Quotes about use
page 72

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”

Ha-Joon Chang book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Source: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Way

“We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.”

Clive Barker book Galilee

Source: Galilee

Sadness, Light

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

Love, Books, Sadness

“It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.”

Joyce Maynard (1953) American writer

Children, Parent, Sun

“The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us; but he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. His attack is psychological, Damien. And powerful.”

William Peter Blatty book The Exorcist

Source: The Exorcist

Truth, Lie

“She can go with us to the lab and keep Myrnin pinned down while we pull the plug, if he's not… you know, better."
"Define BETTER with that guy."
"Not all fangs and raaaaar.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Guy

“Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

Men, Truth

“… Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

Source: The Arkadians

People, Knowledge, Evil, Change

“I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I've ever had, and 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

Love, Life, Dreams, Hope

“We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Source: Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars

“Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.”

Ally Carter Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Source: Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Learning, Memory

“We are not mad. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.”

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

Source: Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

Love, Forgiveness, Madness

“I have to come to realize that God does not want to punish us, but rather, to fulfill our lives. God created us, loves us and wants to help us to realize our potential so that we can be useful to others.”

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

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Love, God, Help

“We get used to living one way, even if it's a bad way or a hard one. When that's gone, there's a hole to fill. It's in our nature to try to fill it with anxieties and fears. It can take time to fill it with good things instead.”

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

Source: Lord of Shadows

Fear, Way, Nature, Time

“strange, there's so much religion in the world, but only enough to make us fight over who is right, not enough to make us love one another.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Love, World, Religion, Fight

“Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.”

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

“We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Daughter of the Blood

People, Evil

“Learning was of two kinds: the one being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?”

George S. Clason book The Richest Man in Babylon

Source: The Richest Man in Babylon

Learning, Training

“For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

God

“Barbarism? That's ironic coming from a woman helping to prepare us for slaughter. And what's she basing our success on? Our table manners?”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Success, Help

“The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.
Context: Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.

World, Beauty, Peaceful

“The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves makes us who we are.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

“It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.”

James Lee Burke (1936) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Glass Rainbow

Parting

“In other words, our opinions and our thoughts and feelings, anything we experience, need not define us forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Feeling

“It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.”

Marjane Satrapi (1969) Artist

Source: The Complete Persepolis

Fear

“The secret is to know how to lie" he used to say, " and to know when someone's lying to you". His father, Steve eventually decided, must have known how to lie.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

Lie, Secret, Lying

“Dreamers are mocked as impractical. The truth is they are the most practical, as their innovations lead to progress and a better way of life for all of us.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Life, Truth, Way

“Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

World, Time

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

On being informed that Faulkner had said that Hemingway "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Thinking

“People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

People

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 1
Endymion (1818)

Health, Beauty, Dreams, Sleep

“What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Thinking, Change, Wise

“Please, sit down," Sharon said with another hair toss. I made a mental note to practice doing that in a mirror the next time I saw one. it seemed a useful skill, right up there with roundhouse kicks.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Time

“We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

“These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing,
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Food, Boy, Kiss

“Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Context: Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to reach out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if it means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
And to save us.

Love, Life, Hell, Time

“There’s a reason we are drawn to the light. A reason why we fear darkness. It’s important to be terrified and unnerved about certain things. That way we will choose another path. The path that leads us to truth and love.”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

Love, Truth, Fear, Way

“None of us are either all good or all bad – we’re all somewhere in between – but there comes a moment in each life when we take an important step, either toward the light or toward the dark…”

Joseph Delaney (1945) British writer

Source: Attack of the Fiend

Life, Light

“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.”

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

School

“All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

page 332
Source: A Million Little Pieces (2003)
Context: All of us started out normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives we got lost. Though we are here at this Clinic trying to find our way back, we all know that most of us will never get there. Things like the fight allow us to dream, and take us away from here, and allow us to imagine what the normal World must be like and how normal people must live in it.

“There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.”

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

Pain, Behavior, Joy

“Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman… as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing… [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can't share with anyone else.”

