Some People Bend Quotes & Sayings

But failure and success are labels placed upon people's lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process. — James Rozoff

EASY PHILOSOPHY
by
Peter Cole Friedman

as soon as you get pubes

you'll start reading Marx

then ideally some Plato

some Descartes or Kant

which sound like aperitifs

then you'll talk

to other people who read

this stuff

you'll talk about life

and other big subjects

but mostly about this stuff

and you'll recognize the names

of the scholars in the field

and you'll start citing things

they've said about the stuff

and they will alight as they do

on your dandelion brain

like fat birds and one day you will

bend and bend so much

that you'll almost forget the world

has a sun which feeds you

even with your mouth closed — Peter Cole Friedman

I'm too tall. I am 6ft 7in, so I've been most people's height at some point in my life, and 6ft 4in is the best. You're tall, but you don't have to bend when you go through a door. — Stephen Merchant

Bend over backward, do a favor, and give and build confidence in people. It's a time to compliment, support and acknowledge the good things people do. — Erwin K. Thomas

Queer, how her own desperate need of light seemed to throw such brilliance over the affairs of the members of her family. She carried her need like a many-batteried pocket spotlight, illuminating emotional corners in other people, but she walked in darkness behind it. Her wrist wouldn't bend to turn it on herself. — Helen R. Hull

I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables? — Samantha Power

What kind of house will these dreamers become? What will it be like to live among people who don't fidget in fear of what's around the next bend? What kind of melodies will they compose?

He guessed that they would make strange company. Mysterious. Aggressively curious. Scary. Ignoring urgent concerns, distracted by insects and clouds and children. Each would live with one foot planted in another world. No more worry about their reputation. No more sugarcoated persuasion. No more flourishes designed to solicit a shower of coins. Only riddles and play and prophecy. — Jeffrey Overstreet

I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn't. My simple reason for that is we've got 7 billion people on the planet, and we have these very serious problems, and I think we don't know who's going to have the answers to the problems that are coming around the bend. — Daniel Suarez

People really understand very little of one another. Sometimes when I speak to him, my Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something (a city on a map?) like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he's not the one who feels alien - ever, I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart. Like Sokrates he fails to understand why travel should be such a challenge to the muscles of the heart, for other people. Around every bend of the road is a city of gold, isn't it?
I am the kind of person who thinks no, probably not. And we walk, side by side, in different countries. — Anne Carson

Best ever was filming in Barcelona last year, and I had a couple of scenes with De Niro. He's a very shy man. Speaks so quietly that people tend to bend down and adopt the same tone, almost the same voice, whenever they talk to him - watching, you'd think someone's offering to carry out a hit for him when they're just offering him a cup of coffee. — Toby Jones

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything. — Barbara Kingsolver

I wasn't sure I'd been born with the ability to forgive. Not for terrors inflicted on those I loved. For myself, I didn't care - not nearly as much. But there was some fundamental pillar of steel in me that could not bend or break in this. Could not stomach the idea of letting these people get away with what they'd done. — Sarah J. Maas

I've always been shy, but in New Orleans there were times my shyness would cause me actual physical pain. I'd get so claustrophobic around people that I'd bend over from the sickness in my stomach. That's not a good way to be when you're famous, obviously. — Ricky Williams

I'm not thrilled that I have a tramp stamp. When you see people bend over in their really low-cut jeans, I'm like, 'Oh ... that's what I have.' — Katherine Moennig

Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it. — Confucius

I will be merciful, and I will believe in people. If I am to err, I will err on the side of mercy. I will give people the benefit of the doubt. I will bend, but not break, in order to give people the opportunity to grow and develop. — David K. Bernard

Because that happened to me when I was little, this is how I will now treat other people"; "Because so and so beat me up and hurt me a long time ago, that gives me the right to treat people the way I treat them, today"; "Because life was hard on me, life should be hard on everyone else around me" - does this sound/ look familiar? It's called victim mentality. When people choose to be the direct product of everything that happened to them, the direct product of every single pair of hands that hurt them. And the world, to these people, must bend over backwards in order to accommodate their wounds. Some people don't want to be loved; they just want to make the world pay. — C. JoyBell C.

