Figuring Things Out Quotes

I think it's important to reiterate here that I didn't start out wanting to be a gardener, or a designer for that matter. It was all trial and error and figuring things out. And sometimes you've got to try something outside of your comfort zone to figure out what it is that you truly love.

Well, you could say that about you and me right from the start. You were never looking for the loud guy, and I certainly wasn't looking for the quiet girl.

Now I look back and go, "If I would've ended up with that quiet guy or that stable guy or that safe guy, I would never have been able to pursue any of these dreams, because no one would have pushed me to these new places I discovered in myself." Those other types of guys might have allowed me to stay in that safe place.

They wouldn't have drawn you out. That's interesting. And if I had wound up with some cheerleader who was always the life of the party, I don't think I would have found my way, either. I needed you for that.

Nowadays when I think about the name Magnolia, I think about it in terms that refer to much more than the blossoming of our business. I think about the buds on the three, and how they really are just the tightest buds--they look like rocks, almost. And I feel like when Chip and I met, that tight little bud was me. I was risk averse, and in some ways, I don't think I saw the beauty or the potential in myself. Then I wound up with Chip Gaines and--

You bloomed?
Joanna Gaines

I caught up on a lot of just domestic normal everyday stuff, and grew up a lot, and went to therapy, and did a lot of contemplating and figuring things out. I needed to just strip everything away and figure out who I am and get to know myself, as cheesy as that sounds. ~ Natalie Maines

I had to figure out my own faith. That was something I figured out a while ago when I was 18. But I can always stand on the fact that my dad has been a great example for me. Beyond that, building my career hasn't been attached to my dad. It's been me figuring things out for myself. ~ Anthony Evans

This is why stories like this, with great evils in them, are necessary for children to read. Kids just got here - they are still figuring things out, and stories are one of the central realities that can help them. Chesterton says somewhere that stories about dragons and knights do not teach children to fear dragons. They had dragons under the bed already. They had the fear already. The stories actually teach children that dragons can be killed. And ~ Douglas Wilson

I was really unfit last year, so I worked out for a long time, then spent time by myself in Oregon. For about two months the only person I saw was my trainer. Every day I did a lot of running and I just didn't want to talk to anyone for two months. So when I started talking again, it was like you would communicate wrongly, like you wouldn't really remember how to speak. That was one of the key things as well as just reading the book, reading the script a million times, just figuring things out. ~ Robert Pattinson

I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work. ~ Charles Petzold

Intelligence tests require that certain things be figured out, but the figuring out doesn't count. If the figuring out leads to the right answer, then of course the right answer counts. But no tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on figuring things out on the test, the less time there is for filling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the score will look. ~ Eleanor Duckworth

On films, you have the liberty of working out the details, the psychology, taking maybe more risks and takes than you can in television just because you can't be figuring things out on the day. ~ Rami Malek

I happen to love engineering. I love figuring things out in a spatial sense, that whole realm of working with mechanical parts, and the relationship of the parts, and things like ratios and the speeds of particular objects. ~ Arthur Ganson

One does not divine this by impressions or knowledge. What this means is that no matter how much you try to figure or calculate by means of impressions or knowledge, it will not prove the least bit useful. Therefore, separate yourself from the discrimination of figuring things out. ~ Takuan Soho

I wrestle with so many mixed emotions about relationships and life itself, and every time I think I've mastered the game of life, I realize that I am far from figuring things out. ~ Hagir Elsheikh

I'm good at figuring out how things work, but I don't know how this happened. ~ Nora Roberts

I've spent awhile trying to figure out where I'm going and the only thing I've come to realize is it doesn't matter where, it's how I get there. ~ Dominic Riccitello

I sat in a world of sorrow trying to figure things out. I couldn't because the world isn't supposed to be figured out. You're not supposed to get it. You're supposed to flow with it and things come or don't. It's that simple, but we think everything's complex when it's just sitting right in front of us. ~ Dominic Riccitello

Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters) ~ George V. Higgins

EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power.

And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Then I did what's probably the largest NIH-funded study on EMDR. And we found that, of people with adult-onset traumas, a one-time trauma as an adult, that it had the best outcome of any treatment that has been published.