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) Soviet writer and journalist who originally trained as an engineer

Source: Everything Flows

Happiness, Imagination, Forgetting

“Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”

David Brin book The Uplift War

Source: The Uplift War

“There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

War

“And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Love

“Some of us weren't born for rewards, Froi. We were born for sacrifices.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Froi of the Exiles

“For any of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred of years from now. You can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

World, Hope

“Women shouldn't iron, ever. It's our wrinkles that make us interesting.”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

Women

“I mean, we're all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out when we're still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we're immortal for more than a decade afterwards.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

“God cannot take sides; for He is in all of us. We are all a part of Him, and when we try to destroy Him, we destroy ourselves.”

Sidney Sheldon book The Sands of Time

Source: The Sands of Time

God, Parting

“Use your head, Sep. Loads of wolverines. Hanging around waiting for super. Gtting excited. eating mint blasts. so what do you think they do?'
it must be here. they can't have eaten that… i dunno, Nik, what do they do?'
POO.”

Angie Sage book Flyte

Source: Flyte

Thinking, Waiting

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Way

“we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Women, Parent

“I can't believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”

Lou Holtz (1937) American college football coach, professional football coach, television sports announcer

God

“Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

Fools, Personality

“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Family, Dead

“One Child:
I hope it will be said we taught them to stand tall & proud, even in the face of history & the future was made new & whole for us all, one child at a time.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Hope, History, Time, Future

“God always offers us a second chance in life.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Life, God, Chance

“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissastifaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Martha Graham (1894–1991) American dancer and choreographer

Time

“Well, then, since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Life

“it is just as wrong, or even perhaps more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

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

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Variant: I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
Context: I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

“Demons don't understand human hearts, not well. They see through a distorted glass and show you what you desire, but warped and wrong. Use that wrongness to push yourself out of the dream. Life is loss, Alexander, but it's better than this.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Life, Dreams, Understanding, Loss

“The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

People, World, Music

“By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Imagination, Distant

“For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.”

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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

Way, Home, Courage, Heart

“Becuse God loves us, but the devil takes an interest.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Love, God

“Jason scratched his head. "You named him Festus? You know that in Latin, ‘festus’ means ‘happy’? You want us to ride off to save the world on Happy the Dragon?”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Variant: You named him Fetus? You know in Latin Fetus means happy? You want us to ride off to save the world on Happy the Dragon?
Source: The Lost Hero

Happiness, World

“Would I be as strong as that once I did that thing Christophe was talking about? Blooming? Would I smell like a bakery item? Or was that just him? Did he use pie filling for cologne?”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

Strong

“Maybe there's nothing impossible tonight. We're down the hole to Wonderland, and no White Rabbit to guide us."
If I remember correctly, the White Rabbit was an unreliable guide, anyway.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Source: The Taking

“Once in a while our school has half days, and the teachers spend the afternoon 'in service,' which I think must be a group therapy for having to deal with us.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Bruiser

School, Thinking, Teachers

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Feeling, Exercises, Thinking

“But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Question

“For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

Youth, Dependency

“With luck, it might even snow for us.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

“We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”

Kent Nerburn (1946) Author

Source: Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis

Thinking

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important it finds homes for us everywhere.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Home, Reading

“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 3

Dreams, Nature

“Good. Show me a man who thinks that he knows what 'good' is, and I will probably be able to show you a horror of a person. Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.”

Idries Shah book Caravan of Dreams

Source: Caravan of Dreams

Thinking, Personality

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Milligan! Come and tell us why you're so dreadfully glum!" ~ Constance, The Mysterious Benedict Society”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

“It's what we think we know that keeps us from learning.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Thinking, Learning

“I felt my heart breaking all over again. Why? Why had this happened to us? Why was the universe so cruel?”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Universe, Heart

“Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Vol. 1, pt. 1.
Panegyric (1989)
Source: Society of the Spectacle

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Hannah Arendt book On Revolution

On Revolution (1963), ch. 2.
General sources
Context: What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Evil

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”

Irving Stone book The Agony and the Ecstasy

Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy