Figuring Out Quotes

I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them. ~ John Patrick Shanley

Evil men rarely convince others to their side by asking them to perform dark deeds for no good reason. They will always start with the lightest shade of gray. They so often use what seems like a good cause."

"You don't think it's possible that a little gray is what's needed, sometimes?" asked Davian.

Raleth snorted.

"No," he said severely. "Gray is the color of cowardice and ignorance and sheer laziness, Davian--never let anyone tell you otherwise. If something is not clearly right or wrong then it bears actually *figuring out* which one it is, not dismissal into some nebulous third category. If you have a basis for your morality, a foundation for it, then there will always be an answer--and if you do not, then trying to decide whether *anything* is right or wrong is an exercise in futility and irrelevance. ~ James Islington

What, you want me to throw you a pride parade for figuring out you like dudes? I don't give a shit who you fuck, so long as it's not me. ~ Eden Finley

The key to skeleton is to find the line, and I think I spend most of training figuring out where that sweet spot is ... ~ Katie Uhlaender

My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that. ~ Lindsey Shaw

What podcasts can do in order to liven up the talk show area of TV is bring new personalities and unique worldviews into the fray in a way that's not going to be filtered through the whole Q-rating thing. I think there's a whole new layer of doing things that TV is behind the Internet in figuring out. ~ Julie Klausner

You're thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what's been there, figuring out what to do that won't clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that's what I do. You ask why I'm not afraid of loving and losing, and that's my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.
Codi, here's what I've decided: the very least you can do in you life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyer nor the destroyed. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

When you're making a film you start living with it, and I find myself sitting down and figuring out a sound or melody that would go with a film, or a particular period. It's not brain surgery, you just kind of feel it along. ~ Clint Eastwood

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another. ~ Milton Friedman

For most developers, that kind of situation - a player figuring out how to do something that the designer didn't intend - to most developers, that's a bug. For me, that's a celebration. ~ Warren Spector

But at the same time, I don't know that we are doing folks any favors if we act like when we become Christians or when we follow Jesus, all we do is win. I think it's okay to say that we mess up, that we let people down, that we overpromise and underdeliver, that we go to therapy, that we take our meds, that we go for walks to remember everything good and true, that we're still in the midst of figuring out where God is in the middle of all this, that we're learning our capacity and God's goodness the real way: by living our lives and experiencing both victories and sorrows in the midst. ~ Sarah Bessey

Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job. ~ Newt Gingrich

He thought women were every bit as intelligent as men, every bit as capable of figuring out how long it would take for train A to crash into train B if the two were moving toward each other at an average speed of C. They were as capable of rational thought; they just didn't appear to be as interested in it. They were happy to apply rational argument to defend what they already believed but unlikely to be swayed by it, not if it conflicted with inclination or, worse, intuition, not if it undercut a cherished opinion or nettled their self-esteem. So many times, when Nate had been arguing with a woman, a point was reached when it became clear that no argument would alter her thinking. Her position was one she "felt" to be true; it was, as a result, impermeable. ~ Adelle Waldman

People change. I mean you barely know who you are when you enter, and you spend that time figuring out what you want from life, and who you want in it. The next thing you know, the people you always thought would be there, aren't. A nd the person you thought you could trust with everything, isn't the person you ever knew at all. ~ Rebecca Donovan

[Playing] the bad guys tend to be fascinating. Figuring out what makes them do the things they do is what interests me. ~ Adam Croasdell

Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions? ~ Sarah Stillman

You must find a way to express your ideas and compel your audience to react through the idea itself, and then figuring out what the best representative of that idea may be, and bringing it to life. ~ Kevin Spacey

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. ~ Arca

When you're younger, it's hard because you're finding your identity, and then for 12 hours out of the day, you have to be a different person. So that's a tricky phase - as far as figuring who you are out and then figuring out the people that you're working with. ~ Hilarie Burton

The part that I know I enjoy most is the restaurants. You can't do everything, you know? For me, the priority has been being deeply involved in my restaurants and figuring out different ways to make them run better. ~ Michael Mina

When we're creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we've organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What ~ Steve Krug

comfort can sometimes be a crutch when it comes to figuring out your life. Goals are achieved through discomfort and hard work. They aren't achieved when you hide out in a place where you're nice and cozy. I ~ Colleen Hoover

It's not a sense of justice. Figuring out difficult cases is my hobby. If you measured good and evil deeds by current laws, I would be responsible for many crimes. The same way you all like to solve mysteries and riddles, or clear video games more quickly. For me too, its simply prolonging something I enjoy doing. It's not justice at all. And if it means being able to clear a case, I don't play fair, I'm a dishonest, cheating human being who hates losing in truth. ~ L Lawliet

