Thought I Mattered To You Quotes & Sayings

I had less control over my thoughts than I'd have liked. The little ring hung around my neck, under my gown, where nobody could see it. When I was alone, I took it out sometimes, wondering how he had judged the size, with nothing but my swollen, knotted fingers to go by. Wondering if my hands would ever be as they once were, small, white, and fine. By the time that happened, if it ever did, I would be long gone from here. I would have left behind both husband and wedding ring. It mattered little whether the size were right or no. Yet, when I thought this, I found my hand closing around the ring as if I did not want to let it go. It's mine, something inside me would say. — Juliet Marillier

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother's old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.
... And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.
... She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory. — Rebecca McNutt

It's funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can't put back together and wouldn't want to even if you could. — Rebecca Harris

I never stood for any president in my life, never voted, before Barack Obama. It changed my life to vote. It starts there with me. I never cared for politics before Barack Obama. I never thought it mattered to people like me. — Nas

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really. — Rebecca McNutt

The Bible is not, in other words, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands - though it includes plenty of both. The Bible is not simply the record of what various people thought as they struggled to know God and follow him, though it is that as well. It is not simply the record of past revelations, as though what mattered were to study such things in the hopes that one might have one for oneself. It is the book whose whole narrative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God's people risen from the dead, this should come not as a surprise but as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along. — N. T. Wright

You are already part of a family," Desari reminded him,her body brushing his, her arms circling his waist from behind. She had materialized out of nowhere,her presence filling the healing chamber.
She was there. Completing him. His air. His heart.The part of his soul that really lived and loved and mattered. Without conscious thought he sent up a quick prayer of thanks that he had been granted such a priceless treasure when he felt so undeserving of her.
Julian loved the way she smelled. He inhaled, and her scent washed over him, clean and sexy. "This mess? With all these males?" Julian allowed a low, rumbling growl to escape. "This is no family. This is a man's nightmare."
Desari deliberately moved against him, her body soft and pliant with invitation. "Is that what you think?"
"What I think is"-Julian circled her slender throat with his large hand in mock threat- "you are deliberately tempting me when I have important, pressing business to atttend to. — Christine Feehan

A friend of yours?" Justiran's voice was detached and clipped.

"No," said Romeo. "But I've seen his heart. He's a good person."

"Do you know he put a compulsion on you?"

He forced me to, thought Paris, but he couldn't get the words out.

"Yes," said Romeo, "but . . ." His voice grew soft and wondering. "He loved Juliet. I'm sure of it."

Romeo was an idiot. Romeo thought nothing mattered besides who had what kind of pretty feelings about Juliet, and he was going to get them both killed by a necromancer. — Rosamund Hodge

Because, though I'd seen and felt just a fraction of all the love in the world, I knew that when people thought of love they thought of moments. Whether or not a marriage worked out, or if they stayed together after graduation, or if they did go to the big dance together, the story's end mattered less, and the highlights in between mattered more. Those are what lingered, and what people can go back to, even when they had nothing left. — Mina V. Esguerra

As a teenager, I was teased at school about my height and long legs, but now they are my best assets. Kids can be mean. When I was at school, I considered myself ugly, but that was when I was silly enough to believe that what other people thought mattered. Now I think I am pretty. I'm not beautiful. There is a difference. — Jasmine Guinness

Shadow was stretched out full length on the seat in the back. He felt like two people, or more than two. There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something. He had moved. It wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't want to live, but he did want to live, and that make all the difference. He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive. And, for a moment he thought that the whole thing was funny, just the funniest thing in the world; and he wondered if Laura would appreciate the joke. — Neil Gaiman

...cool and nonchalant, like none of this mattered anyway. Is that what guys really wanted? Or was it just what the girls thought the guys wanted? — Jodi Picoult

I had never fully understood our tradition- why women wailed so loudly and for so long after someone died. It was only now I realized that women wailed more on account of everything they never had a chance to say. All the questions they never asked. All the times we never really talked about the things that mattered most.
It was the one time that women could be angry. Be loud. Say anything. Yell. Purge the soul. And no one thought less of them. Everyone expected it. — Eucabeth A. Odhiambo