The truth about most people: they will never accept you as you are. You'll need to change. And I'm begging you, change. But only for yourself, and even if that means by yourself. Never bend for them. Don't calm your heart, don't scale back these dreams. Stay strange, lost your mind, finger fuck the rules, burn bridges if you must, and follow your insanity. Feel everything, it's telling you something. People will love you in bits and pieces, and hate you just the same. You'll always be too much for some, and not enough for others. They will never believe in you, as much as you do. And understand that you will never be a success in the eyes of a failure. There's a magic in you that most others can't believe in, simply because they haven't made sense of themselves. But you're magic, still. You've been that way all along. And even if the world changed everything in you, that much would always be true. — J. Raymond

A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it. — Francois Arago

What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world. — Elizabeth Goudge

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity. — Marcel Proust

...why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life... Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaudling, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. — Ray Bradbury

The jewels of spiritual service are always quarried in the depths of spiritual experience. Never is this more true than in revival. Bend the church and save the people. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all
this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now.
Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down ... and neither can we. — Northern Adams

Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. — Ray Bradbury

Some people might laugh or roll their eyes and accuse me of tired cliches. But there it was-hot food in an empty stomach, water on a parched throat, that first glimpse of home just around the bend, or that first bite of something you thought you'd never have the courage to try, only to realize it was the best thing you'd ever tasted. That was what Finn's kiss was like. And in that moment, I realized I was starving and had been for a long time. I was starving. Hungry for companionship, affection, connection. And strangest of all, hungry for Finn Clyde. — Amy Harmon

The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player. — Steve Vai

People who you knew you could trust," he says it like it's the simplest thing in the world to tell me and I decide Laylen might be the one person who can teach me what the term friend means. "You really can't remember anything about her?" I shake my head, bring my feet up onto the couch, and bend my legs to the side of me. "But I was only one when she died." "No, you weren't," he says with a pucker at his brow. "You were four. Who told you that you were one?" I pierce my fingers into the palms of my hand until the skin splits open. "Marco and Sophia." "Why would they do that?" Laylen reclines back in the sofa, pondering. "Why would it make a difference — Jessica Sorensen

How, I asked myself, do you convince men and women who live comfortably to change a system that provides their comforts
even when they know about EHMs and jackals, when they understand that attached to their comforts are terrible price tags? Where do you find words to empower them to stand up to a force like the corporatocracy? How do you inspire them to take actions that will bend the corporations to the will of the people? — John Perkins

I always had hopes of being a big star. But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you've made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you've left a mark. You don't have to bend the whole world. I think it's better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues, and just enjoy it. If you shoot a arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you. — Dorian Corey

The important thing is that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at the bend of the Nile. For seven years I had longed for them, had dreamed of them, and it was an extraordinary moment when I at last found myself standing amongst them. They rejoiced at having me back and made a great fuss, and it was not long before I felt as though a piece of ice were melting inside of me, as though I were some frozen substance on which the sun had shone - that life warmth of the tribe which I had lost for a time in a land 'whose fishes die of the cold'. — Tayeb Salih

What if God wants us to be happy? What if there's nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn't it be us? — Cristina Henriquez

Events are the best teacher for us. You try to learn from people, there is always some bend to it. — Yoko Ono

People", Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, "by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It make us feel as if we're in control. Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man's influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person's influence. — Brandon Sanderson

When we're kids," Dancer said, "we're made of steel. And we think we're invincible but stuff happens and that steel gets stretched and pulled and twisted into impossible shapes. Most people are torn apart by the time they're married and have kids of their own. But some people, the few, figure out how to let that steel heat and bend. And in all the places other people break, they get stronger. — Karen Marie Moning

When you become healthy, courageous, and hopeful, following your conscience becomes much easier. When people are healthy, courageous, and hopeful, it's difficult to bend their mind and will. They will speak out what they believe, and stand up and do what is right even when it means a loss to them. — Ilchi Lee

He resents the very posture of people who are online, the way they bend their backs over their various devices, blocking out any possibility that they might engage with a real live person, who would never come with enough apps to satisfy them, — Elizabeth Berg

No one had ever said anything like that to Evie. Her parents always wanted to advise or instruct or command. They were good people, but they needed the world to bend to them, to fit into their order of things. Evie had never really quite fit, and when she tried, she'd just pop back out, like a doll squeezed into a too-small box. — Libba Bray

Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it "the new thing" or "the new thing in the river," and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I — V.S. Naipaul

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. — John Stuart Mill

Modeling is a very hard job. I know that sounds like a really shallow thing to say, but you have people pulling on your hair all day, telling you what to do, fitting you, telling you to bend over, hitting you, taking your shoes off, throwing you up against a wall - it's a lot. You have to really be able to handle yourself and bring something. It's not just enough to have a cute body and jump up in the air and go, "wow!" — Kelly Cutrone

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls — Yuval Noah Harari

It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I'm absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn't try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree? — Kay Ryan

Avoid taking a definite stand on great public issues either in the Senate or before the people. Bend your energies towards making friends of key men in all classes of voters. — Quintus Tullius Cicero

