Yes No Maybe So Quotes & Sayings

Yes, Boss?'
Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.'
She yawned again. 'Everybody knows that.'
Nevermind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible
a time to stand up and be counted
strike a blow for liberty
smite the wicked.'
Ummm ... '
So quit yawning, the time has come.'
She glanced down. 'Maybe I had better get dressed. — Robert A. Heinlein

I wondered quickly if I'd give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no. — Dave Eggers

He thought here you are Joe Bonham lying like a side of beef all the rest of your life and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said come along son we're going to war. So you went. But why? In any other deal even like buying a car or running an errand you had the right to say what's there in it for me? Otherwise you'd be buying bad cars for too much money or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or do that you should stand up and say look mister why should I do this for who am I doing it and what am I going to get out of it in the end? But when a guy comes along and says here come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you've got no rights. You haven't even the right to say yes or no or I'll think it over. There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own. Of — Dalton Trumbo

You'll be all right, Cassie."
"No! I won't be! I need you-"
"Why? What can I give you that others can't?"
"What?"
Green eyes suddenly burned into mine. "It's a simple question. You said you need me. Why?"
"I-I told you. This job-"
"Which you're handling admirably."
"I am not! I couldn't even get to my parents without help!"
"There are other demon experts-Jonas for one."
"But I need you!"
(...)
"Then give me a reason."
"I...there's so many-"
"Name one."
"I can name a hundred-"
"I didn't ask for a hundred; I asked for one. And you can't give it to me."
"Yes, I can!"
"Then do it!"
"I..." I stared at him, because he looked like there was a lot riding on my answer. Maybe everything. — Karen Chance

Yes and no. I thought maybe there could be something more, but I couldn't deny that I still wanted you in the dirtiest ways." He ran his thumb along the seam of my jeans. "Then I watched you crumble. I never expected you to get that call from the doctor and watching you break made me see a whole other side of you. I want to be your knight in shining armor. To take away the pain. I've never felt like this before and whatever we have, I don't want to lose it. I don't care if it's just starting and may be the most fucked up thing. I just want to give it a try. So please call me? — Magan Vernon

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She'd begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley's personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical - the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery. — L.L. Barkat

For it is the role of the parent to express his concerns and then take three steps back. Not one, mind you, not two, but three. Or maybe four. (But by no means five.) Yes, a parent should share his hesitations and then take three or four steps back, so that the child can make a decision by herself - even when that decision may lead to disappointment. — Amor Towles

They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie. "You doing okay?" she murmured. "Yes," said Jamie, a bit too earnestly. "I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well." He gazed soulfully in Nick's direction. "Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!" He regarded Seb for a long moment. "No, I still don't like you," he decided. "Maybe I need another drink." "I don't think so," Nick said. — Sarah Rees Brennan

So far Tris was immune to the new version of the serum we created--it had no effect whatsoever. It's very strange that a person's genes would make them so resistant to mind manipulation of any kind."
"Maybe it's not her genes," I say, shrugging. I switch feet. "Maybe it's some kind of superhuman stubbornness."
"Oh, are we at the insult part of the breakup?" she says. "Because I got in a lot of practice after what happened with Will. I have several choice things to say about her nose."
"We didn't break up." I grin. "But it's nice to know you have such warm feelings for my girlfriend."
"I apologize, I don't know why I jumped to that conclusion." Cara's cheeks flush. "My feelings toward your girlfriend are mixed, yes, but for the most part I have a lot of respect for her."
"I know. I was just kidding. It's nice to see you get flustered every once in a while."
Cara glares at me.
"Besides," I say, "what's wrong with her nose? — Veronica Roth

A pen, you see, you hold it between your thumb and your index finger. No, wait, you hold it however you want. After that, it's not hard, you don't even think about it. Your hands don't exist anymore. The important thing happens elsewhere. No, this won't do, it's still too pretty. You're not being asked to come up with something pretty, you know. No one gives a damn about pretty. There are children's drawings and glossy magazines for that. So put on your mittens, little genius, little empty shell, yes, go on, put them on, I tell you, and maybe at last you'll see, you'll draw an almost perfect failed circle. — Anna Gavalda