The Yognul people of Australia thought the constellation represented a canoe. But as we move into the southern hemisphere, a marked change in the nature of the constellations becomes apparent. The southern constellations were named by explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of great heroes and gods, we have the keels of ships, sextants, telescopes and the like, things that mattered most to the people of this era. What constellations would we put in the night sky today? Indeed, when human beings go out and colonise the stars, what constellations will they put up in their night skies? — Paul Abel

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight. — Siri Hustvedt

Try to remember the moment when all the stupid innocent things you thought about life and love, all the things you thought mattered, all the things you though were true ... try to remember when they all turned out to be lies. - Kyle — Chad Kultgen

Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know. — Tao Lin

I didn't have a chance to buy you anything, she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered. — Annie Proulx

Since the time I had ridden Vodalus's charger out of Saltus, I had supposed in my innocence that all mounts might be divided into two sorts: the highbred and swift, and the cold-blooded and slow. The better, I thought, ran with the graceful ease, almost, of a coursing cat; the worse moved so tardily that it hardly mattered how they did it. It used to be a maxim of one of Thecla's tutors that all two-valued systems are false, and I discovered on that ride a new respect for him. My benefactor's mount belonged to that third class (which I have since discovered is fairly extensive) comprising those animals that outrace the birds but seem to run with legs of iron upon a road of stone. Men have numberless advantages over women and for that — Gene Wolfe

In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don't measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right. — Kristin Kimball

People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered. — James Lee Burke

Eddie Drood: Is this why we become agents? To play games, to chase after secrets that are rarely worth all the blood spilled on their behalf ... To end up stabbed in the back, just when you thought you'd won, bleeding out in some nameless backstreet ... With most people never even knowing who you were, or what you did, or why it mattered? — Simon R. Green

Sometimes a radio station will get ONE phone call from ONE person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the stating thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics
and takes my records off the air. I object that.
It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are? — Frank Zappa

In the sciences, looking good was usually a negative. It implied you wasted time on outdoor activities instead of building something useful. Even using hair product or makeup implied misguided priorities. Like you thought how things looked mattered, instead of how they worked. We liked to look at attractive people. We expected it of our movie stars and TV characters. But we did not respect it. We knew physical attractiveness was inversely correlated with intelligence, because look at us. — Max Barry

Family. It was just a word ... Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant ... It was a thing everyone had an opinion about - that it was all you had when you didn't have anything else, that family was there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of these words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and get away with it. Family wasn't more reliable than marriages or friendships ... maybe less ... The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. — Paolo Bacigalupi

I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So, when I thought June might take you away, I didn't know what to do. I felt like she was taking everything that mattered to me. I felt like she was taking away from you all the things that I didn't have. That's why I'm sorry. I'm sorry because you shouldn't have to be everything to me. I had you, but I'd forgotten that I had myself too. — Marie Lu

That's when I finally got it. I finally understood. It wasn't the thought that counted. It was the actual execution that mattered, the showing up for somebody. The intent behind it wasn't enough. Not for me. Not anymore. It wasn't enough to know that deep down, he loved me. You had to actually say it to somebody, show them you cared. And he just didn't. Not enough. — Jenny Han

But it was the man beside me who'd proven to me that love was worth everything. That my life, my heart, had room in it for more love that I ever thought possible. There were dozens of reasons to agree to have a child, but as far as I was concerned, just then, with his breath on my face and the warmth of his skin on mine, there was only one that mattered. Love. That was reason enough. — Megan Hart

