Conscious Thought Quotes

It was a sense of belonging that blurs the lines between two people, when you find your ankle wrapped around someone else's, or your fingers intertwined, and it's so natural, so automatic, that you have no conscious thought of it happening. When I think of God, I think of all these magical, inexplicable things, multiplied by infinity. ~ Leylah Attar

So far, she had nothing but fear and the nauseating sensation that the hour would pass and she would be just as helpless as when she'd first left the Fuller house. The same problems that had plagued her before were on an endless loop that took up every conscious thought. Her mother: persistently unavailable. Huckleberry: worthless. Jacob Mayhew: probably working for the congressman. Fred Nolan: ditto, or maybe he had his own agenda. Congressman Johnny Jackson: Paul's secret uncle. Powerful and connected, and duplicitous enough to stand with the Kilpatrick family during press conferences, as if he had no idea what had happened to their precious child. Adam Quinn: possible friend or foe. ~ Karin Slaughter

All conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death; - it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct - it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought - it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude - it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up. Those ~ Erich Maria Remarque

He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Some women, it seemed, were entirely without guile and bestowed their affections with hardly a moment's conscious thought. Others set out to implement a campaign of military thoroughness, with branched contingency trees and fallback positions, all to 'catch' a desirable man. The word 'desirable' was the giveaway, she thought. The poor jerk wasn't actually desired, only 'desirable' - a plausible object of desire in the opinion of those others on whose account this whole sorry charade was performed. Most women, she thought, were somewhere in the middle, seeking to reconcile their passions with their perceived long-term advantage. ~ Carl Sagan

When speaking of initiation, I mean engaging in practices that establish an exchange between conscious reflection and the unconscious material, and developing a form of analogical language: the acquisition of a poetic literacy. I believe this literacy of the imagination arises from a creative dialogue with the unconscious and involves recurring motifs or symbols that transform with time and seduce the initiate. And of course as conscious thought is not independent of the world, similarly the unconscious draws its ancient forms from all things around us in the this secret dialogue. New forms arise out of chaos. As the alchemists proclaimed, there can be no generation without decay. ~ Stephen J. Clark

Your final goal is to convert your athletic swing to pure instinct rather than conscious thought. ~ David Leadbetter

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert's hand - notably short on its middle and ring fingers - reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

But my last conscious thought was an image of Prince Char when he'd caught the bridle of Sir Stephan's horse. His face had been close to mine. Two curls had spilled onto his forehead. A few freckles dusted his nose, and his eyes said he was sorry for me to go. ~ Gail Carson Levine

Every conscious thought you have, every moment you spend on an idea, is a commitment to be stuck with that idea and with aspects of that level of thinking, for the rest of your life. Spending just 10 seconds focusing on a topic that does not serve your interests is to invest your energy along a path that will continue to draw from you and define you. ~ Kevin Michel

I back away from conscious thought and turn the problem over to my unconscious mind. It will scan a broader array of patterns and find some new close fits from other information stored in my brain. ~ Arthur Fry

Save your anger for the enemy. Here it will do you no good; there, it can overcome fear. Use this time now to teach your sword what to do, so later it will do it without conscious thought. ~ Terry Goodkind

There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren't - even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states - I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know - it just happens. Where is the freedom in that? ~ Sam Harris

I want to be," I mumbled against her mouth, the words just spilling out without any real, conscious thought behind them. "I want to be...for you... ~ Shay Savage

There is an undeniable truth that as one progresses further in his understanding of a craft the rest of his life progresses along with it. This symbiotic relationship between all things is experienced on a daily basis, but rarely articulated through conscious thought. ~ Chris Matakas

Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end. ~ Mason Cooley

My first conscious thought of 'I should be like that and not like this' was probably at about six, and I was playing with ... I have a twin brother, and we were playing with our twin cousins, who are a boy and a girl. ~ Candis Cayne

Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren't that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they'd been had found release through a necessary valve. ~ Matthew Thomas

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. ~ Douglas Adams

Elite competitors manage their unconscious minds by mastering their conscious thoughts. ~ Stan Beecham

