Telling Us Quotes & Sayings

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am. — John Marsden

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us. — Joanna Scott

People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it. — Mignon McLaughlin

I'm getting my stuff," he said, and bolted for the steps.
"You don't have to move out," Astrid called after him.
Sam stopped halfway up the steps. "Oh, I'm sorry. Is that the voice of the council telling me where I can go?"
"There's no point having a town council if you think you don't have to listen to it," Astrid said. She was using her patient voice, trying to calm the situation. "Sam, if you ignore us, no one will pay attention."
"Guess what, Astrid, they're already ignoring you. The only reason anyone pays any attention to you and the others is because they're scared of Edilio's soldiers." He thumped his chest. "And even more scared of me. — Michael Grant

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react. — C.S. Lewis

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look around ourselves, we don't know how to understand, we are all like this, all of us, you, and I, and everyone! And you aren't offended by my telling you straight to your faces that you are absurd? There is the basic stuff of life in your, isn't there? You know, I believe it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, we can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection! To reach perfection there must first be much we do not understand. And if we understand too quickly we will probably not understand very well. I tell this to you who have been able to understand so much and - do not understand.'
p. 577 — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Most writers stick to what they know. The black experience is our experience, so it's not that challenging for us. That's why sometimes you'll see writers that start off telling black stories, but later branch out into other material. People say they "sell out." No, they evolve as writers. — Lena Waithe

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?' — Nicolas Roeg

So what do I do? What do we do? How do we move forward when we are tired and afraid? What do we do when the voice in our head is yelling that WE ARE NEVER GONNA MAKE IT? How do we drag ourselves through the muck when our brain is telling us youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop? Well, the first thing we do is take our brain out and put it in a drawer. Stick it somewhere and let it tantrum until it wears itself out. You may still hear the brain and all the shitty things it is saying to you, but it will be muffled, and just the fact that it is not in your head anymore will make things seem clearer. — Amy Poehler

As soon as you have finished telling us anything, you seem to be ashamed of what you've said," Aglaia observed suddenly. "Why is that? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s. — Michael Stipe

They were quiet for a time, alone with their thoughts, but then John sat up straight, struck by a thought. "There's a passage in Exodus - God tells Moses, 'No one can see My face, but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back.' Remember that?"
Emilio nodded, listening.
Well I always thought that was a physical metaphor," John said, "but, you know - I wonder now if it isn't really about time? Maybe that was God's way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on ... we'll understand. We'll see where He was: we'll see His back. — Mary Doria Russell

We were always told we were one step behind Deep Purple, one step behind Led Zeppelin, one step behind everybody. Our manager didn't want to let us know how popular we were. It's only after we did Ozzfest that people started telling me stuff. I thought they were taking the piss. People would come up to me and go, Respect. — Ozzy Osbourne

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story. — Oprah Winfrey

When people used to complain to the Buddha that they were upset, telling him, "Our children upset us; our partner agitates us," his simple reply would be, "You are not upset because of your children or your partner; you are upset because you are upsettable. — Eknath Easwaran

Some of us don't like the way you've been telling it. — Stephen Sondheim

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end. — Frederick Buechner

Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we've been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions — Tim Challies

Every day we see allurements of one kind or another that tell us what we have is not enough. Someone or something is forever telling us we need to be more handsome or more wealthy, more applauded or more admired than we see ourselves as being. We are told we haven't collected enough possessions or gone to enough fun places. We are bombarded with the message that on the world's scale of things we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Some days it is if we have been locked in a cubicle of a great and spacious building where the only thing on the TV is a never-ending soap opera entitled Vain Imaginations. But God does not work this way. — Jeffrey R. Holland

In Advance of All Parting is a tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, the poems give us a profound glimpse into how the events of a life can form a center of gravity that fixes the self in its force field. Theres a cold, truth-telling clarity about them that makes them as unsettling as they are beautiful. Ansie Baird has created a richly-drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks. — Chase Twichell

We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn't have made us all different. — Malala Yousafzai

The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ... — Miriam Makeba

But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales. — Lawrence M. Krauss

When has a civilian ever stopped a mass shooting with an AR-15? An AR-15 is a perfect weapon for mass murderers
not so much for self-defense. Would you bring an AR-15 along on a date? To your place of work? To the movies? If not, how can owning an AR-15 save your life in the event of a mass shooting? Why does the NRA keep telling us we need semi-automatic rifles for self-defense? Whose side are they really on? — Quentin R. Bufogle