You and your dyke music, Erica remarked once. I hadn't thought of them as dykes, my beloved Indigo Girls, my Michelle Shocked, Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Le Tigre, my Ani DiFranco. I just knew that at those shows I was whole and right. I was a person. I mattered. I was in fact not stupid or fat or ugly or lame; I was smart and valid and right and well. I had a fucking voice. The women at those shows weren't gussied up like geishas. They talked of art, life, politics. They felt entitled to feelings and opinions and rage and poetry and laughter and tears and bodies. There was dissent. Looking "cute" was low on the list. Practical shoes were high. It mattered only that one articulate oneself properly — Elisa Albert

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. — Amy Tan

I thought you were gone forever, I thought you'd walked away from everything, because I failed, because I destroyed the only thing that ever mattered to me. I waited for you to come, but you didn't. — Alexandra Adornetto

Since I met you,' he said, 'I've had no eyes and no thought for any other girl. When I was away nothing mattered about my coming back but this. If there was one thing I was sure of, it wasn't what I'd been taught by anyone else to believe, not what I learned from other people was the truth, but the truth that I felt in myself- about you.'

'Don't say any more.' She had gone very white. But for once her frailness did not stop him. It had to come out now.

'It isn't very pretty to have been made a fool of by one's own feelings,' he said. 'To take childish promises and build a-a castle out of them. And yet- even now sometimes I can't believe that all the things we said to each other were so trivial or so immature. Are you sure you felt so little for me as you pretend? — Winston Graham

I'm such a perfectionist. I can be like, 'This has to be like this. And this, and this and this.' But then you realize a lot of things that you thought mattered, they really don't matter. — Ciara

Once she exclaimed, "But I always thought that sorceresses were evil!"
"What do you mean 'evil'?"
Lynet has never considered the question. "You know," she said, after a moment, "unfriendly to people."
"People!" repeated Morgana derisively. "As if humans were all that mattered. Just once I'd like to see people judged by how friendly they are to sorceresses. — Gerald Morris

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously. — Claire Tomalin

I loved Trevor wholly. In all the good ways that made me feel alive and special and important. But also, in the bad ways. The ways that shut me off from others and left me alone with my pain. The ways that had me keep secrets. I loved Trevor in all the ways that I thought mattered, even though I knew that I didn't. — Steph Campbell

So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn't make myself, God did. And I wrote like he'd invited me to share my true "self" with the world. — Donald Miller

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles. — Peter Senge

The others set up all this because they want me to know that what I did was important - important enough to burn coal.

But it doesn't feel important. Not like it should.

I'm reminded now, watching the coals burn, of why I never feel like I truly belong to Winter. I want to understand all this as deeply as Sir and Alysson and everyone else, a reminder of a time when everything was how it should be, but all this is wasted on me, someone whose only connection to Winter lies in stories told by others. I thought that if I had a hand in saving Winter, I'd feel like I deserve it, the kingdom everyone else remembers. I thought I could fill the void left by my lack of memories with purpose. That's what I've always told myself: if I matter to Winter, Winter will matter to me. And today I mattered to my kingdom.

Then why don't I feel anything more for the fire pit than the slight burn on my finger? — Sara Raasch

Buchenwald and Dachau had knocked him crooked, and he'd never been really straight afterward. Yet he had done his best in small ways - volunteering in the city's soup kitchen, working with kids from homes that were poor, broken, or both - to straighten some things. He still thought things like that mattered; even two bits in a bum's upturned hat mattered. — Stephen King

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn't be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I'm not saying I'm a superhero. I'm not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I'm just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered. — Nina LaCour

What mattered was they were never getting out.
He was safe.
That was what he thought then. Of course, he also thought he would never have a drink, not after seeing what it had done to his father.
Sometimes we just get it wrong. — Stephen King

Then don't give up. One day you'll look around and realize that all the things you thought mattered so much, really didn't matter much at all.- Gran — J. Sterling

For a moment, the color leeched from his face, then he blinked and smiled. Margaret, for a second I thought it was your mama standing there. He gave a gruff laugh. You look lovely, my dear.
Her father's praise brought tears to her eyes. His approving words came far too infrequently. Was her appearance all that mattered to him-to anyone? It seemed to be the way of the world. No one cared about who she was on the inside. No one saw the heart longing to be loved and to love in return. She sometimes even doubted God's love for her. — Colleen Coble