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ~ William A. Dembski

Nope," she managed. "No other questions."
Eleven centuries of captivity. Hung on his hated enemy's study wall. Eleven centuries of not touching. Not eating. Not loving. Had he had anyone to talk
to?
Her face must have betrayed her thoughts, for he startled her by saying softly, " 'Tis no longer of
consequence, lass, but thank you for the compassion. 'Tis nigh over. Seventeen more days, Jessica. That's all."
For some reason his words brought a sudden hot burn of tears to the backs of her eyes. Not only hadn't eleven centuries turned him into a monster, he was trying to soothe her, to make her feel better about his imprisonment.
"You weep for me, woman?"
She turned away. "It's been a long day. Hell, it's been a long week."
"Jessica." Her name was a soft command.
She disobeyed it, staring out the window at the rolling hills.
"Jessica, look at me."
Eyes bright with unshed tears, she whipped her head around and glared at him. "I weep for you, okay?" she snapped. "For eleven centuries stuck in there. Can I start driving again or do you need something else?"
He smiled faintly, raised his hand, and splayed his palm against the inside of the silvery glass. Without an ounce of conscious thought, her hand rose to
meet his, aligning on the cool silver,
palm to palm, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. And though she felt only a cold hardness beneath her palm, the gesture made something go all warm and soft in her heart.< ~ Karen Marie Moning

Cole knew what the chemical smell on the cloth over his nose meant. He took one breath, and his last conscious thought was simple: Kyle. ~ Debra Anastasia

One half-conscious thought was burned in my mind: stay on your feet. ~ Gene Tunney

Both Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King used these phrases ("playing out of one's mind," or "over one's head") to describe their performances while winning tghe finals at Wimbledon in 1975 ... The player loses himself in the action, continually breaki g the false limits placed on is potential. Awareness becomes acutely heightened, while analysis, anxiety and self-conscious thought are compoletly forgotten. Enjoyment is at a peak - pure and unspoiled. ~ Timothy Gallwey

She is a human being capable of conscious thought, which is a complete fucking miracle, and she is beautiful and we are lucky that she is on the planet with us. ~ John Green

Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

I believe we all serve someone in this life. For the first thirty-eight years of mine, I served myself. My conversion was not a highly emotional experience. It was a conscious, thought-out decision that changed my focus, my direction, my heart, my life. ~ Francine Rivers

Prayer and contemplation are both exercises in concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is restricted and the mind is brought to one conscious area of operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and a sense of peace and wellbeing ~ Henepola Gunaratana

If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelashionships are not accessible to our conscious thought but we are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art.. ~ Albert Einstein

And we neglect the glorious gospel when we fail to recognize his preeminence. How frequently we forget that everything is for him and about him. We forget that he is to be first, in our honor and in our worship. Whenever the gospel slips from our conscious thought, our religion becomes all about our performance, and then we think everything that happens or will ever happen isa bout us. When I forget the incarnation, sinless life, death, resurrection, and ascension, I quickly believe that I'm supposed to be the unrivaled supreme, and matchless one. It's at this point that I'm particularly in need of an intravenous dose of gospel truth. He is preeminent. ~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

You are already part of a family," Desari reminded him,her body brushing his, her arms circling his waist from behind. She had materialized out of nowhere,her presence filling the healing chamber.
She was there.Completing him. His air. His heart.The part of his soul that really lived and loved and mattered. Without conscious thought he sent up a quick prayer of thanks that he had been granted such a priceless treasure when he felt so undeserving of her.
Julian loved the way she smelled. He inhaled, and her scent washed over him, clean and sexy. "This mess? With all these males?" Julian allowed a low, rumbling growl to escape. "This is no family. This is a man's nightmare."
Desari deliberately moved against him, her body soft and pliant with invitation. "Is that what you think?"
"What I think is"-Julian circled her slender throat with his large hand in mock threat- "you are deliberately tempting me when I have important, pressing business to atttend to. ~ Christine Feehan

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious. ~ John Crowley

I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother - a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile. ~ Lisa Wingate

Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

He had no illusions about surviving the battle, or any real conscious thought about the battle at all. Logic and rational thought had been shed like a killer's false smile, and all that remained was death. ~ Cedric Nye

We waited, eating resilient, deeply satisfying bread dipped in spicy oil that tasted exactly like fresh olives. Doug reached out and stroked my knee and I had a sudden conscious thought that I was happy. ~ Ruth Reichl

The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American magazine contains an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room. Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. - Maxwell Maltz ~ David Allen

Meditation quiets conscious thought and the physical realm, making a doorway to spiritual awareness. ~ Jenna Alatari

Make rituals of the important elements of your work. It ensures that they get done without much conscious thought. ~ Mani S. Sivasubramanian

Belief is the unmitigated, simplest form of mental representation. It's a psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true, one of the integral building bricks of conscious thought itself, therefore capable of radically affecting your mindset, attitude, confidence and ultimately your success ~ Michael Khatkar

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prov ~ Douglas Adams

As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot - on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise - in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains... ~ Marcel Proust