I've had very little negative pushback. I think people in the Senate know that I have believed, for a number of years, and have been outspoken that we need to listen to what the American people are telling us, and we need to focus more on the well-being of people who make lower wages, $50,000 and below. — Jeff Sessions

The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted. — John Leo

I'm always suspicious of really beautiful women telling us we shouldn't be worried about beauty. — Susan Estrich

When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight. — Aruni Kashyap

Fear is an exciting time. It's our soul telling us that we need to change. Change is powerful. — Jim MacLaren

He found a stuffed animal, a fluffy wolf with bright blue eyes, and was immediately drawn to it. "I want to get this for her. It is telling me it needs to go home with us." Francesca laughed at him. — Christine Feehan

We had convinced ourselves that conditions wouldn't be right for seeing spokes on the lit side of the rings until about 2007, ... But this finding seems to be telling us that conditions on the dark side of the rings are almost as good right now for seeing spokes. — Carolyn Porco

Truth-telling may be an ethic, adopted by photojournalists as a behavior, but experience shows us that it is not embedded in the medium like silver salts in film. — Andy Grundberg

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists. — Fred Thompson

Desandra shrugged her shoulders. "Hey, Kate? Have you thought of walking up to Hugh and telling him that he's got the biggest dick ever?" She spread her arms to the size of a baseball bat.
"No, you think it would work?" I asked.
"It's worth a try. May be he'll be so happy you noticed his pork sword, he'll forget all about trying to kill us."
Pork sword. Kill me now. "I'll think about it."
Ascanio began patting his clothes.
"What?" Derek growled.
"Looking for something to take notes with. — Ilona Andrews

None of this seemed to be getting us much further so far as Widmerpool was concerned. I waited for development. General Conyers did not intend to be hurried. I suspected that he might regard this narrative he was unfolding in so leisurely a manner as the last good story of his life; one that he did not propose to squander in the telling. That was reasonable enough. — Anthony Powell

The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us ... His stubbornness, even defiance, in the face of facts ('stupid things,' he once called them in a memorable slip) was nothing short of splendid ... This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency. — Molly Ivins

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do. — Paul Kingsnorth

The journey of the dark night of the soul is where we learn who we are, without people telling us. — Adele Green

I find it strange that Gisela Gschaider a 1974 immigrant from Germany is on the brexit panel telling us British what we should do . — Alan Sugar

In a 1999 paper, Reiner indicates that his data show that with time and age, children may well know what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and child-rearing to the contrary. They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they are, and we can observe how they act and function even before they tell us. — Deborah Rudacille

When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. — Jeannette Walls

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.
Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.
These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon. — Randall Robinson

I'm just trying to make the point that the story we're telling ourselves is often very different from the story we're telling the people around us. — Donald Miller

The sciences paint an impersonal and objective account of the world, deliberately devoid of "meaning", telling us about origins and mechanics of life, by revealing nothing of the joys and sorrows of living. — John Barrow

The shepherds made haste, partly no doubt from human curiosity, in order to see this great thing that had been announced to them. But surely, too, they were driven by their joy on hearing that now, truly, the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord had been born, the one so long awaited - and they would be the first to see him. How many Christians make haste today, where the things of God are concerned? Surely if anything merits haste - so the evangelist is discreetly telling us - then it is the things of God. — Pope Benedict XVI

I learned that one person hurting another really is like a hand curling into a fist to smash the foot. And that all that really matters is family and other people. And that the purpose of life is to find the Light of God, but not the light from some old guy with a beard sitting up there judging us. The light is the love we give each other on our way back home. And that God wouldn't mind if we spent a little less time telling him how great he is and a little more time loving each other, and not just the people we're supposed to love, but everyone. — Paul H. Magid

Another way to put an end to self-rejection is ask yourself whether what you're telling yourself is what a friend would say, or what an enemy would. Friends are supportive. Enemies put us down and undermine our confidence. So if you say something that an enemy would say, stop. Answer back, 'I'm going to be supportive of myself. As a friend, what I have to say to myself is ... ' Then say something supportive. — Mira Kirshenbaum

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way. — Alister E. McGrath

But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you've thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn't believe it, Mr. Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded ... right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that's what we mean by love, Mr. Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don't want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That's beautiful. — Richard Flanagan

