Quotes about going
page 12

“Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

Men

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Art

“I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, "What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: Anybody Out There?

Birth

“Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

For women, Life

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

“It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Beauty, Way, Failure

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

“The secret is not to dream," she whispered. "The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me any more. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Secret, Dreams, Fools

“You don't take your cat with you to go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn't polite, but because he's a cat.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

Cats, Bird

“Let old ones go. Dont be a memory-monger!
Once you were young──now you are even younger.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Source: Beyond Good and Evil

Memory

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

God, Drink, Silence

“You must have been going very fast."
"I was, until I hit the fence.”

Anthony Horowitz book Ark Angel

Source: Ark Angel

“But now," says the Once-ler, "now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

Dr. Seuss The Lorax

Source: The Lorax

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World, Dreams, Sleep, Sea

“Okay, well, let's do a little reenactment. I'm the gay-looking DiCaprio and you're Rose. You have to keep your eyes open and on my face, or you'll have to let me go and I'll turn into a huge gay Popsicle.”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

“Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong… But it might.”

Terry Pratchett book Going Postal

Source: Going Postal

Fear, Hope

“God doesn't care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.”

Jeffrey R. Holland (1940) Mormon leader

Source: Created for Greater Things

God, Help

“Love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep on watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Relationship, Love, Thinking, Water

“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Idea, Thinking

“English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

“Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone.
They paved paradise,
And put up a parking lot.”

Joni Mitchell (1943) Canadian musician

"Big Yellow Taxi"
Songs

“Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is connected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

Music

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Love

“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.”

Terry Pratchett book Wintersmith

Source: Wintersmith

Death

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Beauty, Autumn, Nature

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Dogs

“Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed…
This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Death

“It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996), p. 544
Attributed from posthumous publications

Cars

“That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

“Being in love, you know… it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.”

Sarah Waters book Tipping the Velvet

Source: Tipping the Velvet

Love

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

Motivational, Success, Peaceful, Moving On

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Attitude, Wise, Thinking, Motivational

“Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too-even when you are in the dark. Even when you're falling.”

Morrie Schwartz (1916–1995) American sociologist

People, Feeling

“Sustaining faith is what sets you through those dark nights of the soul when you don’t know where to go or what to do, and it seems that you can’t last another day…but because of your faith in God, you do.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

God, Faith, Soul, Night

“I had been lying to myself, thinking I was free, thinking I had let him go. It didn't matter what he said or did, I'd never let him go." - Belly Conklin”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Lying, Thinking

“If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Girl

“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: A Thousand Mornings

Love, Dependency, Sea

“Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

God, Hell

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Bird by Bird

“I feel like I should probably ask you to leave. But I don’t really want you to go. I want you to stay, but I know you shouldn’t.
- Hope”

Rachel Gibson (1961) American writer

Source: True Confessions

Hope, Feeling

“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Source: Death of a Salesman

Dreams, Christ

“When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Books, Understanding, Study, Learning

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) comedian and social critic

Variant: Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

God, People

“I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up….

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

Life, Search, Question, Forgetting

“‎All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Life, Moving On, Art

“Get up, go and be like him as much as one alive can be like the dead—without dying. Conceive him, yet be your death, too, almost. Like him be now, but only till the shadow of his end falls on the shadow of your being.”

David Grossman (1954) Israeli author

Source: Falling Out of Time

Death, Dead

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Variant: Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

People

“You can't go home again”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

Home

“I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Incidentals (1904)
Variant: I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Source: Breathing Tokens

Way

“Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

Secret, Youth

“I know you loved her, but it's okay to let it go now. You know that, don't you? You've got to be able to let it go.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Love

“Do you see that out there? The strange, unfamiliar light? It's called the sun. Let's go get us a little.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: The Hollow

Light, Sun

“The world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

World

“I don't recommend shadow travel if you're scared of:
a) The dark
b) Cold shivers up your spine
c) Strange noises
d) Going so fast you feel like your face is peeling off
In other words, I thought it was awesome.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Travel, Feeling

“Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Reading

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Source: On the Road: The Original Scroll

Life, Time, Madness

“I've solved the mystery: You have to submit silently. Open up, let go. Let anything penetrate you, even the most painful things. Endure. Bear up. That's the magic key! The text comes by itself, and its meaning shakes the soul… You mustn't let scar tissue form on your wounds; you have to keep ripping them open in order to turn your insides into a marvelous instrument that is capable of anything. All this has its price.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 72-73
Context: At a performance everything works out on its own. I've solved the mystery: You have to submit silently. Open up, let go. Let anything penetrate you, even the most painful things. Endure. Bear up. That's the magic key! The text comes by itself, and its meaning shakes the soul. Everything else is taken care of by the life one has to live without sparing oneself. You mustn't let scar tissue form on your wounds; you have to keep ripping them open in order to turn your insides into a marvelous instrument that is capable of anything. All this has its price. I become so sensitive that I can't live under normal conditions. That's why the hours between performances are worst.

