Started With Nothing Quotes & Sayings

I only wear clothes because I can't walk around with nothing on, but they started calling me a fashionista. — G-Dragon

Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it had been holding around them. Something like static pricked the back of her neck as Baba Zosia cut her finger and smeared blood on the tree. The strange symbol melted into the bark, healing the tree to appear like nothing had been carved on it to begin with. Lifting her hands towards the campsite Baba Zosia started to chant softly in the complicated language of the tribe. Magic thrummed through the air, making Anya's own flare and itch under her skin. She rubbed her arms to stop it. Around her a breeze picked up and the campground, with its tracks in the mud and stains from the fires all melted away until there was nothing but autumn leaf litter and debris in its place. It looked like it hadn't been disturbed for years. — Amy Kuivalainen

The spell started to brush across my skin, tasting me, telling me what it wanted....
Nothing compared to power flowing through you, over you, around you. It was a alluring, sensual as it wound through my hair, cuddled with my skin. It wanted me to swirl the power, to tickle it with light and sound, and it sang to me of spells long lost. — N.E. Conneely

I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14. — Iman

Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. ( ... ). So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. — Pema Chodron

My daughter had carried within her a story that kept hurting her: Her dad abandoned her. She started telling herself a new story. Her dad had done the best he could. He wasn't capable of giving more. It had nothing to do with her. She could no longer take it personally. — Regina Brett

Those are life-and-death-type experiences he goes through in the mines. Eventually he gets out and goes back to his old life. But nothing in the novel shows he learned anything from these experiences, that his life changed, that he thought deeply now about the meaning of life or started questioning society or anything. You don't get any sense, either, that he's matured. You have a strange feeling after you finish the book. It's like you wonder what Soseki was trying to say. It's like not really knowing what he's getting at is the part that stays with you. — Haruki Murakami

He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course. — William Faulkner

When he thought I was ready, my father inducted me into the quantum universe. It seemed to contradict all the science I had learned so far: nothing was really held in place. The essential stuff of the universe was nonmatter, pulses of energy and information, flickering in and out of existence. Everything was up for grabs. A table, a chair was a fluid arrangement of probabilities. Sometimes I expected the uncertainty principle to kick in and find strangers masquerading as my parents, or that our house had been razed by some great atomic upheaval. It was about this time I started sleeping with the light on. MANY — Dominic Smith

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write.
I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation.
But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level. — Aaron Sorkin

Off the floor, I'm really laid back: like, nothing really fazes me too much. But on the floor, I do get emotional and a little carried away. However, I started playing when I was 13 to have fun with my teammates, and that never stopped. I enjoy traveling and having fun in the locker room with the guys. Life is too short to be miserable. — Dirk Nowitzki

The reason for his seven-year hiatus in direction: My son Aditya made Mohabbatein (2000), which took a lot of time and energy. Then we started looking for a script for me to direct. Nothing seemed to excite us both. There's a complete bankruptcy of screenwriting in our cinema. I wanted a very earthy and Indian subject. I was tired of the promos on television. With semi-clad girls, they all looked the same. Of course Dhoom (2004) has them too. But I'd personally not make a film like that. — Yash Chopra

The money is of no concern to me, whatsoever. I started out with nothing. — Dwayne Johnson

You need money to make money is nonsense! Entrepreneur people who started with nothing but an idea. — Timi Nadela

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. — Eugene Ionesco

Many think that my journey started in Khlennium, that great city of wonder. They forget that I was no king when my quest began. Far from it. I think it would do men well to remember that this task was not begun by emperors, priests, prophets, or generals. It didn't start in Khlennium or Kordel, nor did it come from the great nations to the east or the fiery empire of the West. It began in a small, unimportant town whose name would mean nothing to you. It began with a youth, the son of a blacksmith, who was unremarkable in every way - except, perhaps, in his ability to get into trouble. It began with me. — Brandon Sanderson