You'd be doing us both a favor.' 'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.' Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. — David Foster Wallace

Theon," I said, "are you ... asking me to marry you right now?" When I turned back to him, his eyes met mine with a kind of evenness I hadn't anticipated. There was no fear. No embarrassment. Only honesty. "I am telling you to marry me right now." It felt like it'd been years since we'd seen each other, and I remembered him - everything which had brought us to this point - vividly now. My heart ached, and my throat became tight with joy. "Okay," I whispered. — Bella Forrest

George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn't grow on trees. This is what made our country great, Peter. Now George Washington's picture is on every dollar bill. There is an important lesson to be learned from all this. — Paul Auster

If you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that thunder will deafen us, then one of those things will turn out to be true and you'll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future. — Bernard Cornwell

Stop listening to people telling us we need to hate each other — Hank Green

I can tell you that "Just cheer up" is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It's pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to "just walk it off." Some people don't understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having "a case of the Mondays." Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I'm keeping myself from recovering because I really "just need to cheer up and smile." That's when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached. — Jenny Lawson

Delilah, I care about Leah already and I hope she's wonderful, but no matter what, you and Dominique will always be my babies. You're telling me to calm down, but here you are scared for the same reason. Now I get how silly the way I was feeling is. No matter what Delilah, nothing will ever change between us. It won't be any different than when Aunt Sandra, Sabrina, Brooke or Tally became part of the family. We'll just be a bigger unit. — Ella Fox

327 men on board, and 186 men, some of them close friends, died that day. I was one of the 141 that made it out alive. I'll bet you're wondering why I'm telling you this - you're probably thinking I'm drifting again - so I might as well get to it. On the raft, with this big battle raging all around us, I realized that I wasn't afraid anymore. All of a sudden, I knew I'd be okay because I knew that Clara and I weren't done yet, and this feeling of peace just came over me. You can call it shell shock if you want, but I know what I know, and right there, under an exploding sky filled with gun smoke, I remembered — Nicholas Sparks

You're ... very resilient, for someone who's dead." Her voice was a little steadier.
"And I think you're far stronger than any of us were prepared to give you credit for." I kept shooting my mouth off like an idiot, telling her things I'd been ordered not to, and she kept going with it. I was impressed, honestly. — Lia Habel

I'm a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear ... we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn't. That's the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters. — George R R Martin

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. — Frederick C. Beiser

Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer's use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader's malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Girlie, you don't have to tell us what happened, but I'm telling you this. First thing we're doing is getting you karate lessons. No man or boy will ever put his hands on my baby girl again," my father says. — N. Kuhn

We call it keeping up with the Joneses. They buy a boat and we buy a bigger one. They get a new TV and we get a big screen. They start a business and we start planning our articles of incorporation and the first stock release. And while we're so busy keeping up, we ignore our soul, the inner voice, that's telling us that it really wants to teach children to read. While it helps to identify with each other, we're not the same. So why compare ourselves on the basis of material things? Are you walking a path with heart in your own life, regardless of what others have? — Melody Beattie

When we're young nothing offends us, except adults telling us what should. Then when we become adults, nothing offends us, except we are offended on behalf of our young. — Craig Stone

All the stories we've been telling about the presence of an evil power in the world, all the dark characters that have sent chills down our spines and given us restless nights - they are spoken to us as warnings.
There is evil cast around us ... there is an evil force in this world. — John Eldredge

In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel. — Michael Schur

Critical thinking is essential to make sense of our world, especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us loudly that they know best. We need to be able to look at the evidence and work out whether we agree with them. — Helen Czerski

You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception. — Vladimir Nabokov

Surgery is nature's way of telling us to slow down. — Dan John

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun. — Eric Idle

I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be. — Daniel Handler

I steer clear of telling. I can't come out with it; the outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know my story I talk freely about us ... but with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don't want to shock or make anyone distressed ... I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times, but I can't just drop it on someone, I feel. It's too horrifying, too huge. — Sonali Deraniyagala

