Quotes about use
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“If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.”

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) Australian writer

Source: The Solitary Summer

Love, Angels, Feeling, Hurt

“It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.”

Tom Clancy book The Hunt for Red October

Source: The Hunt for Red October

Thinking

“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places”

Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

World

“The end of Religion is not to teach us how to die, but how to live….”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey

Religion

“At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Love, World

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

History

“How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?
Book I, Ch. 27
Essais (1595), Book I
Source: The Complete Essays

Faith

“I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots who protect them and their property.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)
Source: Assata: An Autobiography

War, Lie, Smile, Heart

“The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Waiting, Personality

“guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Love, Sense

“Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Water, Personality

“We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever… and all the time it is carrying us about… It is the human nervous system itself.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

God, Secret, Time

“Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

“Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence?"
"Yes, Sage" he said patiently. "We use it all the time with art,… That, and I know how to use a dictionary”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Art, Time

“Why wouldn’t we run to God. He’s sooo good. God’s not mad at anybody. He just wants to help us be the best that we can be.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

God, Help, Madness

“Remember to use positive affirmations. I am not a dork is not one of them.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

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

“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Death, Flowers

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

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

“The wheel of fortune […] tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.”

Philippa Gregory book The Lady of the Rivers

Source: The Lady of the Rivers

Wisdom, Learning, Victory, Indifference

“Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.”

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

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Forgiveness, Joy

“Don't try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough & that makes all the difference.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Uselessness

“While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

“When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.”

Zeena Schreck (1963) Tantric Buddhist/Sethian

Source: Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue

“Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle”

Gregory Maguire book Son of a Witch

Source: Son of a Witch

Memory, Heart, Parting

“That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: 1920s, p. 157 London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Response to atheist Alfred Kerr in the winter of 1927, who after deriding ideas of God and religion at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Samuel Fischer, had queried him "I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious" as quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971) by H. G. Kessler
Context: Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

Secret, Religion, Nature

“You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not… No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

People, World, Home, Personality

“We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Source: Lighthousekeeping

“It isn't the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Fear, Law

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel

Love, Night

“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Variant: Live the beauty or your own reality.
Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Beauty, Reality, Beauty

“And we must fight back! President Snow says he's sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that? Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (pp. 105-106)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: "I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors. [... ] I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do. [... ] This is what they do! And we must fight back! [... ] President Snow says he's sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?" We're with the camera, tracking to the planes burning on the roof of the warehouse. Tight on the Capitol seal on a wing, which melts back into the image of my face, shouting at the president. "Fire is catching! And if we burn... you burn with us!"

Fight

“The world, right now, is only us.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

World

“My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Namesake

Source: The Namesake, (2003) p. 16.

Books, Travel

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point

Life, Nature

“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Age, Time, Parting

“Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki book Rich Dad Poor Dad

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!
Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Thinking, Learning

“I used my brains to outsmart teachers—and that wasn't very smart at all.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Teachers

“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Life, World

“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

“You grieve
Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Source: The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target / The Lice / The Carrier of Ladders / Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment

“when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: The Mummy

Dreams, Disappointment

“Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

God, Pain, Way

“I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”

Glen Duncan (1965) British writer

Source: The Last Werewolf

Lie

“Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Discipline: The Glad Surrender

God, Error, Feeling, Strong

“Ham smiled. "Cett's going to be furious."
Elend shrugged. "He's a paraplegic. What's he going to do? Bite us?”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

Smile

“Some choices are forever…. Just because people aren't in our lives anymore, doesn't mean they stop thinking about us and vice versa.”

Wendy Mass Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

Source: Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

People, Thinking

“A surprise trigonometry quiz that everyone in class fails? Must be in the Lord’s plan to give us challenges.”

Nicholas Sparks book A Walk to Remember

Source: A Walk to Remember

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”

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

Illusions
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)
Source: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth, Game

“What will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness?”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?”

P.G. Wodehouse book Carry On, Jeeves

Source: Carry on, Jeeves

“I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.”