If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed ... — Vladimir Nabokov

Even though I started with nothing, I started. — Michael Lawrence

God, you're beautiful," he murmured.
Somehow that made her even madder. "You are such a dick. Guys like you don't find girls like me beautiful." Spitting fire, she glared up at him.
He leaned into her, loving the way her eyes widened in awareness. "Guys like me?"
"Yes." She slapped both hands against his chest and shoved, snarling when he didn't move an inch. "Guys who spend hours in the gym, probably only eat protein, look like action movie stars, and probably date models who weigh three pounds."
He frowned. "What's wrong with protein?"
"Nothing," she shouted.
Somehow he'd made her so angry she'd stopped making any sense. "Your beauty isn't exactly a matter of opinion, darlin'. You're stunning."
"Stop playing with me," she almost growled.
"I haven't started playing with you, and when I do, you'll fucking know it," he shot back, — Rebecca Zanetti

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell. — David Simon

I knew I was in love with Lorri when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way. I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it's exactly the opposite. Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode. Now there is only fun and love and silliness. She drives me to frenzy, because I can never get enough. — Damien Echols

I didn't know why something that started off feeling so good had to wind up feeling so bad. Love was a big word and it covered a lot of territory. You could spend your whole life chasing after it and wind up with nothing, be an old bitter guy with long nose hair and ear hair and no teeth, hanging out in bars, looking for somebody your age, but the chances of success went down then. After a while you got too many strikes against you. — Larry Brown

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. — Emile Zola

She started to rise, for she feared Dash might become angry, lose his temper as he had before with Finn, but this Dash, this man who was struggling to find his footing, planted his feet solidly on the deck.
"She married someone else, Finn," he said quietly. "There was no battle to fight once she'd done that. I'd lost, and sometimes when you lose, there is nothing you can do but move on."
Finn sighed and shook his head, the arguments and problems of adults far beyond his ken, but he still persisted, struggling to understand. "Did you?"
"Did I what?"
"Move on? After you lost her?"
Again, Dash shook his head. "Nay, I didn't. Not at all."
"'Cause you loved her?"
Dash looked away. "Aye. Without her, I lost my course and sailed about the seas rather like the Dutchman. — Elizabeth Boyle

The first thing Julian wanted to do in life, well, before he wanted to be an artist and then a musician, was to be a chef. He'd come home and say 'Why don't you bake cakes like my friends' mothers?' I'd say, 'Oh, Julian, go out and buy a Mary Baker cake mix and do it yourself!' That started him off! By the time he was 13, he'd disappear into the kitchen whenever we had visitors and emerge with beautiful canapes. Now he thinks nothing of cooking for ten or 15 people, and he does it so calmly. — Cynthia Lennon

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. — Junot Diaz

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. — Jason Najum

I just asked her if she'd seen anything odd, and she started to say-"
"Oh - that - that's nothing to do with the Chamber of Secrets," said Percy at once.
"How do you know?" said Ron, his eyebrows raised.
"Well, er, if you must know, Ginny, er, walked in on me the other day when I was - well, never mind - the point is, she spotted me doing something and I, um, I asked her not to mention it to anybody. I must say, I did think she'd keep her word. It's nothing, really, I'd just rather
"
Harry had never seen Percy look so uncomfortable. — J.K. Rowling

When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his ... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish. — Maile Meloy

[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail. — Richard Hofstadter

Savannah came to him instantly, her face lit up with some emotion he dared not name.She was in a man's silk shirt and nothing else. The buttons were open so that the edges gaped to reveal her high, full breasts, and narrow rib cage. Another step and her tiny waist and flat stomach, the triangle of tight ebony curls, showed for an intriguing moment before the long tails of the shirt brushed back into place. Her long hair cascaded loose and moved around her like living, breathing silk. With every step she took, he caught glimpses of satin skin.
At once the dull roar started in his head. Heat exploded through his blood, and his body tightened with alarming urgency. Every good and noble intention seemed to go up in flames. She smiled up at him, her slender arms sliding around his neck. "I'm so glad you're home," she whispered softly, her mouth finding the pulse in his throat. — Christine Feehan