Yes, I want to tell her, and maybe I even do say that, but I am crying because whatever gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it. I am like the title character in the film Betty Blue, the woman who is so full of ... so full of ... so full of something or other-it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find its medium-who pokes her own eyes out with a scissors and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end. She is, and I am becoming, a complete waste. So I cry at the end of The Natural. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I've been good at this world, the one that hits you when you are born and makes you cry right from the start, so that crying is your first language. I've learned what I was supposed to learn, bu now it comes to me that in doing so I've unlearned other things. I've lost my sense; I cannot sense things. Yes, we are a shambles. And maybe Ama found the way; she found it when all the paths were washed away by rivers from the sky, when all the buildings were blown down by the breath of a God. For just one day, that one day, she found a way out of that shambles, a way around it. And it's this I want to find. But now she has no path back, no way to return even if she wanted to be here in this America. She will always live away from this world, in something of a twilight that is not one thing or the other, one time or the next. She lives in a point, a small point, between two weighted things and it is always rocking this scale, back and forth. — Linda Hogan

I think maybe they come out into the grounds in nightwear. But no, in typical anorexic stype they have read the fashion magazines literally. This is their version of thin girls in strappy clothes.
The girl in the petticoat talks to me, as Emma has done on occsasion, in a rather grand style, as if she is a 'lady' of some substance and I a visiting guest.
Do they chat much about clothes? I ask Emma in the car.
She shakes her head.
So, does she, Emma, see the difference between underwear or nightwear and 'going out' clothes?
'Yes,' she says, her voices strained again. 'But it's one of the things you don't know properly when you're ill and confused. You see these pictures and the people in the magazines are real for you. — Carol Lee

There was no other way to say it. After being heartbroken for so long, I had made myself completely numb inside. Maybe not from physical pain, but anything emotional, yes. Sexual pleasure? Numb to that, too. I'd have been a great actress. After all, I had the perfect, mind-blowing orgasm down to an art. Suppose I deserve an Oscar for that. — Jennifer Salaiz

Emma this is not a joke. Look at your hands! They're ... they're ... wrinkled!"
"Yes that's because-"
"No way. I'm not going down for this. This isn't my fault."
"Toraf-"
"Galen will find some way to blame me though. He always does. 'You wouldn't have gotten caught if you didn't swim so close to that boat, tadpole.' No it couldn't be the humans fault for fishing in the first place-"
"Toraf."
"Or how about. 'Maybe if you'd stop trying to kiss my sister, she'd stop bashing your head with a rock.' How does my kissing her have anything to do with her bashing my head with a rock? If you ask me, it's just a result of poor parenting-"
"Toraf."
"Oh and my favorite: 'If you play with a lionfish, you're going to get pricked.' I wasn't playing with it! I was just helping it swim faster by grabbing its fins-"
"TOR-AF."
He stops pacing along the water, even seems to remember that I exist. "Yes, Emma? What were you saying? — Anna Banks

So," said Moundshroud. "If we fly fast, maybe we can catch Pipkin. Grab his sweet Halloween corn-candy soul. Bring him back, pop him in bed, toast him warm, save his breath. What say, lads? Search and seek for lost Pipkin, and solve Halloween, all in one fell dark blow?"
They thought of All Hallows' Night and the billion ghosts awandering the lonely lanes in cold winds and strange smokes.
They thought of Pipkin, no more than a thimbleful of boy and sheer summer delight, torn out like a tooth and carried off on a black tide of web and horn and black soot.
And, almost as one, they murmured: "Yes. — Ray Bradbury

Woah,' I said, blocking the doorway. 'You can't come in here. This is the girls' room.'
Even as it came out of my mouth, I knew it sounded dumb. Dumb, I thought and maybe even wrong.
You ... are a boy, aren't you?' I asked. 'I mean, don't take that the wrong way or anything -'
J.Lo is a boy, yes.' I let that go.
So ... you Boov have boys and girls ... just like us?'
Of course,' said J.Lo. 'Do not be ridicumlous.'
I smiled a wan little smile. 'Sorry.'
The Boov have seven magnificent genders. There is boy, girl, girlboy, boygirl, boyboy, boyboygirl, and boyboyboyboy.'
I had absolutely no response to this. — Adam Rex