Positive emotions and mental states may make people more resilient to stress, like sturdy tree branches that bend but don't break when battered by a storm — Melanie Greenberg

People who own everything know how to relax a little and bend and exhale once in a while, but they're not going to let it get out of control. — George Carlin

Pop stars are sending the message that their sexuality is the strongest thing they have to offer, and that's confusing and misleading to girls and women, especially since there's not enough of a counterbalance from those who rely on their other assets, like their music. Also, with the new obsession with all things "booty," it's important that women - and it's often women of color - aren't turned into mere caricatures. Right now it's: "Bend over." That's all people want to see. That's crazy. It's so far from where we should be. — Santigold

In any relationship I believe love should flow naturally . We cannot control it, make other person guilty or punish it to happen.
Love need patience , acceptance and trust. For love to come we make a hard and fast rule on from where, who and we chase it.
Love flow naturally.
When you feel scarcity of love , you need to be patience , big hearted, whole. Remain in your own love zone do not push, control because love is natural. You cannot ask or demand for it.
We might not get the people who we want us to love but there are people who will step in and they can see the light or flow of our love as it is.
We do not need to transform anyone, we need to know our love towards ourselves and how it flows in others.
When resistance is not there, when openness comes in a relationship . We bend, we are flexible and we trust our loving nature . We become less depended on what other is giving us. We do get fair love and acceptance too. — Archna Mohan

Once in a great while, she was distressed by the way she looked. As she was rounding the bend to forty she would write to Avis DeVoto that whenever she read Vogue she "felt like a frump....but I suppose that is the purpose of all of it, to shame people out of their frumpery so they will go out and buy 48 pairs of red shoes, have a facial, pat themselves with deodorizers, buy a freezer, and put up the new crispy window curtains with a draped valence."
Julia was able to deconstruct the disingenuous motives that drive women's magazines with the ease she normally reserved for deboning a duck, seeing quite clearly that while ostensibly offering inspiration and useful advice, the stories and articles quietly pummel the reader's sense of self, the better to drive her into the arms of the advertisers. — Karen Karbo

To understand what happened in Zimbabwe its worth trying to see things through the Zimbabwean people prism for a moment. Immune from the propaganda and the western media mind- bend. The real issues started a long, long time ago before the current regimes. Those who came bearing greed and seeking to rip off the cradle of Sub-Saharan Africa orchestrated the demise the people of Zimbabwe found themselves reeling in — Thabo Katlholo

The kind of submission or resignation that he showed, was that of a man who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered over the question whether he might have a better man under better circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.
It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned his eyes on me with a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child. As to all the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him complain. — Charles Dickens

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn't. Instead, he forged a note that said, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?" (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don't know what you're talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. — Ryan Holiday

Either the phone is so seriously thin and flimsy that it is bendable with mere physical force, which I cannot believe given the extensive tests Apple would have done. Or
and this is far more plausible
somehow the energy and excitement of the 10 million people who purchased iPhones has awakened their mind powers and caused the phones to bend. — Uri Geller

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like "boof-boof" - just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible - except when we choose not to be. — Alan Bradley

I've known Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and they're two of the most independent people I've ever known in my life, and the thought we could somehow bend their views I find really beyond my capacity to believe. — Peter George Peterson

Oh, anywhere, driver, anywhere - it doesn't matter. Just keep driving.
It's better here in this taxi than it was walking. It's no good my trying to walk. There is always a glimpse through the crowd of someone who looks like him - someone with his swing of the shoulders, his slant of the hat. And I think it's he, I think he's come back. And my heart goes to scalding water and the buildings sway and bend above me. No, it's better to be here. But I wish the driver would go fast, so fast that people walking by would be a long gray blur, and I could see no swinging shoulders, no slanted hat.
Dorothy Parker, Sentiment, Harper's Bazaar, May 1933. — Dorothy Parker

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency. — Thomas Merton

Afterwards
Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could."
You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.
Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn. — William Stafford

The world doesn't really need more people who can bend their bodies into amazing positions. What it needs are kinder, more compassionate, generous people. — Donna Farhi

She'd heard of black American Express cards before, because famous people had them, and now she was holding one with her name on it. The card was cool against her skin, like it was made out of metal instead of plastic, and it was thick and heavy, so it didn't bend like a normal credit card. Would it even slide through a swipe machine? She hit it against her palm, surprised by the echo of the metal. Rock-solid, it felt indestructible. — Michelle Madow

Trees bend low with ripened fruit; clouds hang down with gentle rain; noble people bow graciously. This is the way of generous things. — Bhartrhari

The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me. — Nick Hanauer

Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people. — Erik Larson