Quotes about making
page 60

“Those fruity drinks better have a lot of caffeine in them or I'll never make it through World Issues.”

Lisi Harrison (1970) Canadian writer

Source: Invasion of the Boy Snatchers

“A dog – a collie – went up to Eric, looked up at his face, and growled.
“Shoo,” Eric said, making an imperious gesture with his hand.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

Dogs

“Make me immortal with a kiss.”

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English dramatist, poet and translator

Source: Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, Parts 1-2

Kiss

“We are not perfect. We make mistakes. We screw up but then we forgive and move forward.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

Forgiveness, Perfection

“I wouldn't touch a hot dog unless you put a condom on it! You realize that the job of a hot dog is to use parts of the animal that the Chinese can't figure out how to make into a belt?”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

I'm Swiss (2005)

Dogs, Animals, Parting

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford (1933) British author

Source: Unexpected Blessings

Past, Future, Help

“What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

Thinking

“God, as a loving Father, will stretch our souls at times. The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched…. God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference!”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Love, God, Music, Soul

“In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Life, Pain, People, Way

“It is not titles that make men illustrious, but men who make titles illustrious.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book Discourses on Livy

Book 3, Ch. 38
Discourses on Livy (1517)

Men

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

People, World

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Life

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Life

“if it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

Sheryl Crow (1962) American musician and actress

Happiness, Sadness, Hell

“There is very little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude.”

W. Clement Stone (1902–2002) American New Thought author

People, Attitude

“O God, make me good, but not yet”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Part 1, start of chapter 5
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

God

“People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices”

Gary L. Francione (1954) American legal scholar

People, Education, Intelligence

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Love, Sense, Suffering, Madness

“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

Lie

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature.”

John Cowper Powys book A Glastonbury Romance

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 178
Source: A Glastonbury Romance
Context: It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

People, Nature

“… It makes me cry, I want to talk about something I am not sure I can talk about, I want to talk about the inside from the inside, I do not want to leave it
I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread”

Hélène Cixous (1937) French philosopher and writer

Source: The Book of Promethea

Happiness, Cry

“I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

“Makes us appreciate blessing, not be greedy and mean and fat like Polyphemus.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

“I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Way, For Friend

“I wonder if what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

Love, People, Family, Chance

“Doesn't sunlight kill them? Doesn't it turn them to dust, or make them burst into flames or something?"
"Nope. Vampires tan, just like you and me. Well, just like you. I tend to bleach.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“There's no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love. There is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Love

“This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.”

Lynda Barry (1956) Cartoonist

Source: One Hundred Demons

Children, Way, Forgetting

“Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

Dead

“We're frightened of what makes us different.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

“Like her father, he wasn't comfortable sharing his thoughts and feelings. She tried to explain that she needed to be closer to him, but it had never seemed to make a difference.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Feeling

“Before you make a decision," he said, "I want you to know that I love you.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Queen of Attolia

Source: The Queen of Attolia

Love, Decision

“a depressed person doesn't want you to try and cheer them up. It makes us
sick.”

Brandon Sanderson Elantris

Source: Elantris

Personality

“the fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light”

Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) British writer

Source: October Ferry To Gabriola

Light

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

Jeff VanderMeer book Annihilation

Source: Annihilation

Way

“I am the god Apostolos. The Harbinger of Telikos. The Final Fate of all. Beloved son of Apollymi the Great Destroyer. My will makes the will of the universe. [Apostolos / Acheron Parthenopaeus]”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

God, Fate, Universe

“The greatest gift God gave us is the power to make decisions.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

God, Decision

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

Sense

“Readers love fantasy, but we need horror. Smart horror. Truthful horror. Horror that helps us make sense of a cruelly senseless world.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Love, Truth, World, Sense

“But I do think that when people say 'a learning curve,' they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upward.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Enchanted Glass

Source: Enchanted Glass

People, Thinking, Learning

“In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: It's a Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Happiness, School, Memory, Success

“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

God, Religion, Feeling, Idea

“I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 31
Context: And thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Dreams, Hope, Feeling, Spring

“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica, Act 3, sc. 1
Dirty Hands (1948)

Children, Time

“Come home with me, Acheron. I’ll make it well worth your while. (Artemis)
I have a headache. (Acheron)
You’ve had a headache for two hundred years! (Artemis)
And you’ve had PMS for eleven thousand. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Home

“I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you, okay?”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Love, Kiss, Personality

“Mind over matter, will make the Pooh unfatter.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can't help it. It's the way they're built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival

People, Way, Hell, Help

“Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Way

“This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

God

“That's what being a demigod was all about, not quite belonging in the mortal world or on Mount Olympus but trying to make peace with both sides of their nature.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

World, Peace, Nature

“That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.”

Madeleine L'Engle Dragons in the Waters

Source: Dragons in the Waters

Way

“When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
Source: Le diable et le bon dieu

War

“Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) American literary critic and scholar

“Okay, okay, okay. I understood that pushing the elevator button over and over again would not make the elevator appear sooner. But I couldn't help myself”

James Patterson book Sundays at Tiffany's

Source: Sundays at Tiffany's

Appearance, Help

“Perhaps your challenge isn't finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.”

Seth Godin (1960) American entrepreneur, author and public speaker

Source: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

People, Way, Feeling, Passion

“I close my eyes. And i scream. If my whole world is crashing down around me, then I am going to make the sound of the crashing. I want to scream until all my bones break.”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

World

“When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, an evasion simply muddles 'em.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 9
Atticus Finch
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Children

“Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, and unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life, God, Heart

“The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

Paul Bowles (1910–1999) American composer, writer, translator

Source: The Spider's House

Life, Perfection

“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Life, Time, Parting

“The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.”

Tess Gerritsen (1953) Chinese-American novelist

Source: Keeping The Dead

Heart, Night

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Sect. 318, as translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)

Life, Science

“Thomas has the kind of whiter-than-white boyish grin that makes women's panties spontaneously evaporate.”

Jim Butcher book Blood Rites

Source: Blood Rites

Women

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”

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

Way, Imagination, Reality, Reading

“A tree doesn't make a thunderstorm, but any fool knows where lightning's going to strike.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Fools, Tree

“The hardest part of living is making peace with your past. Most of all, it’s making peace with yourself.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Retribution

Peace, Past, Parting

“I will make Maggie safe. If the world burns because of that then so be it. Me and the kid will roast some marshmallows.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

World

“I kept making you cry… didn't I?

- Hatori Sohma”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 2

Cry

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

Way

“Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.”

Margaret Cousins (1878–1954) Suffragist and feminist

Life, Change

“It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.”

David Sedaris book Holidays on Ice

Source: Holidays on Ice

Hurt

“Whatever you have to say, leave
The roots on, let them
Dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
Where they come from.”

Charles Olson (1910–1970) American writer

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Education, Feeling, Game

“When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Happiness, Idea, Heart, Painting

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897), Envoi
Variant: Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
Context: What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.

Faith

“A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Nature

“Your eyes make me shy”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“I'm only being cute here. I don't really mean it. I just wanted to make you smile.”

Stephen Chbosky (1970) American writer

Smile

“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

As quoted in A Joke, a Quote, & the Word : Feed Your Body, Soul and Spirit (2006) by Ronald P. Keeven, p. 147

Sense, Success, Horse

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Attributed to Emerson in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous on-line sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/29/purpose/ indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all." <br class="br">Misattributed

Life, Happiness, Wise