Pain, Soul

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”

Mark Twain book Tom Sawyer Abroad

Source: Tom Sawyer Abroad

Home, Cats, Knowledge, Personality

“I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

For Men, Dogs, Hope

“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

Source: Quoted in Woman power to the fore, by R.S. Binuraj, The Hindu (1 July 2017)

Women, Future, Peace, Way

“weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)

Night

“Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Source: Lynch on Lynch

Love, Dreams

“There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Coffee, Thinking

“Val: Why do you go out there?
Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice.
Val: What advice do they give?
Sandra: Just one word- live!”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Source: Battle of Angels

People, Dead

“You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said.
'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.”

Terry Pratchett book Sourcery

Truckers, Ch. 7
The Nome Trilogy (1989 - 1990)
Source: Sourcery

“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.”

Les Brown (1945) American politician

Life, Business, Graduation, Life

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Looking Back: Diane Arbus at the Met" http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/03/21/050321craw_artworld?currentPage=all, The New Yorker, March 21, 2005. Retrieved February 4, 2010. source: Sass, Louis A. "'Hyped on Clarity': Diane Arbus and the Postmodern Condition". Raritan, volume 25, number 1, pp. 1–37, Summer 2005. <br><br> <br class="br">Source: Kimmelman, Michael, The Profound Vision of Diane Arbus: Flaws in Beauty, Beauty in Flaws, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/arts/design/the-profound-vision-of-diane-arbus-flaws-in-beauty-beauty-in.html, 1 November 2018, The New York Times, 11 March 2005

Personality, Life, People

“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Source: Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass

Imagination, Learning, Time

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”

Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass

Source: Through the Looking Glass

Life, Lie, Dreams, Summer

“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Love

“Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.
Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Question, Thinking, Time

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Life

“After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”

Michael J. Fox (1961) Canadian-American actor

Source: Lucky Man

Learning

“You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go…”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Inspirational

“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Books

“The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.”

Barbara Hall (1946) Canadian politician

“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.”

Jodi Picoult Change of Heart

Source: Change of Heart

World, Way, Change

“Alexander tilted his head and kissed her deeply on the lips. He let go of her hands, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. They kissed as if in a fever… they kissed as if the breath were leaving their bodies.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Kiss

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.”

Steven Pressfield Gates of Fire

Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

Lie, Law

“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Books, History, Reading, Falseness

“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Universe

“the best part was
pulling down the
shades
stuffing the doorbell
with rags
putting the phone
in the
refrigerator
and going to bed
for 3 or 4
days.
and the next best
part
was
nobody ever
missed
me.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Parting

“Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Men

“You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1947) American basketball player

Soul, Forgetting

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Act I.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Context: Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.

“Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, I got on my knees and told her that I was going to marry her some day. We were both married to someone else at the time. ‘Ring Of Fire’—June and Merle Kilgore wrote that song for me-that’s the way our love affair was. We fell madly in love and we worked together all the time, toured together all the time, and when the tour was over we both had to go home to other people. It hurt.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Love, People, Way, Home

“The Lower City is MINE, Its People are MINE.
If I Find Them That's Doing All This Kidnapping
And Murdering, They'd Best Pray For Mercy,
Because Once I Get My Teeth In 'Em
I Will NEVER Let Them Go.”

Tamora Pierce book Terrier

Source: Terrier

People

“A billion stars go spinning through the night,
glittering above your head,
But in you is the presence that will be
when all the stars are dead.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Star, Night, Dead

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Books, World

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“His eyes met mine and the rest of the room faded away. ―I‘m always going to keep your heart safe, even if mine has to stop beating for that to happen,‖ he told me softly.”

P. C. Cast book Tempted

Source: Tempted

Heart

“The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you… and then, the worse things get.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to sister Sarah Muir Galloway (3 September 1873); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 10: Yosemite and Beyond <br class="br">1870s

Mountain

“If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Pain, Business, Tree, Learning

“While you are going through your trial, you can recall your past victories and count the blessings that you do have with a sure hope of greater ones to allow if you are faithful.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Faith, Hope, Past, Victory

Quotes about going page 12

Quotes about going
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