People do not buy fortune cookies because they taste better than every other cookie on the shelf. They buy them for the delight they deliver at the end of a meal. Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a way to create a better fortune. Of course your job is to bake a good cookie, the very best that you can, but you must also spend time figuring out how to tell a great story. ~ William Mougayar

In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don't even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires - or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can't match. ~ Charles Duhigg

Kids are meeting in coffee shops and basements figuring out what's unsustainable in their communities. That's the future. ~ Ian Somerhalder

There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge. ~ Bella DePaulo

Then it began to dawn on us: There was no miracle moment. Although it may have looked like a single-stroke breakthrough to those peering in from the outside, it was anything but that to people experiencing transformation from within. Rather, it was a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel. After pushing on that flywheel in a consistent direction over an extended period of time, they'd inevitably hit a point of breakthrough. ~ James C. Collins

The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but [ ... ] once you do that, the rest is really easy. ~ Elon Musk

The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents. ~ Chelsea Clinton

I think the most note-worthy part is that Stella [Mozgawa] had joined the band two weeks before we started recording, so that really influenced the way that the album was recorded. It was really important for Stella and Jen[ny Lee Lindberg] to lay down the drums and bass first for most songs, because they were determining how they needed to lock in together, and Stella was still kind of learning and figuring out her parts. ~ Theresa Wayman

I'm a very introverted person. Nothing that's happened has changed that, but one of the reasons I write for teens is it's a real privilege to have a seat at the table in the lives of young people when they're figuring out what matters to them. ~ John Green

You find out who you are by figuring out who and what you're not ~ Kelly Cutrone

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan

There were a lot of apocalypses that didn't make it into this assemblage because they didn't suit the world. And defining that world and figuring out what its wobbly borders were was a long-term and exhaustive process. I had all of these different ways of categorizing the apocalypses I had made. I had a period of time where I cut them up. ~ Lucy Corin

Getting what you want is just as difficult as not getting what you want. Because then you have to figure out what to do with it instead of figuring out what to do without it. ~ David Levithan

I like figuring out where I need to be mentally so that I'm not thinking about the camera and that it's second nature. I want to get to a place where I can exist within the confines of what you can do with filmmaking and not have to think about it. ~ Anna Kendrick

He tells me of experiments his team is developing to monitor the spark of recognition in the brain as people look at online ads. The test focus on a brain wave called P300. (The U.S. Navy has run similar tests to see how pilots distinguish friends from foes in the air.) If a P300 wave heats up within a fraction of a second of a subject's seeing an ad, the Tacoda team will make the case that the viewer has not only looked at the spot but has processed it mentally. The next step? Figuring out which type of people process certain types of ads. Like other Numerati in a wide range of industries, Dave Morgan in scrutinizing humans and searching for hidden correlations. What do we do, he asks, that might predict what we'll do next? ~ Stephen Baker

There are many, many things that are difficult in this life, but one thing that isn't difficult at all is figuring out whether someone is excited or not when they open a present. ~ Lemony Snicket

The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there's an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later. ~ Jason Calacanis

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that. ~ Greil Marcus

If your goal is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and most of your focus has been on finding the church that will best meet your needs, figuring out which translation of the Bible is the best, or reading the best books on discipleship that you can find, but your life is the same as it was before - I would argue that you aren't becoming a disciple. Nothing other than following Jesus Christ can make you his disciple. ~ Kevin Watson

Figuring out our gifts in life is part of our journey to becoming enlightened human beings. ~ Allison DuBois

If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that you're basically a calculating manipulative person who always says what you think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think you want.' I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically accurate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be really open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it'd make me look good in others' eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing way all the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in middle school but quit because I couldn't be as good as I eventually wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good, etc. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can't stop thinking about a certain topic - a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it. ~ Merlin Mann

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts. ~ Adam Davidson

In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What were we trying to do, kill ourselves and everyone around us? But we were children then, and we were just figuring out how to live. The car finished its U-Turn and headed back for the road. I laughed. I believed in writing down my future, but I didn't know to keep an eye on hers. ~ Nova Ren Suma

A lot of people live in fear because they haven't figured out how you're going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I've come to terms with this by looking deeply into whatever makes me fearful - what are the key elements that get the hairs up on the back of my neck - and then figuring out what I can do about it. ~ Chris Hadfield

I love to work. I know that sounds ridiculous to say because all people love to work, but I love the homework that goes into acting. I love figuring out different ways of playing a scene. I love the energy of being on set. I love not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning. ~ Amanda Schull

We tend to think only in terms of what we think is plausible that we could pull off and decide that "that's what I want", instead of focusing on "what do I want?" and then figuring out how we could pull it off. ~ Michael Neill

I've just grown up a lot and started to encounter some of the big decisions of life in terms of what career I wanted to do and figuring out personal relationships and things. ~ Lee Norris

