Start From Scratch Quotes & Sayings

When you join the NFL, you start from scratch. As long as I've been playing - which has been since I was eight years old - the game becomes harder at every level. Little league, high school, college - they're different stages you have to go through, and professional sport is completely different again. — Reggie Bush

AWESOME. In fact, I'm starting a whole movement right now. The FURIOUSLY HAPPY movement. And it's going to be awesome because first of all, we're all going to be VEHEMENTLY happy, and secondly because it will freak the shit out of everyone that hates you because those assholes don't want to see you even vaguely amused, much less furiously happy, and it will make their world turn a little sideways and will probably scare the shit out of them. Which will make you even more happy. Legitimately. Then the world tips in our favor. Us: 1. Assholes: 8,000,000. That score doesn't look as satisfying as it should because they have a bit of a head start. Except you know what? Fuck that. We're starting from scratch. Us: 1. Assholes: 0. — Jenny Lawson

You don't have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don't have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. You have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible. — Jack Dorsey

'Utopia' is a positive and constructive program that gives people the opportunity, if you can start all over again, start from scratch and create laws and make decisions, will you be able to build a society that is better than the one we have; will it be chaos or happiness. — John De Mol Jr.

Would it insult you if I used your alphabet? I don't think I could start from scratch. — Clay Griffith

But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the angel" as they used to say back then), so rather than try to fix it, He instead decided to simply wash everyone away in a great flood and start over from scratch
just as you might do to your computer's hard drive if it has a really bad virus. So God spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark, aboard which he'd carry two of every animal in the world ... Thus was born humankind's lust for gigantic vehicles, for God's instructions to Noah were basically the world's first car commercial, and the sales pitch was this: Large vehicles are your salvation. — BikeSnobNYC

It can be hard to feel like you have to start from scratch when you have invested so much time with a person, but shortly after my break up I realized something: I wasn't losing the chance to have love
I was getting the opportunity to do it all over again. — Lauren Conrad

The secret to success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching. — Dennis Green

That's why I'm very wise [in] the way I choose the remixes 'cuz I know that the song has to transcend well. You already have a base, instead of me just doing my own production and I don't have to start from scratch. — Cedric Gervais

We can't start over and develop a Saturn 5-type vehicle from scratch. — Buzz Aldrin

We got a right to climb out of the sewer and live like other people. We could start from scratch. Make every minute count twice for the one we lost. — Samuel Fuller

I steeled myself. I would start from scratch. I would root out like weeds the effects of my parents, the tendency to choose safe options, to get ahead, to feel secure... and when I met other Asian Americans, those bound for consultant and hedge-fund jobs where they would make six figures, my judgment was harsh. Silently, through my narrowed eyes, I told them, I know you, and there's not too much to know. — Michelle Kuo

Let us never accept the point of view that mysteries are written by hacks. The poorest of us shed our blood over every chapter. The best of us start from scratch with every new book. — Raymond Chandler

It is best to start a new project with new people from the scratch. — Sunday Adelaja

There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven't seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time. — Francine Prose

[Writing something original from scratch], the initial process is way different. But once it exists and you start to actually work on making it real, then the approach is kind of the same, for me anyways. — Zack Snyder

All of a sudden, life became too much to bear. Just like that, for no particular reason. Because there was a child's corpse in the fridge on rue Parthenais. Because I had to start all over again from scratch, one more time. Because I had rolled my rock to the top of the hill and now it was rolling back down again. The times before, I'd always managed to put on a brave face. But there comes a time when you just don't feel strong enough to look for another place to live and go shopping again for clothes and dishes and cutlery and scouring pads and toilet paper. This was one of those times. When I got back to the hotel, I asked the Barbie at reception for the key to the minibar. It burned in the palm of my hand. I slapped it back down on the counter and ran out. I had to find a meeting. — Bernard Emond

With 'Scratch,' our goal is to allow people to mix together all kinds of media, not just sounds, in creative ways. We want people to start from existing materials - grabbing an image, grabbing some sound, maybe even bits of someone else's program, and then extending them and mixing them to make them their own. — Mitchel Resnick