"Okay, what'd I do?" he asked.
"Nothing. I'm just tired."
"Uh-uh. I suspected I was getting the cold shoulder earlier, but with everything going on, I wasn't sure. Now I'm sure. You're giving me the look."
"What look?"
"The Maya's-pissed-with-Corey look. Fifty percent disappointment, thirty percent disapproval, twenty percent exasperation. I've done something you're not happy about."
I hesitated, then blurted, "Rafe told me what you said about Daniel."
He frowned. "You're going to need to be a little more specific."
"In Salmon Creek, when Rafe and I started getting together. You told him to back off because Daniel ... " I glanced at the open door and lowered my voice. "Because Daniel likes me." — Kelley Armstrong

We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do. — Benmont Tench

They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste. Safe enough. — Lee Child

(Ugh. Don't even get me started. It's like teachers think we have nothing better to do with our lives than to come home and do more schoolwork.) [SirLeo] (It's coz they're old and have no lives and want to punish those who do.) — Mari Mancusi

Even though he had admitted to her that he used to watch me shower through a hole in the bathroom wall back when I was thirteen. She blamed us both for what we had "done" to her. But it sounds like she got over being mad at him pretty quick. She later told me that she had to go back and have sex with him one more time, just to make sure that there was nothing left between the two of them and to get some closure. That almost made me want to vomit. The only interaction between us after that was her showing up at the courthouse when I had to sit in front of a grand jury of twelve strangers and tell them what had happened. She came into the waiting room where I was sitting and started screaming that I was a whore and that I'd fucked her husband. She had to be escorted out of the court by two officers. That's what I got from her. — Ashly Lorenzana

I moaned. "Gonna make this fast and hard," he murmured against my skin. He lifted up my leg and pushed inside of me, stretching and filling me in two hard long thrusts. He started pumping into me before my body was ready for him and the bite of pain made each stroke torturously erotic. "Never felt nothing like this, Ti. Wanna fuck you and smack the living shit out of you all at the same time. Don't know what this is, but it makes me want to keep you filled with my cock all day long and dripping with my cum. I want to mark you. I want to fucking own you." He grunted as his thrusts became harder, more frantic, more erratic. Just more. "What the fuck are you doing to me?" he asked on a ragged exhale. Sparks — T.M. Frazier

When I became a parent and hit my thirties, I got my hands on an acoustic guitar. I started writing quiet, simple songs at home and, with a little encouragement, I got more courage and found my voice. I have people and movements who have inspired me to carry on, but I try to write about things I know, nothing too complicated, really. — Withered Hand

Little things.
I drive by the funeral home where he was taken several times a week, if not a day. Ordinarily, these trips mean nothing. But one time not long ago I happened to glance at the building and my mind was filled with visions of him laid out on the table, his body being prepared.
I started crying. I was still crying when I got on the freeway a short time later.
"You're gone," I whispered. "I can't believe you're gone."
I can't believe it. I can't believe he's gone.
I repeated the words over and over, until I started to hear something else above the rumble of the tires and the rush of the wind.
I'm still here. Always with you. — Taya Kyle

Do you need me to carry you?" The words were said softly but with a definite edge. He looked so angry, I wasn't sure if he was mad or trying to help.
"No." The last thing I wanted was to be carried out of there. I turned in my seat and tried to get a read on him. An idiot would have known he was pissed, but beyond that, I got nothing. Why was he the only person in my life I had so much trouble reading. He started to lean down and I realized I was out of time.
"Don't you dare," I said, trying to delay whatever action he was preparing to take. Looks like my stall quota had been all used up. If I'd had any delusions of him cutting me any slack because of what had happened between us, I was quickly realizing how wrong I'd been. He seemed even worse. — Donna Augustine

She had nothing against any of the other guests, but once she started she saw no way to stop. There was nothing to do but turn the hose against every arriving guest. No one coming out of the house to reason with her was safe either. — Katherine Paterson