What's intriguing about EMDR is both how well it works and the question is how it works and that got me into this dream stuff that I talked about earlier, and how it does not work through figuring things out and understanding things. But it activates some natural processes in the brain that's helped you to integrate these past memories. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

So I've gotten used to not complaining, and I've gotten used to not bothering Mom and Dad with little stuff. I've gotten used to figuring things out on my own: how to put toys together, how to organize my life so I don't miss friends' birthday parties, how to stay on top of my schoolwork so I never fall behind in class. I've never asked for help with my homework. Never needed reminding to finish a project or study for a test. If I was having trouble with a subject in school, I'd go home and study it until I figured it out on my own. I taught myself how to convert fractions into decimal points by going online. I've done every school project pretty much by myself. When Mom or Dad ask me how things are going in school, I've always said "good" - even when it hasn't always been so good. My worst day, worst fall, worst headache, worst bruise, worst cramp, worst mean thing anyone could say has always been nothing compared to what August has gone through. This isn't me being noble, by the way: it's just the way I know it is. ~ R.J. Palacio

I am private because I'm still figuring things out. I'm young! I'm making it up as I go! ~ Allison Williams

Figuring things out for yourself is practically the only freedom anyone really has nowadays. Use that freedom. ~ Michael Ironside

The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having another take on something and keeping it alive. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal

I was always interested in figuring things out. I'd do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together. ~ Alan Alda

I have a tendency to talk extremely fast ... I think the fastness comes from the fact that I get very excited about things and I just want to spit them out. ~ Shailene Woodley

What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. ~ Stephen Greenblatt

It was always one of my favorite things, the action figures, the video games, when I was with WWE, even though I'm not a gamer. I would literally go out and buy the games just so I could play myself. ~ Dave Bautista

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route. ~ Terry Gilliam

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

There were a lot of lessons of production to be learned. On the page, the biggest thing you learn on any TV show is how to write to your cast. You write the show at the beginning with certain voices in your head and you have a way that you think the characters will be, and then you have an actor go out there, and you start watching dailies and episodes. Then, you start realizing what they can do and what they can't do, what they're good at and what they're not so good at, how they say things and what fits in their mouth, and you start tailoring the voice of the show to your cast. ~ Ronald D. Moore

So many things in this world were cracked and sad, and still a glowing showed through and moments came when everything was lit and love happened. Every tree stood where it belonged, each bird had perfect feathers folded against its tiny body, each holding a heart beating madly. Life was a vibration of light and dark, and love illuminated that life. Then darkness descended and your heart was ripped apart. So that was part of it, a requirement of the miracle. Death stayed, lurking in the shadow of beauty. In the bargain, life both had meaning and had none. So, she kept thinking, what to do? What to do? A pressure in her would not stop asking. There were not many things she could make better, not many things she could change. And yet ... and yet ... sparks of possibility still shot out. Unasked for, they came and randomly flew up. ~ Susan Minot

Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive. ~ Haruki Murakami

When I realized that people actually wrote comics, that it was a job people could do, I thought, 'Gee, these things are only 17 pages long! I could probably finish one of those and find out whether I suck before I've spent five years of my life on it.' In stumbling into comics that way, I discovered that I loved the form. ~ Kurt Busiek

After that summer, after being friends with Won-a-nee and her young, I never killed another otter. I had an otter cape for my shoulders, which I used until it wore out, but never again did I make a new one. Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, think necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other. Nor did I kill seals for their sinews, using instead kelp to bind the things that needed it. Nor did I kill another wild dog, nor did I try to speak another sea elephant.
Ulape would have laughed at me, and other would have laughed, too -- my father most of all. Yet this is the way I felt about the animals who had become my friends and those who were not, bu in time could be. If Ulape and my father had come back and laughed, and all the other had come back and laughed, still I would have felt the same way, for animals and birds are like people, too, though they do no talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place. ~ Scott O'Dell

The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves. ~ Roald Dahl

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst thing you could say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death. ~ Woody Allen

Even when you think you have your life all mapped out, things happen that shape your destiny in ways you might never have imagined. ~ Deepak Chopra

The next day he hangs up the painting, but he doesn't put it in his office. He puts it in his living room, so he can see it every day. So that at his worst, when things start getting nasty, he can look at that thing and see what Steve does. That to Captain America, his good buddy Steve, Sam's not a worn-out soldier, not a footnote, not a two-bit shrink. That to someone, sometimes, in his better moments, Sam can be help that was sent straight from God. ~ Spitandvinegar

Life never turns out quite the way you dream it will. You have to make things happen.
Luke...Sky Watcher ~ Ella Emerson

I'm always interested in looking forward toward the future. Carving out new ways of looking at things. ~ Herbie Hancock

People would see a lot of times fighting as a ugly thing, as a thing that denigrates the human being. In reality, you see fighting on everything ... Everything's fighting. Doesn't matter what it is. You wake up in the morning, to get out of bed is a fight, believe it. So, fighting is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul. ~ Renzo Gracie

My job is to try to figure out how to fix things, and I'm going to fix things as best as I can. I'm going to get a team together to fix things. And I can't sit around and worrying what the heck the chairman of the Republican Party thinks about what I'm doing. ~ John Kasich

How do I talk to the flower?
Through it I walk to the Infinite.
And what is the infinite?
It is that silent, small force.
It isn't the outer physical contact. No, it isn't that.
The infinite is not confirmed in the visible world.
It is not in the earthquake, the wind or the fire.
It is that still small voice that calls up the fairies.
Yet when you look out upon God's beautiful world- there it is.
When you look onto the heart of a rose there you experience it- but you can't explain it.