Zero dimensions! Have you seen such a thing done?" "No. We've only witnessed two-dimensionalization. We've never even seen one-dimensionalization. But somewhere, some Zero-Homers must be trying. No one knows if they've ever succeeded. Comparatively, it's easier to lower the speed of light to zero, so we've seen more evidence of such attempts to lower the speed of light past zero and return it to infinity." "Is that even theoretically possible?" "We don't know. Maybe the Zero-Homers have theories that say yes, but I don't think so. Zero-lightspeed is an impassable wall. Zero-lightspeed is absolute death for all existence, the cessation of all motion. Under such conditions, the subjective cannot influence the objective in any way, so how can the 'hour hand' be shifted past it? I think the Zero-Homers are practicing a kind of religion, a kind of performance art." Cheng — Liu Cixin

There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name that thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. and the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where?
And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away. — Tara Conklin

When Sarsine saw Kestrel, her eyes narrowed to mere cracks and Kestrel became very conscious that Sarsine was a tall woman. "For someone with a reputation for being so smart," Sarsine said, "you act like you haven't a thought in your head. Did it never occur to you that I'd worry when you disappeared from the city with no word?"
"I didn't exactly mean to leave."
"Oh, so it just happened."
"Yes."
"The gods made you do it."
Kestrel laughed. "Maybe they did." Then, earnestly, she said, "I'm sorry, Sarsine."
Sarsine folded her arms. "Then make it up to me."
"How?"
Sarsine's expression softened. Now there was an inquisitive gleam in her eye. "Start with the night you left. End with this very moment. And tell me everything."
So Kestrel did. — Marie Rutkoski

She paused, and said, "May I ask you a question?" He said, "Sure." "Are we having dinner?" "That's what it said on the menu. Lunch was different, and this sure ain't breakfast." "No, I mean having dinner, as opposed to grabbing road food." "As in candlelight and piano music?" "Not necessarily." "Violin players and guys selling roses?" "If appropriate." "Like a date?" She said, "Broadly, I suppose." He said, "Honest answer?" "Always." "Suppose we had found Keever yesterday, maybe stepping off the train, or fallen over in a wheat field somewhere, with a sprained ankle, somewhat hungry and thirsty but otherwise OK, then yes, for sure I would have asked you out to dinner, and if you had accepted, then we'd be having that dinner right about now, so I guess this half-qualifies. — Lee Child

She was murdered by rebels.' He took in her unconcealed look of shock. 'So there you go. Something for you to celebrate.'
Magnus turned away from her, ready to find solace in his chambers, but the princess grabbed his arm to stop him. He sent a dark look at her over his shoulder.
'I would never celebrate death, no matter whose it is,' she said, her gaze filled with anger and something else. Something that looked vaguely like sympathy.
'Come now, I'm sure you wouldn't mourn any Damora.'
'I know very well what it's like to lose a parent in a tragic way.'
'Oh, yes, we have so much in common. Maybe we should get married. — Morgan Rhodes

Jane." Molly rubbed her arm. "You've got so much going on! You don't need this Pembrook Park, and you definitely don't need Mr. Darcy."
"I know. I mean, he's not even real. He's not, he's not, I know he's not, but maybe ... "
"There's no maybe. He's not real."
Jane groaned. "But I don't want to have to settle."
"You always do. Every single guy you ever dated was a settle."
She sat up. "None of them loved me, did they? Ever. Some of them liked me or I was convenient but ... Am I truly that pathetic?"
Molly smoothed her hair. "No, of course not," she said, which meant, Yes, but I love you anyway. — Shannon Hale

Nothing lasts. So it's my belief, yes, I know a lot of the things that we liked didn't last, but maybe things we don't like, they're also not going to last. There has been progress in my lifetime. There are certainly things that are better than when I was young, and there are things that are worse. New York City, it's worse. There's no question. — Fran Lebowitz