Some people get medals and awards and all that, and maybe not intentionally - maybe the world is making them do it - but they sort of just follow what they were doing. Repeat or follow what they were doing all their lives, in their style of music or whatever. In my case, I always try to start from scratch. It's very nerve-wracking actually, but it's interesting. — Yoko Ono

We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch. — James Joyce

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process. — Paul Auster

Y2K hype taps our native discomfort with the realities of a dynamic, evolving social order. It elevates personal, local contact over the impersonality of the 'extended order' of trade and technological networks. It suggests that we can wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. — Virginia Postrel

I strongly believe that people may not want, or may not be able, to start again from scratch, so giving old furniture a new lease of life is at the heart of my philosophy. — Nina Campbell

If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least. — Michael Lewis

Sometimes a sound gets overused. There is such a thing as a good saxophone, but it's like those fields in agriculture - they need to rest for a year or so. You need time to burn all the saxophones and start from scratch. — Thomas Mars

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father. — Marcel Duchamp

A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true. — Criss Jami

Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made - imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell ... Meals' ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness. This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. — Tamar Adler

Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else ... even the gods.'
'You feel that way?'
She [Annabeth] looked down. 'Don't you ever feel like, what if the world really is messed up? What if we could do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.'
'I'm listening.'
'I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did - that's why the fire is still burning. That's why Olympus is still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: "If I could tear this all down, I would do it better." Don't you ever feel that way? Like you could do a better job if you ran the world? — Rick Riordan

But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live. — Werner Herzog

If you're going to re-invent healthcare you have to start from scratch. — Vinod Khosla

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch. — Rene Redzepi

I don't really remember much about Kosovo. I only remember growing up in London, where my parents had to basically start from scratch. — Rita Ora

Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that. — Peter Seibel

He wanted to start from the top while he knew nothing of the beginning and that was why he was always swimming at the bottom. He liked to think he was an entrepreneur and was even on Dragon's Den with the silliest invention ever: a machine to scratch his back. Why don't you just reach out, you lazy twit? — Luella Christie

Don't you ever feel like, what if the world really IS messed up? What if we COULD Do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.
'm listening.
Annabeth: I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did
that's why the fire is still burning. That's why OlympusIs still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: 'If I could tear this all down, i would do it better.'. Don't you ever feel that way? Like YOU could do a better job I'd you ran the world?
Percy:Um ... no. Me running the world would be kind of a nightmare.
Annabeth: then you're lucky. Hubris isn't your fatal flaw.
Percy: what is?
Annabeth: I don't know, Percy, but every hero has one. If you don't find it and learn to control it ... well, they don't call it 'fatal' for nothing.
Percy(thinking to himself): I thought about that. It didn't exactly cheer me up. — Rick Riordan

I start from scratch with each movie; I wipe the slate and I certainly don't rely on some bag of acting tricks I've amassed over the years. — Christian Bale

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal. — David Geffen

I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention.
Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change my goals. I told myself that I'd never really cared about learning the language. My main priority was to get the house in shape. The verbs would come in due time, but until then I needed a comfortable place to hide. — David Sedaris

You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet — Nick Hornby

Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve, instead, a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again. — Edward Hoagland

Concerning trees and leaves ... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air. — Annie Dillard

He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch? — Elias Canetti

The Qur'an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to
salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was
to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole. — Jeffrey Lang

I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: "Hi!" I said. Someone or something hears. I don't know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don't feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that - Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday's faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it. — Anne Lamott

Idolatry isn't just one of many sins; rather it's the one great sin that all others come from. So if you start scratching at whatever struggle you're dealing with, eventually you'll find that underneath it is a false god. Until that god is dethroned, and the Lord God takes his rightful place, you will not have victory. Idolatry isn't an issue; it is the issue. All roads lead to the dusty, overlooked concept of false gods. Deal with life on the glossy outer layers, and you might never see it; scratch a little beneath the surface, and you begin to see that it's always there, under some other coat of paint. There are a hundred million different symptoms, but the issue is always idolatry. — Kyle Idleman