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Happiness, like sleep, in order to be fully effective must involve some sort of yielding of conscious thought. ~ Jon Richardson

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth. ~ Philip Pullman

The oth­ers went up­stairs, a slow unwilling pro­ces­sion. If this had been an old house, with creak­ing wood, and dark shad­ows, and heav­ily pan­elled walls, there might have been an eerie feel­ing. But this house was the essence of moder­ni­ty. There were no dark corners - ​no pos­si­ble slid­ing pan­els - it was flood­ed with elec­tric light - every­thing was new and bright and shining. There was noth­ing hid­den in this house, noth­ing con­cealed. It had no at­mo­sphere about it. Some­how, that was the most fright­en­ing thing of all. They ex­changed good-​nights on the up­per land­ing. Each of them went in­to his or her own room, and each of them automatical­ly, al­most with­out con­scious thought, locked the door.... ~ Agatha Christie

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. ~ Maxwell Maltz

My last conscious thought was that although I lay in squalor, my mouth was minty fresh. ~ Bradley Denton

It all comes down to the first thing you think of when you wake up. That first image or idea before the filtering of conscious thought takes over, while you're still in between. Whatever you think of, that's the reason you get up in the first place. That's the reason you get out of bed, into your clothes, into your shoes, and out the door. ~ Christina Collins

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort. ~ Neel Burton

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar. ~ Denis Johnson

Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It ~ Dan Simmons

He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into The Great Wasps' Nest of Life. As an image it stank. As a cameo of reality, he felt it was serviceable. He had stuck his hand through some rotted flashing in high summer and that hand and his whole arm had been consumed in holy, righteous fire, destroying conscious thought, making the concept of civilized behaviour obsolete. Could you be expected to behave as a thinking human being when your hand was being impaled on red-hot darning needles? Could you be expected to live in the love of your nearest and dearest when the brown, furious cloud rose out of the hole in the fabric of things (the fabric you thought was so innocent) and arrowed straight at you? Could you be held responsible for your own actions as you ran crazily about on the sloping roof seventy feet above he ground, not knowing where you were going, not remembering that your panicky, stumbling feet could lead you crashing and blundering right over the rain gutter and down to your death on the concrete seventy feet below? Jack didn't think you could. When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps' nest, you hadn't made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honour. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five seconds. ~ Stephen King

Genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought to enable us to repeat by deliberate art what has been apprehended and what in wavering apparition gleams fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever! ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths. ~ Peter Watts

Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I've been there for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting. ~ Sarah Ockler

Words, moreover, can get in the way of dancing. They signal self-conscious thought, and the moment they play through a dancer's mind her concentration and the way she responds physically to music risk changing. Words can distance a dancer from the music and from her own impulses, and make her movement appear remote and flat. ~ Jennifer Homans

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice - well, then you're going to get fucked. ~ Mark Manson

Here's the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that's affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he's not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant."
"How long?" someone yelled.
Sam shook his head. "I don't know."
"Why can't you get him to leave?"
"Because I can't, that's why," Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. "Because I'm not Superman, all right? Look, he's inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can't get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?"
Silence.
"Yeah, I thought so. I can't get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake."
"That's your job," Zil said.
"Oh, I see," Sam said. The resentment he'd held in now came boiling to the surface. "It's my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What's your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don't know how we'd ever manage without you."
"Sam…," Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning.
Too late. He was going to say what needed saying.
"And t ~ Michael Grant

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at t ~ Anton Chekhov

One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly. ~ Niels Bohr

He's paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness
in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy
all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. ~ Ayn Rand

I saw that he was looking anxious.
'I thought you weren't coming.' As he spoke, he grasped my hand. And if the sight of him had not quite restored the magic, the touch of him most certainly did. 'You're not wishing yourself some place else, Mary? ~ Jennifer Paynter

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you'd be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today. ~ Dolly Parton

Face your fears, Halt had always thought him, and more often than not they fade like mist in the sunshine ~ John Flanagan

All my life,' she thought, 'someone has been telling me what I must not do. Mother, father, husband, priestesses... How did it take me till now to realize how heartily sick of it I am? ~ Cass Morris

You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing. ~ M.L. Rio

You have to make entertaining movies. But like a good meal, it's nice to have a little food for thought after you walk out of the theater rather than just wiling away a couple of hours. ~ Michael Douglas

The doctor looked at it after the game and he thought it didn't look too bad, but we'll see what happens. My skate got caught and I twisted it. I heard it twist and I couldn't get up. All my body weight fell on it. I had to be really hurt to leave the game - we were still in the game at that point. ~ Martin Brodeur

