! Can't it be that simple? I think it is! I don't feel overworked. I get a constant kick out of being heavily committed. Is that sick or something? God, what would I do sitting still? — Beverly Sills

God has called every Christian to international missions, but He does not want everyone to go. God calls some to be senders. — David Sills

Today, 112 years later, 94% of the people in the world recognize the Coca-Cola logo and product. In 112 years, we can reach the world for profit's sake, but we cannot do it for the glory of God in 2,000 years. — David Sills