Robert James Waller The Bridges of Madison County

Source: The Bridges of Madison County

Dreams, Feeling, Time

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Exercises

“Lets dedicate ourselves to what the ancient greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Context: And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Life, World

“I won’t snatch, harm, or scare to death people with you or use checking up on you as an excuse to cause trouble. You’re worse than my mother, Rachel.”
“Mine, too,” Jenks muttered.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: White Witch, Black Curse

Death, People

“That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Suffering, Reading

“I thought you hated demons. Now you use them like servants. The Ravener, the Drevak demons, Agramon-they‘re your. Guards, butler-personal chef, for all I know.”
-Jace to Valentine, pg.260”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Hate, Personality

“Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.”

Emily Post (1872–1960) American etiquette expert

Feeling

“It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Love, Question

“Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

War, Truth, Lie, Help

“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it”

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) Novelist, librarian, nurse

Imagination

“Glory falls around us
as we sob
a dirge of
desolation on the Cross
and hatred is the ballast of
the rock
which lies upon our necks
and underfoot.”

Maya Angelou book Letter to My Daughter

"Glory Falls"
I Shall Not Be Moved (1990)
Source: Letter to My Daughter

“Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase

Fools, Thinking, Time, Clothes

“Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

Faith

“And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

World, Beauty, Question

“Why didn’t you sleep with the headrest?”
I shrugged. “It was uncomfortable.” I looked at Sadie for support. “You didn’t use it, did you?”
Sadie rolled her eyes. “Well, of course I did. It was obviously there for a reason.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Support, Sleep

“Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

God

“She loves. And she doesn't know how to pull it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

Love

“One of Us:
Someday, the light will shine like a sun through my skin & they will say, What have you done with your life? & though there are many moments I think I will remember, in the end, I will be proud to say, I was one of us.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Life, Thinking, Light, Sun

“WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel

“A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table
underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us,
only pretending to be invisible.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“We two make banquets of the plainest fare
In every cup we find the thrill of pleasure…
For us life always moves with lilting measure
We two, we two, we make our world, our pleasure”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

Life, Pleasure, World

“The gods do make playthings of us… but it is we mortals who provide them with the tools.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

God

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Love, Fate, Sadness, Sense

“Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated infantryman.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Castle in the Air

Source: Castle in the Air

Cats

“None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

“So that makes us robbers of robbers," said Bug, "who pretend to be robbers working for a robber of other robbers.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

“The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'

Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Happiness, Idea

“I can't promise we'll ever use you for a hasty getaway," Cole said, "but with a little work, you might be able to race my grandmother-while she's on her scooter.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

“I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

Love, Hope

“I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Life

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Books

“All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

World, Time

“Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“All of us are better when we're loved.”

Alistair MacLeod (1936–2014) Canadian author and professor of English

Love

“There is, though, nothing that prepares us for the worst things in our life. There is nothing you can do to stop the shock, or buffer the pain.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Life, Pain

“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Fate, Help, Forgetting

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

As quoted in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989) by Jeffrey M. Elliot

Motivational, Wise, Deep, Inspirational

“Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.”

Alan Brennert (1954) American writer

Source: Moloka'i

Fear, Fools

“We must each of us bear our own misfortunes.”

Charles Portis book True Grit

Source: True Grit (1968), Chapter 3, p. 32 : 'Colonel Stonehill'

“Can the sarcasm,' he said. 'Please, I always use fresh sarcasm, never canned.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Circus of the Damned

Source: Circus of the Damned

“I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.”

Robin McKinley book Sunshine

Source: Sunshine

Beer

“Bizarre! That's the only word I can use to describe life sometimes. Just freaking bizarre.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Life

“Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Life

“Oh would some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us.”

Robert Burns To a Louse

To a Louse, st. 8 (1786) http://www.poetry-online.org/burns_to_a_louse.htm Variant: O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us Source: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns Context: O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion. What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us An' ev'n Devotion