Alphas Like Us Quotes

I try to explain in my own words, and I gesture to his chest. "It's in your bones; it's what keeps you alive. The foundation of your body. To suck out all the marrow of life... I think about how Thoreau went into the woods and stripped life to the barest necessities. To learn what life is really made of, the feeling of water slipping between fingers, the chilled glass in my hand, the wind that rustles your damn hair. And I think about how I feel these barest things every day with you. To live life at its most essential level so as to fully live. ~ Krista Ritchie

We need to encourage each other to do what we want and not let it totally define us. You know? The things that people think define them aren't valid either. You could see a girl who's completely covered head-to-toe and who looks like the sweetest little thing in the world, and she could be the most horrendous human being on the planet inside. ~ Ariana Grande

I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I'd wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend - never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she'd look like and how she'd hold her long hair back from the flame when bending over a lit candle. I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagined her drowning off the coast of North Carolina during one of my family's vacations. Everyone needed to be there so they could see just how devastated I was. I could actually make myself cry by picturing it: How I'd carry her out of the water, how my feet would sink into the sand owing to the extra weight. I'd try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and keep trying until someone, my father most often, would pull me back, saying, "It's too late, son. Can't you see she's gone?"

It seemed I wanted to marry just so I could be a widower. So profound would be my grief that I'd never look at another woman again. It was perfect, really. Oh, there were variations. Sometimes she'd die of leukemia, as in the movie Love Story. Occasionally a madman's bullet would fell her during a hostage situation, but always I'd be at her side, trying everything in my power to bring her back.

The fantasy remained active until I was twenty. Funny how unimportant being gay became once I told somebody. All I had to do was open up to my best friend, and w ~ David Sedaris

What's going on between us?"
I don't know. I rubbed my hand over my face before glancing at Echo. A hint of her cleavage peeked from her shirt. Damn, she was sexy as hell. I wanted her, badly. Would one night be enough, even if she gave it to me? Echo already felt like a heavy drug. The kind I avoided on purpose - crack, heroin, meth. The ones that screwed with your mind, crept into your blood and left you powerless, helpless. If she gave her body to me, would i be able to let go or would i be sucked into that black veil, hooks embedded into my skin, sentenced to death by the emotion i reserved for my brothers-love? "I want you."
"Do you? Really? Because these scars are sexy."
How did she see her self? "I don't give a fuck about your scars."
She stalked toward me, hips swaying side to side, eyes hardened with anger. Echo pushed her body agaist mine, parts of her fitting perfectly into parts of me. I swore under my breath, fighting for control over my body.
"How are you going to react when we 're this close and you take off my shirt? Are you still going to want me when you see red and white lines? Are you going to flinch each time you accidentally touch my arms and feel the raised skin? How about when i touch you?"
She pulled away from me, leaving my body cold after experiencing her warmth. "Or will you forbid that? Will you tell me how to dress or what i'm allowed to take off?"
Her anger only fed mine. "For the last time I don't give ~ Katie McGarry

Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abn ~ Ray Bradbury

Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do, it costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world. ~ John Carmack

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame. ~ Paul Haggis

What are you so afraid will happen? Afraid you might start to like me?"
He said nothing.
Despite her fatigue, she trotted ahead of him. "That's it, isn't it? You don't want to like a Grisha. You're scared that if you laugh at my jokes or answer my questions, you might start thinking I'm human. Would that be so terrible?"
"I do like you."
"What was that?"
"I do like you," he said angrily.
She'd beamed, feeling a well of pleasure erupt through her. "Now, really, is that so bad?"
"Yes!" he roared.
"Why?"
"Because you're horrible. You're loud and lewd and . . . treacherous. Brum warned us that Grisha could be charming."
"Oh, I see. I'm the wicked Grisha seductress. I have beguiled you with my Grisha wiles!"
She poked him in the chest.
"Stop that."
"No. I'm beguiling you."
"Quit it."
She danced around him in the snow, poking his chest, his stomach, his side. "Goodness! You're very solid. This is strenuous work." He started to laugh. "It's working! The beguiling has begun. The Fjerdan has fallen. You are powerless to resist me. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Gossip, public, private, social to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found. ~ Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Sometimes in life our master will teach us and then test us like this. He will send the same painful circumstances to us over and over again until we no longer want what isn't good for us; until he is sure that we have learned what we need to know so that he can move us on to new kinds of lessons and experience. ~ Kate McGahan

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them. ~ Samuel Butler

there, you've got to be able to meet the dirtiest, smelliest beggar-peasant, and as you walk past him, you've got to be able to speak to him, and make him know, just with your eyes, as you exchange glances, that you know he is a man who hurts like we do and hopes like we do and wants for his kids just like all of us Americans do. If you can do that, if most of us can do that, we can stay here until we want to leave. And we can win the worldwide ideological war, peacefully. ~ Robert Humphrey

What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling I'd like to know who they think they are fooling They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on ~ Peter Weiss

Pardon if all the cleanness and the beauty
Brave rhythym and the immemorial sea
Ensare us sometimes with their siren song,
Forgetful of our murderous intentions.
Through our uneasy peacetime carnival
Cold sweat of death holds us like a dew;
Even this grey machinery of murder
Holds beauty and the promise of a future. ~ Norman Hampson

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place. ~ Lydia Davis

Here I am baking cookies and looking all over the house for you," she turned her attention to Gabe and uncovered his eyes, "hoping to bring my man something to munch on, and instead I walk in on your crazy monkey sex! Thanks you two, now I'm officially scarred for life." She swatted the air in front of her, as if she could shoo away the images, and darted over the broken dishes and cookies, up the staircase, with a flustered string of expletives.
Gabe watched her ascend the stairway and let out another amused cackle. "Oh don't mind her. She's acting like she just witnessed her parents in the act." Bending down, he snatched a cookie and gave us a thumbs-up. "You look hot, kids. Carry on. ~ Rachael Wade

All we know is that things happen. More accurately, God is the urging-forward force within all things, and all things (if "things" can be spoken of at all) are alive. The ontological matrix is a way in which His urging or thinking is manifested; so in that respect I think it's not time which moves forward, carrying us with it like a great tide, but that we are driven forward all of us together, animate and inanimate. ~ Philip K. Dick

Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Oh my God…How could he do such a thing? What kind of monster is he? (Kiara)
You think you're so unsullied. How dare you sit there like some high queen dispensing her judgment on us. Don't waste pity on Arast. If he'd been given the chance, he'd have raped you slowly and in ways you can't even conceive of, then cut you into little pieces and fed you to his dogs. All except your head with your contorted fear permanently twisted on your pretty little face – that he would have sent home to your father as a present, but only after he'd been paid. And that's nice compared to what he'd have done to Nykyrian. To what he's done to Nykyrian in the past. (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that. ~ Benh Zeitlin

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN FATE, OTHERS DON'T. I DO, and I don't. It may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us about like puppets on strings. But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We can grab the strings ourselves and adjust our course at every crossroad, or take off at any little trail into the unknown. ~ Thor Heyerdahl

She bent down and reached around his trim waist to grab the handcuffs. A bit of a compromising position, given the state of her thoughts, but she had to help the poor guy out before his nose froze off. "There's a saying here in Switzerland. To be a fool at the right time is an art." She caught his eye before continuing with the knot. "You better hush, now."
"Well, there's a saying in the US, too. Imagination is worse than the truth. I have a real vivid imagination, and you bent over me like this is not helping. ~ Melinda Dozier

When Good gave Eve that extra rib? He should have given us something extra too. Like mental telepathy. ~ Emma Chase

Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation. ~ Albert Camus

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

And that was how sin came into the world," he said, "sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed."

"But..." Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: "but it en't true, is it? Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale."

"The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

"Anyway, it's what the Church has taught for thousands of years. And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was a physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience.

"Incidentally, the Bible gave us the name Dust as well. At first they were called Rusakov Particles, but soon someone pointed out a curious verse toward the end of the Third Chapter of Genesis, where God's cursing Adam for eating the fruit."

He opened the Bible again and pointed it out to Lyra. She read:

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto d ~ Philip Pullman

When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. [...] They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly. [...] We are just like clouds, rocks and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged? ~ Alan W. Watts

We have a lot of respect and love for Bruschi. But he's gone. That's unfortunate for us, but we have to move on. Just like if I got injured they'd have to move on without me. That's just part of the game. That's reality. ~ Rodney Harrison

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others - Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She'd be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they'd be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They'd come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they'd walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man's-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they'd simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself. ~ Libba Bray

