Unwilled Quotes & Sayings

I've learned never to discount possibilities because of the odds - because all things are possible with God. — Irene Hannon

Confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones. — Leslie Jamison

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. — Rebecca Solnit

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this. — Marilynne Robinson

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment. — George Saunders

The old philosophy was that parents, especially mothers, caused their kids to become schizophrenic. Now we see that when a kid is this crazy, he'll make the family begin to seem crazy. — John R. Talbott

This new condition, this unwilled silence, had fallen over him ten days ago. The day Cass had gone into the hospital. The day she had fallen into a coma. — Pseudonymous Bosch

The ache became longing, longing became nostalgia, nostalgia became fondness, and after a while he could see the funny side of it. A long while. — Charlaine Harris

Occasionally, on purpose, Dr. Lecter drops a teacup to shatter on the floor. He is satisfied when it does not gather itself together. For many months now, he has not seen Mischa in his dreams.
Someday perhaps a cup will come together. Or somewhere Starling may hear a crossbow string and come to some unwilled awakening, if indeed she even sleeps. — Thomas Harris

The candles burned The moon went down The polished hill The milky town Transparent, weightless, luminous Uncovering the two of us On that fundamental ground Where love's unwilled, unleashed, unbound And half the perfect world is found. — Leonard Cohen

To commit to loving a person for five minutes is easy. To commit to loving a person for the rest of your life, after you have met them, is a strong commitment. But when you commit to loving a person before you meet them and for the rest of your life, you have made the strongest commitment one can make to a relationship. — Tom Houck

Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill. — Jim Highsmith

Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable. — Joseph Epstein

He didn't want to fight for her. He wanted her to want him, and she didn't. — Sara Raasch

Beware of becoming a pawn in your own game. — Marty Rubin

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. — Ayn Rand

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose. — Tao Lin

I wholeheartedly support umbilical stem cell research, but also support embryonic stem cell research. — Eliot Engel