In a thousand years, Lieutenant, nothing you care about will matter. Not even to you - you'll be dead. So will I, and no one alive will care. Maybe - just maybe - someone will remember our names. More likely those names will be engraved on some dusty memorial pin at the bottom of an old box no one ever opens." Or Ekalu's would. There was no reason anyone would make any memorials to me, after my death. "And that thousand years will come, and another and another, to the end of the universe. Think of all the griefs and tragedies, and yes, the triumphs, buried in the past, millions of years of it. Everything for the people who lived them. Nothing now. — Ann Leckie

A lot of courageous noes make for some beautifully brave yeses. And I guess we never know which ones come first until we are standing at the crossroads, right? It may be easier to determine the yes route, knowing it means saying no. Or maybe it is the no you are sure of, so that tell you where to say yes. — Annie F. Downs

STEPAN: Innocence? Yes, maybe I know what that means. But I prefer to shut my eyes to it - and to shut others' eyes to it, for the time being - so that one day it may have a world-wide meaning. KALIAYEV: Well, you must feel very sure that day is coming if you repudiate everything that makes life worth living today, on its account. STEPAN: I am certain that that day is coming. KALIAYEV: No, you can't be as sure as that. ... Before it can be known which of us, you or I, is right, perhaps three generations will have to be sacrificed; there will have been bloody wars, and no less bloody revolutions. And by the time that all this blood has dried off the earth, you and I will long since have turned to dust. — Albert Camus

So tell us," says Connor, "in The World According to Hayden, when do we start to live?"
A long silence from Hayden, and then he says quietly, uneasily, "I don't know."
Emby razzes him. "That's not an answer."
But Connor reaches out and grabs Emby's arm, to shut him up- because Emby's wrong. Even though Connor can't see Hayden's face, he can hear the truth of it in his voice. There was no hint of evasion in Hayden's words. This was raw honesty, void of Hayden's usual flip attitude. It was perhaps the first truly honest thing Connor had ever heard him say. "Yes, it is an answer," Connor says. "Maybe it's the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don't know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War. — Neal Shusterman

So, no, when I mention "tolerance", I'm not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible about a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgivenessm as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock star moments of divine ecstacy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way - in some quietly measureless way - all the same? — Elizabeth Gilbert

Maybe those sorts of yes-or-no life-and-death decisions are easier to make because they are so black and white. I can cope with them because it's easier. Human emotions, well ... they're just a fathomless collection of grays and I don't do so well on the midtones. — Jasper Fforde

Another voice rages.
I hate that boy! I hate me! I am so incredibly stupid!
A sunflower leans over the fence, smiling
How dare you!
I rip off its head and throw it in the gutter.
The smart thing to do is to keep going on. Walk away quickly and no one will know what I've done. But I can't move because my eyes are locked on the slowly opening front door - locked on Mrs Muir.
'I'm sorry.' My tiny voice sounds so pathetically lame, but I've still got more lameness for her. 'I never do this sort of thing. I like sunflowers. I was just angry about something - nothing to do with you or the flower. I'm really, really sorry.'
'Oh, you are upset! Well, never mind'. Mrs Muir comes closer to me. 'Goodness, we all get cross. The main thing is: did it make you feel any better?'
'No. Yes. Maybe. A little bit.'
'Would you like to do another one? There's more out the back, too. You go for your life dear. I don't mind at all - they need a good pruning. — Bill Condon

Do you sell anything that can answer a yes or no question?" I asked him.
"For entertainment purposes," he asked me not bothering to look up, "or for real?"
I squelched the impulse to scream, "What do you think, you jackass?" Maybe he was asking a serious question- though I had my doubts. "You're the one with the metaphysical shop. If I wanted a magic Eight Ball, I'd go to SaverPlus."
He looked up at me and grinned. "Did you notice the new guy who works at the return counter in the SaverPlus basement?He's kind of a creep- which I think I like about him- and he's got this monster bulge in his pants."
I could totally see him getting into someone who was a creep. "Um. No."
"They're still open. Why don't you go buy a Magic Eight Ball so I can return it?"
"No."
"Then what the fuck good are you? — Jordan Castillo Price