As miserable as Gregor felt about being dumped with a rat, his heart ached for Vikus. He wanted to scream at Luxa, "Say something! Don't let your granpa fly off like this! Four of us aren't coming back!" But the words caught in his throat. Part of him wasn't ready to forgive Vikus for abandoning them, either.
"Fly you high, Gregor the Overlander," said Vikus.
Gregor struggled with how to respond. Should he ignore Vikus? Let him know that none of them, not even an Overlander, could forgive him? Just as he had steeled himself against replying, Gregor thought of the last two years, seven months, and was it fifteen days now? There were so many things he wished he'd said to his dad when he'd had the chance. Things like how special it was when they went on the roof at night and tried to find the stars. Or how much he loved it when they took the subway out to the stadium to watch a baseball game. Or just that he felt lucky that out of all the people in the world, his dad was his dad.
He didn't have room inside him for any more unspoken words. The bats were rising into the air. He only had a second. "Fly you high, Vikus!" he yelled. "Fly you high!"
Vikus turned back, and Gregor could see tears shining on his cheeks. He lifted up a hand to Gregor in thanks.
And then they were gone. ~ Suzanne Collins

You like me," he finally said. "You like me, like me." He was trying not to smile.
"No. I hate you," I said, hoping that saying it would make it so.
"And yet, you draw me." Noah was still smug, completely undeterred by my declaration.
This was torture; worse somehow than what just happened, even though it was only the two of us. Or because it was only the two of us.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why what?" What could I say? Noah, despite you being an asshole, or maybe because of it, I'd like to rip off your clothes and have your babies. Don't tell. ~ Michelle Hodkin

He swiveled his head towards Eddie. "Tell me how to get over to the Four Lads. Do I have to die again?"
If he did, he had a Beretta on him and he knew what kicking the bucket from a gunshot was like. Snore.
"Don't bother." Adrian cracked his knuckles. "They're not going to tell you anything. They can't."
What the fuck? "I thought I worked for them."
"You work for both sides, and they've given you all the help they can."
Jim looked back and forth between the two angels. Each of them had the tight expression of a guy with a shoestring noosing up his balls.
"Help?" he said. "Where's my goddamned help?"
"They gave you us, asshole," Adrian snapped. "And that's all they can do
I've already gone over and asked them who's supposed to be next. I figured it would help you, you ungrateful bastard. ~ J.R. Ward

You may not mean to, but you do seem to look down your nose at many of us mere mortals muddling along down here. I feel as though you think everyone should be better than they are. I certainly think you expect me to behave like some sort of perfect princess. But I'm just an ordinary girl who wants to grow up and find out where I belong in the world. ~ Emily Arden

Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there's a supreme being? There's no proof of it. There's no harm in saying you're an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated.
I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don't believe necessarily that there's a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of George Carlin. George said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I'm in good company ... Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin. It's not like I'm not with good company and intelligent people. There have been some good, intelligent atheists who have lived in the world. ~ Jesse Ventura

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about - depending on their views - the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except that now it's applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. ~ Sebastian Junger

Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime the changes in the world have been incredible… Flying is the worst because people come back from flights and they tell you…a horror story…They're like: "It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway…" Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?! You're flying! It's amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: "Oh my God! Wow!" You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky! ~ Louis Ck

I think, as most of us do, I put such high expectations on myself that this spills over onto other people. And not everyone is wired this way. Some people can shrug expectations off their shoulders like a cardigan, remaining cool and breezy. Others wear them like a parka with a stuck zipper, hot and stifling. ~ Kristin Armstrong

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real ~ David Graeber

Most people look at cats and think what a life - all we do is lie around in the sun, never having to lift a finger. But cats' lives aren't that idyllic. Cats are powerless, weak little creatures that injure easily. We don't have shells like turtles, nor wings like birds. We can't burrow into the ground like moles or change colors like a chameleon. The world has no idea how many cats are injured every day, how many of us meet a miserable end. I happen to be lucky enough to live with the Tanabes in a warm and friendly family, the children treat me well, and I've got everything I need. But even my life isn't always easy. When it comes to strays, though, they have a very tough time of it. ~ Haruki Murakami

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I write about warriors; men and women who rise above the rest. Men and women who overcome their fears with courage and integrity. While some of my characters may seem like super heroes, the real life men and women who risk their lives every day to protect and to serve us are truly super heroes. Please support your warriors. There are a variety of worthwhile organizations that need financial support and/or volunteers. Visit a hospital, send a card, say a prayer.
Thank you
Sandy ~ Sandra J. Yearman