Quotes about use
page 53

“It's just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,

not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close

to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.”

Alice Fulton (1952) American poet

Time

“She is fine. She hates us both but it really didn't sound like anything else was wrong”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Hate

“History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.”

Jill Lepore (1966) American historian

Way, History

“We were screwed and he didn't even kiss us first.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Kiss

“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Source: The Emperor's Handbook

Soul, Sun

“We are a sum total of what we have learned from all who have taught us, both great and small.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you

Learning

“Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.”

Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job

Source: A Dirty Job

World

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: Merlin

Truth, Heart

“All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.”

Alethea Kontis (1976) American writer

Source: Enchanted

Time

“And so could you know it if you would only use the brains the good God has given you. Sometimes I really am tempted to believe that by inadvertence, He passed you by.”

Agatha Christie book Lord Edgware Dies

Source: Lord Edgware Dies

God

“Pink is female - but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It's something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Girl, Boy

“Always remember where we come from, how we got here, and Who led us into the warmth of the sunshine.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

“Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the woulds inflicted by others.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Confidence, Forgiveness

“A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

World, Fear, Parting

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Lovers, Learning

“He took twelve pictures that day.
Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

“And unless I'm remembering it wrong, mermaids don't sing and sirens don't swim."
"Ariel sang in 'The Little Mermaid'," Corey said.
Sam came over to join us. "Do I even want to know why you remember her name?”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Source: The Calling

Singing

“No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.”

Scott Westerfeld book Goliath

Source: Goliath

War

“Purity in body and heart
May please some--as for me, I make no boast.
For, as you know, no master of a household
Has all of his utensils made of gold;
Some are wood, and yet they are of use.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

Source: The Canterbury Tales

Heart

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

Love, Fear

“Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.”

Ina May Gaskin (1940) American midwife

Source: Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

Nature, Problem, Maternity

“We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.”

Alice Hoffman book The Dovekeepers

Source: The Dovekeepers

God

“When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Source: Jeeves in the Morning

Love, Girl, Painting

“I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Death, Wisdom, People, Age

“The roles we play in each other's lives are only as powerful as the trust and connection between us--the protection, safety, and caring we are willing to share.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. i will always be yours.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Life, Future

“… I believe in a God of scandalous grace. I have pledged allegiance to a King who loved evildoers so much he died for them, teaching us that there is something worth dying for but nothing worth killing for.”

Shane Claiborne (1975) American activist

Love, God

“My friends are gone and my hair is grey.
I ache in places I used to play.
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Source: Dance Me to the End of Love

Love

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.”

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

World, Deep, Friendship, Relationship

“What an ugly beast is the ape, and how like us.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

“At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.”

Anna Funder book All That I Am

Source: All That I Am

Love

“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 195
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Mountain

“Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”

John Hodgman (1971) American humorist

Life, Pain, Sense

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Hunger

“I guess it's hard for people who are so used to things the way they are - even if they're bad - to change. 'Cause they kind of give up. And when they do, everybody kind of loses.”

Catherine Ryan Hyde (1955) American writer

Source: Pay It Forward

People, Way, Change

“I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.”

Lee Child book One Shot

Source: One Shot

Life, Way

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

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

People, Freedom

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

Truth, History, Childhood

“I figure if Eve could get us into this mess, I could get us out. After all, God really likes to see a go-getter.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

God

“[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

Women, Men

“What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
The quote is from section 258d of the dialogue Phædrus (tr. Benjamin Jowett).
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Context: A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus. "And what is written well and what is written badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

“For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Childhood

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change”

Isabel Allende book The House of the Spirits

Variant: Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.
Source: The House of the Spirits

World, Fear, Reality, Change

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Life, Happiness, Children, Youth

“[She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.”

Louis De Bernières (1954) English novelist

Source: Corelli's Mandolin

Love, Smile

“The only use she has for the word fun is to make the word funeral.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“Believe it or not, that was the first time I recognized that in some ways she was just like the rest of us.”

Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember

Source: A Walk to Remember

Way, Time

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”

Lynne Truss (1955) British writer

Source: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

World, Support

“For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

Stupidity, Thinking

“Refills are free,” the waitress tells us with a frown, like she’s hoping we’re not the kind of people who ask for endless refills. I am already pretty sure we are exactly those people.”

Holly Black book Black Heart

Source: Black Heart

People, Hope

“Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren't meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were.
And what we remember.”

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

Source: Incantation

People, Help

“I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Children

“Worry is the secret weapon perpetrated upon us by the dark forces of the world that lurk in the shape of fear, uncertainty, confusion, and loss.

We, on the other hand, have our own secret weapon against these incorporeal fiends.

It is laughter.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Secret, World, Fear, Laughter

“The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way, Dependency

“Victor smiled through the pain and the blood. "Of course you have. I used to think Belikov was the savage one, but it's really you, isn't it? You're the animal with no control, no higher reasoning except to fight and kill.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Pain, Smile, Thinking, Animals

“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Love, Books, Heart

“Maybe that's all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we're doing.”

Orson Scott Card book Pathfinder

Source: Pathfinder

People

“If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?… Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mould”

Oswald Chambers book My Utmost for His Highest

Source: My Utmost for His Highest

People, Star

“Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“Have you talked to North?" he said.
"Yes," she said. "I asked him to get us cable."
"I wish you weren't talking to him."
"I'd talk to Satan to get cable," Andie said.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Maybe This Time

“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005)

“Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?”