I think our government has gotten so far off track that it's high time something like this happened. All of these partisan politicians. You can see where they've gotten us. They cultivated this cancer, fought senselessly over how they should treat it, and now they're shocked to find that it's malignant and spreading? I'll tell you how we need to treat it. We need to oust the sons-a-bitches and bring the control back to the people. We're going to have to start this whole country up from scratch, using the Constitution, of course. We need to stick a cork in all of these special interests and get back to doing what's best for us. We've got this moment in history to set things right. Does that make sense to you guys? — Nicholas Antinozzi

It's too difficult to start right from scratch and try and be funny out of the blue. — John Cleese

Each time I do a trilogy it's ten years out of my life. I'll finish Episode III and I'll be 60. And the next 20 years after that I want to spend doing something other than Star Wars. If at 80 I'm still lively and having a good time and think I can work for another 10 years between 80 and 90, I might consider it. But don't count on it. There's nothing written, and it's not like I'm completing something. I'd have to start from scratch. The idea of a third trilogy was more of a media thing than it was me. — George Lucas

It's been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time. — John Seely Brown

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time. — Jon Oringer

Never too old, never too bad, never too late, never too sick to start from scratch once again. — Bikram Choudhury

When one thing ends, you put it away and start from scratch on the next thing. — Laurie Metcalf

It is expensive to start from scratch though. — David Leslie

Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was - to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends - albeit more by circumstance than by choice - he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed - and thereby strained - by comprehensibility. — Ashim Shanker

You're never too old, never too bad, never too late and never too sick to start from the scratch once again. — Bikram Choudhury

By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours. — David Byrne

I don't like comfort zones. Having never had any drama training, I don't really have a technique, so I'm continually learning new things. I like being frightened, and always having to start from scratch. — Lea Seydoux

After you've dated someone it should be legal to stamp them with what's wrong with them so the next person doesn't have to start from scratch. — Rita Rudner

I wanted to start a hotel company from scratch. — Barry Sternlicht

I love going into the studio with just an idea of the direction. Like, I want this tempo ... I love to start from scratch, and the tracks sort of take on a life of their own. — Lindsey Stirling

Lo- don't move," he says, seriously, his eyes like honey in the basement light- warm and amber and shining. "i'm still working."
"I had an itch."
"Let me know next time, and I'll scratch it for you. Before the terrible itching incident ruined everything, I was about to start on the dark shadow of your elbow crease. Now I'll have to re-create that perfect, dark, little cityscape from memory. — Kate Ellison

Start from scratch with Jesus every day and then be picky about what you add to your life. — Bob Goff

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. — Ann Patchett

One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I'm thinking is maybe it's time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or wathever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn't working. — Ron Rash

I always start from scratch with a character - they're never based on anyone else. You get ideas of what people look like, and I'm a great people watcher. You can draw inspiration from people. — Amanda Burton

We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding. — Nicolas Chamfort

All your life you was one thing. And now you can be something else if you want! Somebody completely different. You can actually start yourself over from scratch. Turn yourself into what you have always wanted to be! — Adriana Trigiani

No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years. — Debra Dean

When I started swimming again two years ago, it felt like I was starting from scratch. My mind-set was [to tell myself that] every time I swam, it was going to get easier-and it did. When you're working toward a fitness goal, you just need to start. It's not going to be pretty, your body is going to scream at you, but each time you'll get better. — Janet Evans

It's easy to make mistakes that only come out much later, after you've already implemented a lot of code. You'll realize Oh I should have used a different type of data structure. Start over from scratch. — Guido Van Rossum

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music. — Carly Simon

Usually I work out the plot before I start. This time I thought: Writers always talk about not knowing where a book is going - -I want to experience that, too. What I found out is that it's very interesting, but it takes much longer because you have so many false starts. You take wrong turns and you have to go back and start the whole chapter, or the whole section, from scratch. — Daniel Kehlmann