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be. — Ellen Page

You weren't going to tell us about Orsay?"
"I didn't say I - "
"You don't get to decide that, Sam. You're not the only one in charge anymore. Okay?"
Astrid had an icy sort of anger. A cold fury that manifested itself in tight lips and blazing eyes and short, carefully enunciated sentences.
"But it's okay for all of us to lie to everyone in Perdido Beach?" Sam shot back.
"We're trying to keep kids from killing themselves," Astrid said. "That's a little different from you just deciding not to tell the council that there's a crazy girl telling people to kill themselves."
"So not telling you something is a major sin, but lying to a couple of hundred people and trashing Orsay at the same time, that's fine? — Michael Grant

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear? — P.D. James

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand. — Adrienne Rich

Voices surround us, always telling us to move faster. It may be our boss, our pastor, our parents, our wives, our husbands, our politicians, or, sadly, even ourselves. So we comply. We increase the speed. We live life in the fast lane because we have no slow lanes anymore. Every lane is fast, and the only comfort our culture can offer is more lanes and increased speed limits. The result? Too many of us are running as fast as we can, and an alarming number of us are running much faster than we can sustain. — Mike Yaconelli

He closed by telling us the real battle is won in the mind. It's won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can. — Marcus Luttrell

I have never, so far, in all the studies I have done, met a contradiction between what the human, experimental and natural sciences are telling us and the Islamic rules. In fact, the opposite is true: anything that is coming from the modern sciences is helping me better understand the text. It's not a contradiction. It's a relation. — Tariq Ramadan

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

I have a very precise memory of the local train, the hot bricks and copper boxes filled with boiling water to warm us up. Someone in another compartment was playing the guitar. To the rhythm of the train's rocking movement, I heard the chorus "Porque yo to quiero, porque yo to quiero," and I traveled toward my Tonio telling myself, "Because I love you ... because I love you — Consuelo De Saint-Exupery

We know the road of lack of recognition, of people telling us that we can't headline a movie because black women don't translate overseas, that every time we try to break the glass ceiling, people say no, people push back. And it's everything that people don't see out there. — Viola Davis

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way. — June Jordan

We have decided to diversify agriculture; we decided to develop our tourism sector. We have decided to develop our mining sector. So these are some of the things we're telling Malawians: we say this is what we need to do in order for us to get out of this total dependence on aid. — Joyce Banda

Why was the painting made? What ideas of the artist can we sense? Can the personality and sensitivity of the artist be felt when studying the work? What is the artist telling us about his or her feelings about the subject? What response do I get from the message of the artist? Do I know the artist better because of the painting? — Gerald Brommer

The kiss has started something bigger between us, and the lies I'm telling Stirling will only get worse from here on in. — K.C. Finn

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day. — Bruce Feiler

If people use Chrome, we make less money on our service and that's fine by us because that is fair competition. I wouldn't put Google on a pedestal for competition, but they aren't telling users not to use OpenDNS. — David Ulevitch

And we offer each other words of consolation or distraction or encouragement when we see that one or the other of us is in need of such words. We also miss each other (vaguely) when we're not together, she's one of those people (in everyone's life there are four or five such people whose loss one truly feels) to whom you're used to telling everything that happens to you, that is, one of those people you think about when something happens to you, be it funny or dramatic, and for whom you store up events and anecdotes. You accept misfortunes gladly because you know you can tell those five people about them afterwards. — Javier Marias

We're baseball players. We don't need guys telling us, 'Hey, you need to hurry. Hey, you need to do this. Hey, you need to step up.' We are professionals, we can do that without anybody telling us. I'm OK with it, but we need to do it on our own. — Bengie Molina

I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture. — Holly Hunter

telling us that the death has occurred
in the family home
or after a long illness
or after a short illness
or suddenly
or in England
or peacefully at their home in
all the innumerable ways and places in which anyone can die — Mike McCormack

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian - the mythology resides deep in my bones - and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky. — Derrick Jensen

Emotions, or feelings, have a function. They tell us something. They are a signal....Anger tells us that our boundaries have been violated. Much like a nation's radar defense system, angry feelings serve as an "early warning system" telling us we're in danger of being injured or controlled. — John Townsend

We find it easy to believe that praise is sincere: why should anyone lie in telling us the truth? — Jean Rostand

We did some jumping at the start of the show. We went out without telling anyone - and the studio liked to kill us. They were threatened with cancellation of their production insurance. — Ken Curtis

Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, 'What does God want to tell us?' If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of 'magic' book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, 'the lively oracles of God'. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation. — Rowan Williams

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.
It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. — Oscar Wilde

The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are. — Flemming Rose

For years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone? — Anne Graham