Neil Jordan (1950) Irish filmmaker and fiction writer

Source: The Dream of a Beast

Suffering, Memory

“Why do they treat us like children? they said & I said why do you treat them like adults?
& their eyes opened wide & they began to laugh & talk all at once & suddenly everything looked possible again.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Trusting Soul

Children

“Will gave a short laugh. He was in gear as if he had just come from the practice room, and his hair curled damply against his temples. He was not looking at Tessa, but she had grown used to that. Will hardly ever looked at her unless he had to.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

Love

“You'll have to ask Bill that, Sookie. And this is the only reason we're going? You're not cleverly using
this as an excuse to make out with me?"
"I'm not that clever, Eric."
"I think you deceive yourself, Sookie," Eric said with a brilliant smile.”

Charlaine Harris book Living Dead in Dallas

Source: Living Dead in Dallas

Smile, Thinking

“If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Diplomatic Immunity

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity (2002)

Truth

“What's the point of God making us human if He doesn't want us to act like we're human?'
'To see if we can rise above our natures,'Megan said.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

God, Nature

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

Love, Hate, Religion

“For the first time I realize how perilous peace can be. I appreciate the tightrope that my grandfather has spent his whole life trying to walk. And now, more than ever, I grow terrified that I'm going to make us all fall down.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

Life, Peace, Time

“If God has nothing better to do than punish schoolgirls for a bit of tomfoolery, then I've no use for God.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

God

“Using your feminine wiles to lead my familiar astray. If all you want is dangerous sex, I can give that to you better than he can, and I won't break your heart afterward." - Al to Rachel”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Black Magic Sanction

Sex, Heart

“Truth brought to public light recruits the best of us to work for change. On the other hand, even the best-intentioned "noble lie" ultimately discredits the finest of causes.”

Christina Hoff Sommers (1950) American author and philosopher

Source: Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women

Truth, Lie, Light, Change

“Benjamin, we’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”

Eric Roth (1945) American screenwriter

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Love, People

“Some times I think this whole world
Is one big prison yeard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

World, Thinking, Time

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

Source: In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day: How To Survive And Thrive When Opportunity Roars

God, Business, Past, Future

“If we make every attempt to increase out knowledge in order to use it for human good, it will make a difference in us and in our world.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

World, Knowledge

“It doesn't seem to matter what we think… The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.”

Shannon Hale Princess Academy

Source: Princess Academy

Thinking

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

World

“Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.”

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) American writer

Source: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

World, Dogs, Heart

“The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life… He played that which he would never play again.”

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

Life, Soul

“Where is your sense of patriotism?"

I keep it hid away safe, along with my sense of trust, Mr. Clent. I don't use 'em much in case they get scratched.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

Sense

“Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Children, People, Age

“The queen's guards might have been the best of the best, but Dimitri… well, my former lover and instructor was in a category all his own. His fighting skills were beyond anyone else's, and he was using them all in defense of me.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Variant: ... but Dimitri... well, my former lover and instructor was in a category all his own. His fighting skills were beyond anyone else's, and he was using them all in defense of me.
"Stay back," he ordered me. "They aren't laying a hand on you.
Source: Spirit Bound

Lovers, Fight

“All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.”

Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

People, Religion

“The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.”

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

Time

“I used to have a drug problem, now I make enough money.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Money, Problem

“Don't do this to us." He warned, his voice hoarse with angry desperation as he realize he was losing her. "You're letting eleven years of mistrust color everything you've discovered I've done".”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Paradise

Color

“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All Be Feminists

Source: We Should All Be Feminists

Women, Men, Problem

“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

Beauty, Dreams

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

Gilles Deleuze book Dialogues

Source: Dialogues

Way

“And so I'm stupid for thinking they might be useful. Because of something Johanna Mason said while she was oiling her breasts for wrestling.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Stupidity, Thinking

“It felt bizarre to be ignored in general, much less by an embodiment of Aidan--who used to stare at her so hard that he'd run into trees.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Tree

“Sometimes when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena. To make myself put a name to the thing I've lost. But what's the use? It's gone. He's gone. Whatever existed between us is gone. All that's left is my promise to kill Snow. I tell myself this ten times a day.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (p. 195)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Boy, Kiss, Strong, Time

“I am never, ever, going to make things easy for you, Seaweed Brain. Get used to it.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

“Love is deceitful and sublime. In its truest form, it brings out the best in all beings. At its worse, It's a tool used to manipulate and ruin any one who is stupid enough to hold it. Don't be stupid.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Love, Stupidity

“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Nature

“For us there is no valid definition of socialism other than the abolition of the exploitation of one human being by another.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Afro-Asian Conference (1965)
Context: For us there is no valid definition of socialism other than the abolition of the exploitation of one human being by another. As long as this has not been achieved, if we think we are in the stage of building socialism but instead of ending exploitation the work of suppressing it comes to a halt — or worse, is reversed — then we cannot even speak of building socialism.

“If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.”

Cheryl Strayed (1968) author, memoirist, blogger

God, Truth

Quotes about use page 53

Quotes about use
page 53