Quotes about making
page 63

“What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?”

Source: Jazz

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Variant: We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Context: We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Light

“Inspiration is God making contact with itself.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

God

“If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Diplomatic Immunity

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity (2002)

People

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Dreams, Sleep

“HOBBES:
All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

People

“You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

God

“He would find a way to make it work, because he finally understood that sometimes you have to raise your expectations. And sometimes you need to make a claim on the world and the people you love to get what you most desire”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Wizard Heir

Love, People, World, Way

“Just because it makes no sense doesn't mean it's not good advice.”

Mick Farren (1943–2013) English journalist, author and singer

Sense

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Though often attributed to Galbraith, as early as 1988 in U.S. News & World Report, the earliest publications of this statement, in The Bulletin (1984) and Reader's Digest (1985) attributes it to Ezra Solomon.
Misattributed

“Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand… well, God put a lot of thought into making you.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Men, God

“If he's forgotten me, I'll make him remember me. I'll make him want me again.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“We are none of us perfect, and… we learn to take these imperfections and make them only a small part of who we are”

Patricia Briggs book Bone Crossed

Source: Bone Crossed

Learning, Parting, Perfection

“Coffee. I could smell coffee. Coffee would make everything better.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Every Which Way But Dead

Coffee

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Thinking, Sense, Personality

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

7 July 1838
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Source: The Journals of Kierkegaard

God

“She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

Pain, World, Feeling, Change

“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

"The Shrike and the Chipmunks", The New Yorker (18 February 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Because it is derived from Benjamin Franklin's famous saying this is often misquoted as: Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

Dead

“For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Love

“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Love, Fools, Time, Heart

“But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Truth

“Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure.”

Alice Hoffman book Practical Magic

Source: Practical Magic

Appearance

“The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Love, Way

“We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Reality, Sense

“Nothing like ADHD and a good fight to the death to make time fly”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Death, Time, Fight, Flying

“The things that make us happy make us wise.”

John Crowley book Little, Big

Source: Little, Big

Happiness

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

World, Beauty, Color, Nature

“But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are. Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Kiss

Pain, Nature, Appearance

“Every time you have to make a choice about anything, think "Does this go toward or away from what I want?" Always choose what goes toward what you want.”

Barbara Sher (1935) American writer

Source: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It

Thinking, Time

“You can present the material, but you can't make me care.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Truth, Nature, Evil

“That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Straight Talking

Love, Life, People, Parting

“What good are insights? They only make things worse.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

World, Courage, Question

“People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

People, Reality

“I don't have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I've earned that.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Thinking

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Marriage, Way, Learning, Perfection

“Don’t spend your time on and give your heart to any guy who makes you wonder about anything
related to his feelings for you”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

Guy, Feeling, Time, Heart

“I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Money, Hate, People

“Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we need to worry that we might have to make a choice between being heard and being loved.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: A Woman's Worth

Love, Women

“I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Age

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”

Marian Wright Edelman (1939) American children's rights activist

Thinking, Time, Faith

“There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?”

Azar Nafisi (1955) Iranaian academic and writer

People

“Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Source: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Books

“and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

People, Disease, Way, Communication

“No. But I understand her. Life makes people what they are.”

Lisa Kleypas book Dreaming of You

Source: Dreaming of You

Life, People, Understanding

“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Fools, Reading

“Because when everyone dreams, but only a few realize their dreams, that makes cowards of us all.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Dreams

“If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.”

Chris Crutcher book Deadline

Source: Deadline

God, Personality, Madness, Anger

“Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Feeling, Appearance, Loss

“Sure. My ego's had enough time to recover a modicum of dignity. Let's make sure we crush it again before I mistake myself for a god. -Acheron”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

God, Time

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

God, Children, Justice, Democracy

“If he's choosing not to make a simple effort that would put you at ease and bring harmony to a recurring fight, then he doesn't respect your feelings and needs.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

Feeling, Effort, Fight

“Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: Cocaine: Impressions & Opinions

People, Health

“And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.”

Jodi Picoult Change of Heart

Source: Change of Heart

Faith

“One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982)
Context: I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

War

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

World

“This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

Love, People, Feeling

“It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

World, Feeling

“Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
1890s

World

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

“… every time you make a decision to be less than what God wants for you, you're denying yourself some of God's blessings. It's up to you. You can live a life with God's blessings, or just exist with all the consequences of choosing wrong.”

Terri Blackstock (1957) American writer

Source: Last Light

Life, God, Decision, Time

“Every man or woman who makes a stand helps keep the flame of freedom burning.”

Juliet Marillier book Shadowfell

Source: Shadowfell

Freedom, Help

“Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.”

Orson Scott Card book Xenocide

Source: Xenocide

Children, Parent

“When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”

Jeanne DuPrau The People of Sparks

Source: The People of Sparks

“I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

Sense

“In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier.
We all grieve alone.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Incantation

“Take chances! Get messy! Make mistakes!”

Joanna Cole (1944) American children's books author

Chance

“That's why I want you there, he said. You're unpredictable, and that can be the difference between success and failure. Most people make decisions in anger, fear, love, or obligation. You make decisions to irritate people.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: For a Few Demons More

Love, People, Fear, Failure

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

"Have You Learned The Most Important Lesson Of All?" http://www.thehypertexts.com/Essays%20Articles%20Reviews%20Prose/Elie_Wiesel_Essay_Have_You_Learned_The_Most_Important_Lesson_Of_All.htm, published in Parade Magazine (24 May 1992)

Faith