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare. — Victor Hugo

In this city, the victors had delusions of grandeur. It was visual. Across the street from the hotel stood City Hall, sporting an oversized Serb flag that hung from the roof to the ground, a hundred feet tall, fifty feet wide, three horizontal stripes of blue, white and red, so large that only a strong breeze could make it flap. The flag, hanging over a building where, fifty years earlier, Kurt Waldheim worked as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, was meant as a projection of Serb nationalism, as though size were all that mattered, rather than content. I had never thought of flags as weapons, but in Bosnia, as in the rest of Europe, they were becoming the deadliest weapons of all.

p. 80 — Peter Maass

He set off right away, glad of his boots, an old army pair. The leather had outlasted three complete sets of stitching. They were the most comfortable footwear he had ever known. There's no happiness like a good pair of boots, he thought as he walked. Boots, if they were just exactly right for you, changed the way you felt. In fact, there was no happiness like marching alone up a track towards evening in the desert. His limbs tingled. For a while he didn't care if he ever found what he was looking for, if he had to give it all up tomorrow. Nothing mattered but this march through the wide open air of the desert hillside. — Henry Shukman

What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing! — Elizabeth Von Arnim

They were together, and that was all that mattered. The food, the house, the cars, the money, the power, all inconsequential. She would tear it all down herself with her bare hands if she had to, because her family was alive, well, and surrounding her in love. It was how it should have been that night, and it was the last thing Abigail thought or saw in her minds eye as she faded off into the oblivion and unknown of death. — Stephen Vaughn

The people of Jesus' day thought holy men were unapproachable. But Jesus' work was in the marketplace. He made people feel welcome, and that they had a place. His life was a constant demonstration that there were only two things that really mattered in this life-God and people. They were the only things that lasted forever. — Rebecca Pippert

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted,
and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer. — Ariel Schrag

When it's all said and done, the only thing that matter in life are so damn simple. Family, friends. being safe and well. I think before the war a lot of people got sucked in by the crap on TV. They thought having the right shoes or the right jeans or the right car really mattered. Boy were we ever dumb. — John Marsden

The results of the irrevocable decisions in her life, the commitments she had leaped into without thought, with only the sure and perfect knowledge that it mattered not where her feet landed because her heart was certain.
p 186 — Erica Bauermeister

Never forget those first five minutes, when you thought how much you loved each other was the only thing that mattered. Because in truth it is the only thing that matters. That love is what gets you through all the other stuff. — Lisa Unger

He kissed her, slow and tender, like she mattered. Because she did, at least to him. And she thought she might even be able to believe it. — Stacia Kane

Stevenson had noble ideas
as did the young Franklin for that matter. But Stevenson felt that the way to implement them was to present himself as a thoughtful idealist and wait for the world to flock to him. He considered it below him, or wrong, to scramble out among the people and ask them what they wanted. Roosevelt grappled voters to him. Stevenson shied off from them. Some thought him too pure to desire power, though he showed ambition when it mattered. — Garry Wills

I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117) — Jean Said Makdisi

I don't get scared very often," he said finally. "I was scared the first morning I woke up and you weren't here. I was scared when you left me after Vegas. I was scared when I thought I was going to have to tell my dad that Trent had died in that building. But when I saw you across the flames in the basement ... I was terrified. I made it to the door, was a few feet from the exit, and I couldn't leave.
"What do you mean? Are you crazy?" I said, my head jerking up to look into his eyes.
"I've never been so clear about anything in my life. I turned around, made my way to that room you were in, and there you were. Nothing else mattered. I didn't even know if we would make it out or not, I just wanted to be where you were, whatever that meant. The only thing I'm afraid of is a life without you, Pigeon."
I leaned up, kissing his lips tenderly. When our mouths parted, I smiled. "Then you have nothing to be afraid of. We're forever. — Jamie McGuire