There are certain things, often very little things, like the peanut, the little piece of clay, the little flower that cause you to look within-
and then you see the soul of things. ~ George Washington Carver

I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out. ~ Billy Corgan

I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out. ~ Orson Scott Card

I bet things will turn out okay," I said, gripped by an urge to say some cheerful thing - it rose up from my throat like a cough. "I bet it will be fine. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

The things I will invent will be, I suspect, mundane by comparison with the truth. And as I said, it's my intention that you should not know the difference. I plan to interweave the elements of my story so cunningly that you'll cease to even care whether an event happened out there in the same world where you walk, or in here, in the head of a crippled man who will never again move from his stepmother's house. ~ Clive Barker

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ~ David Foster Wallace

There's an inherent thing in me where, if things are going too smooth, I'll sabotage the hell out of them just to make the music more of a sanctuary. ~ Daniel Johns

What we're all sort of trying to do in our lives is to make the simplest things work out the best. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things - of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil - seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing. ~ David Abram

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage. ~ Drew Barrymore

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced. ~ Robin McKinley

In reality I have said very little things; I didn't point out many things to Geoffrey, I trusted very much not only his understanding of what I was doing, or what I wanted to do, in that moment. ~ Victoria De Los Angeles

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out. ~ David McRaney

Braves fans are one-of-a-kind. Your passion to win comes close to equaling that of the players that go out on the field each and every game. But when the team goes through rough patches, you're there to encourage and cheer and believe that things will turn around. ~ Tim Hudson

Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was. ~ Nicholson Baker

My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'

I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care. ~ David Foster Wallace

Creatures...infinity...our minds have ceilings, Malorie...these things...they are beyond it...higher than it...out of reach...out of - ~ Josh Malerman

The plain wooden toothpick, it may be argued, is among the simplest of manufactured things. It consists of a single part, made of a single material, intended for a single purpose-from which it gets its simple name. It is also among the most convenient and ready of things. It can be used directly out of the box-there being no instructions to read, no parts to assemble, no priming or booting required, and no maintenance expected. When it has served its purpose, it is simply discarded. ~ Henry Petroski

I mean, I hate to gloat, but I'm extremely satisfied with my position in life and the way things have worked out for me. ~ Al Yankovic

Without a target to shoot at, our lives are literally aimless. Without something productive to do, without positive goals and a purpose, a human being languishes. And then one of two things happens. Aimlessness begins to shut a person down in spiritual lethargy and emptiness, or the individual lashes out and turns to destructive goals just to make something happen. ~ Tom Morris

Enjoy being with yourself, hanging out with yourself, doing things by yourself. ~ Frederick Lenz

... rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that
man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. ~ Giambattista Vico

I don't know; I haven't heard from Uncle Stuart since the day we drove out to Brooklyn together to talk to Mirav Mendelsohn. I miss him, in a way. He meant so much more to me than I could ever mean to him. You don't get too many people like that. Roy Belisle and Bob Santacroce and Stuart Plotz- any one of them could have been something that was almost everything, if things had worked out just a little differently. ~ Joshua Ferris

Don't get me wrong. I like Disney World. The rest rooms are clean enough for neurosurgery, and the employees say things like "Howdy, folks!" and actually seem to mean it. You wonder: Where do they get these people? My guess: 1952. I think old Walt realized, way back then, that there would eventually be a shortage of cheerful people, so he put all the residents of south western Nebraska into a giant freezer with a huge picture of Jiminy Cricket on the outside, and the corporation has been thawing them out as needed ever since. ~ Dave Barry

A map may become outdated when a newer version comes out, but the old one is never useless. With time a map becomes a graphic history of things as they were, and to the user a map is a friend to be treasured and a diary of past adventure. ~ Robert L. Mooers Jr.

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it. ~ Pat Conroy

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world - that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. ~ C.S. Lewis

It's as if scientists exert every effort of will they possess deliberately to find the least significant problems in the world and explain them. Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore. ~ Stephen Fry

He reached into the bag and drew out an odd array of manga, ripped paperbacks of books both classic and modern, and a small stack of crumpled magazines. See, I even brought some things to read aloud. I wasn't sure what you'd like, so there's a bit of everything. ~ Holly Black