I think I'm still figuring out how to be a little less selfish. ~ Anthony Kiedis

I spend all day figuring out how to beat the machine and knock the crap out of the political power structure. ~ Bella Abzug

UNDERLYING NEED "COPING" MECHANISM To have support in figuring out your talents Getting stoned to avoid thinking about it To be loved, held, appreciated Negativity, pessimism to "control" expectations To have feelings received Overeating as an attempt at self-soothing To be recognized as mattering Overwork to prove worth To forgive yourself Becoming perfectionistic to try and avoid mistakes To avoid punishment or disapproval Focusing solely on the needs of others so you don't take care of yourself by exercising Rest and rejuvenation Drinking alcohol to excess, "rewarding" yourself with fatty or sweet foods Solitude and contemplation Picking fights so you end up alone Stability in chaos Worrying as a way to feel in control A sense of purpose Overspending in an attempt to find meaning in material things ~ M.J. Ryan

Yeah, we don't consider many stupid things. I mean, we get rid of 'em fast ... Just getting rid of the nonsense
just figuring out that if people call you and say, 'I've got this great, wonderful idea', you don't spend 10 minutes once you know in the first sentence that it isn't a great, wonderful idea ... Don't be polite and go through the whole process. ~ Warren Buffett

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks. ~ John Waters

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Do You Have DID?

Determining if you have DID isn't as easy as it sounds. In fact, many clinicians and psychotherapists have such difficulty figuring out whether or not people have DID that it typically takes them several years to provide an accurate diagnosis. Because many of the symptoms of DID overlap with other psychological diagnoses, as well as normal occurrences such as forgetfulness or talking to yourself, there is a great deal of confusion in making the diagnosis of DID. Although this section will provide you with information which may help you determine if you have DID, it is a good idea to consult with a professional in the mental health field so that you can have further confirmation of your findings. ~ Karen Marshall

What your opponent wants you to think is useful data in figuring out what they think. So get the early draft, okay? ~ James S.A. Corey

I felt so proud to be having a baby and so excited. And I felt closer to other women - to my sisters, to my mom. I felt empowered, like, 'I've given birth. I did it! There's nothing I can't handle.' I've really enjoyed this time that I have taken to be with Suri, as well as the challenges of the first couple of months: feeding and pumping, learning to decipher what each cry means - is she hungry? Is she tired? Does she need a fresh diaper? - and figuring out how to really help her. ~ Katie Holmes

Angela: What I asked what [Seth] was doing, he said, Figuring out how to make Ellie fall for me. ~ Kelly Oram

You do your job, you get your work done at the rink and then you go home. The big thing is figuring out what you're going to do the rest of the day. ~ Dany Heatley

When weight loss becomes a goal in your life, eating right and exercising are just two pieces of the puzzle. Figuring out why you've put on the extra weight is the hardest part. ~ Ali Vincent

And there's no figuring out the unknowable. And there's some kind of oxymoron in that that's more moron than anything else. ~ Sarah Mussi

Like Frankenweenie is a story about a boy and his dog, Big Fish is the story of a father and his son, and all those conversations you can't have. It's universal, in a way that can go from one medium to another medium. That's been the funnest, figuring out what we can do in a Broadway show that's unique and special. ~ John August

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. ~ Gary Wolf

Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion ... Empathy isn't just remembering to say 'that must be really hard'
it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination ... Empathy means realizing trauma has no discreet edges.p7 ~ Leslie Jamison

SPACES ... BREAKS ... TO CONTEMPLATE THINGS ... TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S IMPORTANT ... ~ Stephanie Perkins

I was really selfish, and I didn't want to listen to anyone. Then I started working with some really amazing people, traveling more, and figuring out who I was as a person - looking at different things, listening to different music. ~ Charli XCX

Composer" is a word which here means "a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play." This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing.
This is called decomposing. ~ Lemony Snicket

As a dad I'm emotionally dedicated but I'm not 'figuring out their life plans'. But of course as I'm telling them about the rights of wrongs I'm thinking back to what I was like at their age. ~ Peter Mullan

The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why. ~ Michael Sandel

In the first sixteen years of my life, my parents took me to at least a dozen so called professionals. Not one of them ever came close to figuring out wheat was wrong with me. In their defense, I will concede that Asperger's did not yet exist as a diagnosis, but autism did, and no one ever mentioned I might have any kind of autistic spectrum disorder. Autism was viewed by many as a much more extreme condition - one where kids never talked and could not take care of themselves. Rather than take a close sympathetic look at me, it proved easier and less controversial for the professionals to say I was just lazy, or angry, or defiant. But none of those words led to a solution to my problem. ~ John Elder Robison