Here was something that I did all the time, and thought nothing of it, and it turns out the rest of the world thinks it's completely reprehensible. That's when I knew I needed to change, so I started making rules. The first one was; Don't mess with animals. — Dan Wells

A violin is nothing more than a piece of wood and a dead cat. But it's a piece of technology. So when computers came along, in the '70s, I suddenly thought, hang on a second, this is interesting. These things can become an instrument. So I just became very interested in them, and started, playing with electronics. — Hans Zimmer

It was worth it," Faye says after school while she walks me to my car. "It's not fair that you take all the shit for this while the guys get to walk around like nothing happened. They're just as much to blame."
"I'm the one who started it," I say, kicking a beer cap across the parking lot with my shoe. "If I hadn't started it, nothing would have happened.
"Don't let them off the hook so easily," Faye snaps. "They were coming to you. It takes two to have sex. So don't defend them. — Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

I started out with nothing. I still have most of it. — Michael Davis

People don't understand this, but I started very young, and I became very, very successful at a very young age. By the time I was 26 years old, I was a multimillionaire. And I started with nothing. And I was on the road 10, 11 months a year. — Jerry Weintraub

You can say that Mitt Romney started with nothing! He didn't get an inheritance from his dad. — Brian Kilmeade

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done. — Katherine Anne Porter

It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages. You must surely have seen instances enough of that frailty. You have yourself heard many such marvellous relations started, which, being treated with scorn by all the wise and judicious, have at last been abandoned even by the vulgar. Be assured, that those renowned lies, which have spread and flourished to such a monstrous height, arose from like beginnings; but being sown in a more proper soil, shot up at last into prodigies almost equal to those which they relate. — Christopher Hitchens

At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze," as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master-I had the feeling that Fleisher has sized up the piano's character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty-and, after this, there was nothing more to be said. — Oliver Sacks

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives. — Karen Joy Fowler

Stay with Aisling," Drake ordered Jim as he and Gabriel were about to leave.

"Ten four, dragon buddy."

Drake turned to his wife. "Do not do anything foolish, kincsem."

She gave him a fond but exasperated look. "Honest to Pete, dragons! Bossiest beings in the world."

Gabriel smiled at me but said nothing until he and Drake started to leave. "You'll notice I don't have to warn my mate to be careful. I have full confidence in May's abilities," he told Drake.

"She's a female American. No doubt you will soon understand the true depth of hell she can put you through — Katie MacAlister

It was May's idea," Quentin added.

"I'm sure it was," I said. Sylvester started circling. I dropped into a defensive position. "I'm not really comfortable with this, May."

"Cope," she said.

"Maybe an audience will make you shape up," Sylvester said, and lunged.

I parried. "Maybe an audience will distract me and get me gutted."

"Let's see some carnage!" hollered May, pumping her fist in the air.

"This isn't professional wrestling!" I snapped, trying to hit Sylvester's ankle. He blocked, turning my thrust aside and nearly disarming me. "And I swear if you shout 'take it off,' I am coming over there."

"Take what off?" asked Sylvester.

"Nothing, Your Grace," Quentin and I said in unison. — Seanan McGuire

When we started, it was based on lies. It's changing now. There are no secrets in the business. You've got to come with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It's becoming very confusing. — Don King

It started with nothing more than a yearning for nicotine and beauty. — J.K. Rowling

Nothing to finish? You wondered why sex with a vampire was such a big deal. I'm going to show you." He moved toward her, slowly, like a cat sneaking up on a bird. "Stamina." He stepped closer. "Multiple orgasms." Closer, and her mouth went dry. "Flexibility." Closer. Her skin flushed hot. "Strength." Closer. Her stomach did a flip-flop. "The ability to sense heat so we know what parts of the body are the most sensitive at the right time." Closer. A throbbing ache started low in her pelvis. "The ability to hear the slightest change in the tempo of your pulse so we know exactly how every stroke, kiss, and lick affects you." Oh. Dear. Lord. — Larissa Ione