Odd how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love-soaked, drenched in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. ~ Anita Shreve

Sleep is the true rehearsal for death, Soobin thought with a sigh. That's why grandma had more dreams of the future the older she got, for death is the future of all things, coming back towards us like a feedback loop. ~ Giacomo Lee

When you become a parent, it blows you open in ways that you never thought possible in terms of a level of love that I know I never thought I could possibly have. ~ Audra McDonald

Let me tell you the truth: I'm 45 years old. I never thought that I would live to see a black president. ~ Coolio

It is a terrible thought, that nothing is ever forgotten; that not an oath is ever uttered that does not continue to vibrate through all times, in the wide spreading current of sound; that not a prayer is lisped, that its record is not to be found st ~ William Cowper

You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that! ~ Dave Barry

Its taken 14 billion years for matter to gain the capacity to become conscious of itself. If this is true, it wouldn't make any sense that the whole point of enlightenment would be to escape from the whole process at the very instant that the universe is beginning to awaken to itself. ~ Andrew Cohen

An obstreperous urge seized him. he desperately wanted to hold on to her, to support his slipping heart, and when it slipped away, he realized she had gone away, incarcerating herself in his thought with her smile and unblemished innocence. ~ Faraaz Kazi

Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. "Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!" he sighed. "Who knows what's going to happen to them? ~ Paul Bowles

I spiraled slowly down the steps, the soft way a milkweed seed sometimes twirls to earth. I wanted time for any vague thought to come to mind that mind should want. No new ones came, but the pace seemed a meditative winding, and what I was winding was like yarn on an oblong skein, softly enfolding a quiet center that was myself. ~ Sena Jeter Naslund

Anwen uncrossed her arms, adjusted her skirt. She glanced from me to Watson. "If it's not an imposition," she said. "You can come too, Jamie. If you want."
At that, I pinched his leg.
"No!" he yelped. "No, go on. I, ah. Have a lecture."
"Are you sure?" I ask him, sniffling.
"I'm sure," he said, and reached out, very gently, to brush away a tear from my face. His dark eyes softened. He really was a better actor than I gave him credit for. "I'll see you later, pumpkin."
As I led Anwen out to the street, I texted from my bag:
Watson?
Yes, pumpkin?
New condition: you cease and desist all gourd-related nicknames.
Done. But pinch me again, and I'll start calling you pickle.
Do that, and I will find and them publish your diaries in a website with a vociferous comments section. Thought I was not a gourd, I was most definitely not a vinegar-soaked phallic object. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

On opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished ... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured. ~ Felix D'Herelle

I deserve this shrimp. Born to people who clearly shouldn't have reproduced, I date my best friend and turn him gay, date another man who doesn't know he's gay, almost have dinner with a third man who's more interested in his reflection than me, and land on a yeti who turns out to be a millionaire playboy.

"I lost the man I thought of as a father, had my thirtieth birthday party minus any family, and now I'm being dissed in the gossip rags. I am only human and I can take no more, so, yes, I have consumed my body weight in wine and I plan on eating this whole goddamn plate of shrimp. ~ L.A. Fiore

I kneeled in front of the E M T chair, in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That's it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wated time is knowledge. p.295 ~ Monica Drake

You took a bullet to save those girls," I said as he watched me.
A pale Dylan shrugged then flinched at the pain of the movement. "In my head, I would stop the bastards without getting shot. Didn't really work out that way."
"Very brave though."
Looking pale, Dylan nodded. "I'm sorry I kicked your ass that day. I never really thought of you as a girl."
"That's okay," I said reaching for his hand. "I'm sorry I kicked your ass worse and made you look like a girl."
Dylan smirked. "And our gentle moment is over. ~ Bijou Hunter

I loved you so much, that I thought you were the meaning of my life," Celia said, crying. "I thought that people were put on Earth to find other people, and I was put on Earth to find you. To find you, and touch your skin, and smell your breath, and hear all your thoughts. But I don't think that's true anymore." She wiped her eyes. "Because I don't want to be meant for someone like you. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

He assumed a manner that could be called circular irony. Everything he said, he said in quotes, with an artificial, exaggerated emphasis, and with the elocution of someone playing a succession of improvised, ad hoc roles. Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words. ~ Stanislaw Lem

My aim was not to fool. My aim was to provoke thought and stir emotion. ~ Casey Affleck

Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they're sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it's not the kids' fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

Free. He was free. He thought his brothers gave him that, and they did. At the same time, they didn't. True freedom came from Tabby. ~ Kristen Ashley