She was such a surprising mix of gentle and brash, of focused and flighty. It was almost as if I could see the little girl in her battling with the responsible woman, figuring out which would lead the way. ~ Christina Lauren

Since the greatest room for each person's growth is in the areas of his greatest strength, you should focus your training time and money on educating him about his strengths and figuring out ways to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his 'skill gaps.' You will find that this one shift in emphasis will pay huge dividends. In one fell swoop you will sidestep three potential pitfalls to building a strengths-based organization: the 'I don't have the skills and knowledge I need' problem, the 'I don't know what I'm best at' problem, and the 'my manager doesn't know what I'm best at' problem. ~ Donald O. Clifton

I like to discover little treasures in the cities we are in like a really amazing restaurant. I will go on my own and enjoy figuring out the ingredients as if I were making it at home, then I share my finds on my socials. I find that these little adventures bring me peace, because it is something I do when I am home. ~ Noelle Scaggs

Things weren't the same with us, not right away, and maybe not ever. We were growing up. We were still figuring out how to be in each other's lives without being everything to each other. ~ Jenny Han

If you feel trapped in a situation and are complaining about it, figure out how to untrap yourself and stop complaining. Save your energy for further figuring out and when there is an increase in courage. ~ Art Hochberg

Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other. ~ June Jordan

It's actually totally badass to go from your twenties to your thirties. There are so many awesome things that happen to you! Like deeply bonding with your yoga pants, developing a burning passion for expensive cheese, having real, actual orgasms (!), not giving two shits what other people think, figuring out the things you actually like to spend time and money doing, and embracing giant underwear. ~ Ingrid Reinke

I do have a lot of difficulty figuring out what I want to be working on, but what's the alternative? To be one of those people who has a million things they want to do, and then never does any of them? And then where will you be? ~ Cyndi Lauper

Some people might get obsessed with figuring out how they wound up on the F train in drag, with no bag and only one shoe, but that's simply not my style. What's done is done. I'm sure I had my reasons. ~ Josh Kilmer-Purcell

I don't know for sure where I'm going to end up.
But I know who I love. And I'm figuring out that might be enough to live for. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

Why not start figuring out ways to change the way we treat each other? The way we talk to each other, the way we talk about each other. To love each other. You know it starts off with self-love. We have to love ourselves before we can love anybody else.

And the media from day one, from when you were little ass kids, they teach you not to love yourself. They take something out of you and they try to sell it back to you...Something that you've been fighting for your entire life that's taken from you as a child. That you always had inside of you. That's self-love.

That's why I love you so much, cause as everybody knows, I love me so much. ~ Kanye West

I think the times that we're fucked up and lost in the world bring us closer to figuring out who we are. ~ Kaiylah Muhammad

People think of teachers who are born to teach, and you think of all these charismatic folks. Some of the most successful teachers are some of the least charismatic, interestingly. But they have a gift of figuring out what motivates people. ~ Wendy Kopp

There are things we can fix and things we can't. I guess life is about figuring out which is which, and dealing with both the best you can. ~ Ruth Cardello

College is about figuring out who you are, and in order to do that, you need to become a lot of people you aren't. ~ Ryan O'Connell

I like to write music. And I think exploring with lyrics and figuring out how to make complete songs is fun. I think I have a take on it. I don't know if it's great, but it's an interesting take. It's original. ~ Stone Gossard

There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts. ~ Chester Brown

That can be the most painstaking aspect of being a teen, figuring out what the world really looks like. If you find someone in a book, you know you're not alone and that's what's so comforting about books. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia ~ Carol Queen

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it. ~ Katherine Paterson

This figuring-out step is crucial, since overly optimistic economic models have often assumed that demand and incentives are enough to stimulate the production of any product. Incentives work to motivate intermediaries and traders, but makers, who are the ones that provide the substance of what is traded, need more than an incentive to make something. They need to know how to do it. ~ Cesar Hidalgo

I've been working a lot on figuring out how to sing differently and better. I want to become a better singer. I want to sing out more. I want to me more extroverted, vocally. ~ Sufjan Stevens

When content scarcity was the norm, we could live with a minimum of context. In a limited market, our editors became skilled in making decisions about what would be published. Now, in an era of abundance, editors have inherited a new and fundamentally different role: figuring out how "what is published" will be discovered. ~ Hugh McGuire

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important. ~ Sam Altman

People make this kind of money. Lawyers are just good at figuring out how to siphon a piece of it their way. ~ Elizabeth Camden

We all have our own loves, insecurities, strengths, weaknesses, and unique capabilities. And we have to take those into account in figuring out where our talents and desires intersect. That intersection is what I call your "blue flame" -- where passion and ability come together. When that blue flame is ignited within a person, it is a powerful force in getting you where you want to be. ~ Keith Ferrazzi