What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. — Yaa Gyasi

Remember I came to Albuquerque to do a hair and makeup test and wardrobe fitting; you guys were already shooting. It's tough when the movie's already started and you kind of show up. You're the new kid on the block. I walked onto the set and Tommy [Lee Jones] was about to do the scene. I just kind of walked up to him. I was shaking, but I just gave him this big hug and he just had nothing to say. He was like, 'Gotta go to work now.' I had a great time working with him. — Charlize Theron

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time. — Wallace Stegner

You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is, it's how we use it that makes things possible. — Henry Ford

I felt sorry for her, baby, guilty and responsible. That's all it was. Once she started talking about you, I could have thrown her off the deck with no remorse. I know there are no words that can take away what you saw, just please say you understand. Liz is nothing to me, Evan, but you...you're everything. — Lilly Black

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. — Lewis Carroll

I started over again with an image: Nothing goes right. Then when The Godfather came out, all I heard was, Show respect. With me, you show respect. So I changed the image to I don't get no respect. I tried it out in Greenwich Village. I remember the first joke I told: Even as a kid, I'd play hide and seek and the other kids wouldn't even look for me. The people laughed. After the show, they started saying to me, Me, too - I don't get no respect. I figured, let's try it again. — Rodney Dangerfield

And right then it felt like I finally understood where everything was, eternity, the heart , the soul. It was like I was sharing every experience I'd ever had in my past 13 years. And then, the next moment, I became unbearably sad. I didn't know what to do with these feeling. Her warmth, her soul. How was I supposed to treat them? That, I did not know. Then right then, I clearly understood that we would never be together. Our lives not yet fully realized, the vast expanse of time. They lay before us and there was nothing we could do. But then, all my worries, all my doubt, started melting away. All that was left were Akari's soft lips on mine. — Makoto Shinkai

I can't understand how people can have grown up in the eighties, amidst all this competitive spirit, gangster battles, hiphop - and still pretend that artists are 'colleagues' that should be bloody nice to each other. I mean that's like the 60's, not the 80's. I grew up with the idea of putting a cap in the ass of bad rhyming niggers. So that's what i did. And they all started frontin me, copycats and dinosaurs, but they have nothing on me. To me, the house generation of the 90's is excused - I never pick fights with these ecstasy heads. I just wanna bury all the dinosaurs that don't get ill. — Martijn Benders

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God? — Richard Dawkins

Tania, I was spellbound by you from the first moment I saw you. There I was, living my dissolute life, and war had just started. My entire base was in disarray, people were running around, closing accounts, taking money out, grabbing food out of stores, buying up the entire Gostiny Dvor, volunteering for the army, sending their kids to camp - " He broke off. "And in the middle of my chaos, there was you!" Alexander whispered passionately. "You were sitting alone on this bench, impossibly young, breathtakingly blonde and lovely, and you were eating ice cream with such abandon, such pleasure, such mystical delight that I could not believe my eyes. As if there were nothing else in the world on that summer Sunday. — Paullina Simons

The meeting started, and I could barely listen for my self-mortification. I wanted the hour to end so I could ask her what it was I had done. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me - boing! This had NOTHING to do with me. I felt a wave of relief, an internal shift like I had just had a chiropractic adjustment. I realized that I had made something that had nothing to do with me into something that was all about me.

I saw that I had been doing this all my life. When I was a kid, my mom was easily annoyed, and I always figured it was me bugging her. After growing up like that, I was forever making myself the cause of other people's pain. It was self-centered and rendered me incapable of compassion for others, because I'm no good to anybody else when it's all about me. And frankly, most things have nothing to do with me. It was very adolescent, really. I got it, suddenly and profoundly. — Jane Lynch

Tell me you didn't really watch Nausicaa."
Miho tried to keep a serious face, which must have been difficult enough in her flannel Hello Kitty pajamas. But the girl was a terrible liar. She smirked.
"No. Kiki just ended. So much for our Miyazaki marathon."
"We got through two movies," Sakura said. "Tonight, that's a marathon."
They'd wanted to watch movies tonight, just to clear their minds, and had agreed on nothing violent. All three of them loved the films of Miyazaki, who had become perhaps the most successful director in Japan while making only animated films. Kara had vetoed Howl's Moving Castle because she'd seen it too recently, and they had all seen My Neighbor Totoro far too many times, so they had started with Spirited Away. — Thomas Randall

Scotty, what's wrong?" For a moment, Scott ignored the sleepy, querulous voice of the man occupying the other half of his bed. Then he turned back from the window to look at the guy whose name he couldn't remember for the life of him and said, "Nothing, just a nightmare. Sorry. Go back to sleep." "Maybe I don't want to sleep now," the man pouted. Scott shrugged. "Then get dressed and go home. Makes me no nevermind." "Well, I never," the man huffed. "I guess I might as well. Looks like nothing more's going to be happening here." With a shrug, Scott grabbed his robe then put it on as he strode out of the bedroom. When he was downstairs in the kitchen, he started a pot of coffee, sighing — Edward Kendrick

Alan ... " Shelby kept her voice mild and patient as excitement ripped through her. "I've already told you, nothing's going to get started between us.Don't take it personally," she added with a half smile. "You're very attractive.I'm just not interested."
"No?" With his free hand, he circled her wrist. "Your pulse is racing."
Her annoyance was quick, mirrored in the sudden flare in her eyes, the sudden jerk of her chin. "I'm always happy to boost an ego," she said evenly. "Now,I'll get your shirt."
"Boost it a little higher," he suggested and drew her closer. — Nora Roberts

Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted.
The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person? — Daphne Scholinski

Music is my life. I love doing it, so I just do it nonstop all day. And with dancing, I wanted to put on a show for people. I don't want to just be sitting there doing nothing, so that's when I started to dance. — Austin Mahone

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. — Laurie Penny

That "I don't give a darn" attitude is probably why I've shot so many good final rounds over the years when I started the day a few shots behind with nothing to lose ... and maybe that's why I've shot so many bad last rounds when I was ahead and knew I couldn't afford a mistake. — Jack Nicklaus

If you vent anger with the object of spreading your toxic feelings, the result will have nothing to do with healing. Your anger is your weapon. On the other hand, if you release anger the way you'd expel a rock from your shoe, your intention clearly has healing behind it. Once the anger starts flowing, both of these alternatives might feel the same. Anger is anger. But if you have a healing intention, two things will happen: you will feel more peaceful after your anger has been released, and you will feel like an old, fixed belief in enemies and injustice has started to move. — Deepak Chopra

I never had good hair growing up - just had the worst nothing hair - and until I started being rough with it, even 'til this day I'm actually pretty rough with it, and ever since I've been like that it's been pretty darn good to me. — Lights

Check it out-this is a copy of a painting of a Greek High Priestess named Calliope. it says she was also the Poet Laureate after Sappho. Doesn't she look exactly like Cher?'
Wow, that's insane. She does look just like young Cher,' Erin said.
Yeah, before she started wearing those white wigs. What the hell's up with that?' Shaunee said.
Damien gave the Twins a look. 'There is nothing wrong with Cher. Absolutely. Nothing.'
Uh-oh,' Shaunee said.
Stepped on a gay nerve,' Erin agreed. — P.C. Cast

Dex gasped, his back arching at the feel of strong hands kneading his ass cheeks, pushing them apart as the head of his lover's slick cock aligned itself then pushed in slowly, the pressure both painful and exhilarating. God, it had been too long. Dex palmed his erection as he was entered, his lover burying deep inside him inch by inch. Hard muscles pressed up against his back, lowering Dex onto the mattress, his breath coming out ragged as his lover buried himself to the root and started rotating his hips, drawing out then pushing back in painfully slow. Dex moaned, his stomach filled with butterflies, the anticipation building like nothing he'd ever felt before. His whole body was on fire, and he writhed with need beneath the deliciously heavy weight. He couldn't remember Lou feeling like this. Had it always felt this damn good? Dex moaned when lips pressed against his skin beneath his ear. "Easy there, Rookie." Dex's — Charlie Cochet

Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked back to the beginning, the reason is simple, I couldn't understand the beginning until I had reached the end. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, too much you would never tell. I could sell these things. People want to buy them, but I'd set all this on fire first. She'd like that, that's what she would do. She'd make it just to burn it. I couldn't afford this one, but the beginning deserves something special. But how do I show that nothing, not a taste, not a smell, not even the color of the sky, has ever been as clear and sharp as it was when I belonged to her. I don't know how to express the being with someone so dangerous is the last time I felt safe ... (White Oleander) — Janet Fitch

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. — Steve Martin

When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked. — Larry Ellison

I grin at her enthusiasm. "Did you like the little gun-finger I flashed you after that goal? All for you, baby."
She grins back. "Sorry to burst your bubble, but you were actually pointing at the old guy a few seats over. He totally freaked out and started shouting to everyone that you scored that goal for him, and then I heard him ask his wife if maybe you knew that he was just diagnosed with diabetes, so I didn't have the heart to tell him who the goal was really for."
I break down in laughter. "Why is nothing ever simple with us?"
"Hey," she protests. "We're more interesting this way."
I can't argue with that. — Elle Kennedy

I constantly meet people who are doubtful, generally without due reason, about their potential capacity [as mathematicians]. The first test is whether you got anything out of geometry. To have disliked or failed to get on with other [mathematical] subjects need mean nothing; much drill and drudgery is unavoidable before they can get started, and bad teaching can make them unintelligible even to a born mathematician. — John Edensor Littlewood

I walked over to the paper and bent as the pencil began scribbling across it.
You look OK. Are you OK?
"Liz?" A stupid question. Liz was the only poltergeist I knew. But if she was here, that meant. "Chloe?" My heart started thudding again. "Where's Chloe. Did they - ?"
She's outside.
I took a deep breath. "Good. Okay. My dad's there, too?"
I watched the paper. Nothing happened.
"Liz? My dad is with her, right? She called him, didn't she?"
Couldn't.
"What do you mean she couldn't. She has her cell - " No, she didn't. We hadn't taken them into the forest. If Chloe had managed to follow me straight from there ...
I swore. "Tell her to get to a pay phone. Call collect. Get my dad and - "
No time. They're packing the van.
"Then you ride with me. You can find out where we go, and return and Chloe - "
We're getting you out.
"What? No. Absolutely not. Tell Chloe - "
Girls rule :D — Kelley Armstrong

In 2001 New York came under attack, and thousands of people simply evaporated, leaving behind only dust and bits of gold Rolex watches. We were told that we had nothing to worry about, that we should go shopping. I was eager to please my country, for shopping had long been an answer for me, but what I couldn't pay for, I stole. I started to accumulate stuff I felt would make me feel whole: I surrounded myself with symbols of status. I believed the TV commercials with all my heart. I felt that those material things I was being sold defined me. — Joe Pantoliano

My wife, Sharon, and I started with nothing when we got married. I was driving a 1902 Pinto and eating off a card table. — Dave Ramsey

It seems like as we stand there I'm watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father's old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson's face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current. — Lauren Oliver

Back when I was five, I thought my mom was being mean to me, so I decided to run away. Carried my slingshot with me because I was a big strong man, you see. Could take care of myself. I believe I also took a flashlight and a package of Oreos."
Despite my embarrassement, I couldn't help smiling. "I think you packed better than I did."
I swaggered out of the house where we were staying and took myself all the way to ... the far corner of the backyard. There I made my stand. Stayed out there all day, until it started to reain. I hadn't thought about taking an umbrella."
The best laid plans." I sighed.
I know. It's tragic. I cam back in, all wet and my stomach aching from eating about twenty Oreo, and my mom
who is a smart lady even is she drives me nuts
well, she acted like nothing happened." Lucas shrugged. — Claudia Gray

A man in his early prime contemplates on life, shattered by the distortions of society he gazes ahead in time. There were vows of happiness and fairy tale beginnings. Now there is nothing of that sort; now there is nothing that started the tales so bright. It's after all this while that he understands why fairy tales begin with 'once upon a time'... — Adhish Mazumder

Jennifer," he said, his voice sharp with dawning alarm, "where are you going?"
A moment later, Aunt Elinor looked down from the gallery above and cheerfully replied, "She is going to have your baby, your grace."
The serfs in the hall turned to exchange smiling glances, and one of them dashed off to spread the news to the scullions in the kitchen.
"Do not," Aunt Elinor warned in direst tones when Royce started up the stairs, "come up here. I am not inexperienced in these matters, and you will only be in the way. And do not worry," she added breezily, noting Royce's draining color. "The fact that Jenny's mother died in childbirth is nothing to be concerned about." Royce's tankard crashed to the stone floor. — Judith McNaught

The crowd started cheering as soon as they seen him, he was one of them, a local lad from Lancashire. In the first round, I tried to put him away but my punches had nothing in them, I might as well as been hitting thin air. It was then that I knew I had to really dig deep if I wanted to hear the final bell; I threw a clever little corkscrew right. A great shot, but ineffective unless it hits with some vigour, which it didn't! — Stephen Richards

I don't know what you think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what's the point of butter without bread? (Why are all these examples of FOODS?!!?!?!?!?!?!) Anyway by myself I'm nothing special. But with you I could be. — Jodi Picoult

In the context of the English language, there were many more important words than "in." There were fancy words, historic words, words that meant life or death. There were multi-syllabic tongue-twisters that required a sort out before speaking, and mission-critical pivotals that started wars or ended wars ... and even poetic nonsensicals that were like a symphony as they left the lips. Generally speaking, "in" did not play with the big boys. In fact, it barely had much of a definition at all, and, in the course of its working life, was usually nothing but a bridge, a conduit for the heavy lifters in any given sentence. There was, however, one context in which that humble little two-letter, one-syllable jobbie was a BFD. Love. The difference between someone "loving" somebody versus being "in love" was a curb to the Grand Canyon. The head of a pin to the entire Midwest. An exhale to a hurricane. — J.R. Ward

If I could set a world record, it would be that I have 150 business partners, all with thriving businesses of their own that started with nothing and I made the difference to make them all billionaires. — Barbara Corcoran

A little-known fact: Next to nothing is impossible. Actually, nothing itself is impossible. Nothing is the absence of all things. But that absence is, itself, a thing, and - well, the logic's so screwy you could uncork a wine bottle with it.
The point is, most of the stuff people say is impossible is not at all impossible. Starting a car that's already started, that's im- possible. Traveling to where you are is impossible. Sleeping through Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is impossible (and so is listening to it).
And that's the list. Taking a neon-blue dump? Well... You'd think, but really it's just improbable.
To sum up a wildly unmanageable concept: most things we call impossible are actually just things that require more effort than we're willing to give. And even when it comes to impossible, it's really only the Rick Astley that nobody will try if they're given a few slices of pizza. — Daniel Younger

When I first started on television, people, and even my own manager at the time, would tell me I had to make all of these changes. But you have to stand up and say, 'There's nothing wrong with me or my shape or who I am; you're the one with the problem!' And when you can really believe that, all of a sudden other people start believing, too. — Jennifer Lopez

It's so easy to think that because you can't do something extraordinary, you can't do anything at all. It's easy to decide that if you can't overhaul your entire life in one fell swoop, then you might as well just do nothing. We started where we could, with what we had. I hope it's just the beginning for us. — Shauna Niequist

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even. — Will Rogers