Judith Guest Quotes

Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. ~ Judith Guest

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it. ~ Judith Guest

With my friends, I don't feel pressure to be someone other than who I am. ~ Judith Guest

Make peace with what is. ~ Judith Guest

Make notes - I've lost more material than I've ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not still up there in one's brain. It's in outer space and it ain't coming back. ~ Judith Guest

Everything seems excessive, now, and too intense, too important. ~ Judith Guest

And if you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even. ~ Judith Guest

Jesus but people got weird when they lived alone. ~ Judith Guest

Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you. ~ Judith Guest

Autonomy is the whole thing; it's what unhappy people are missing. They have given the power to run their lives to other people. ~ Judith Guest

I think living the blessed life is the luck of the draw. ~ Judith Guest

It's true that every day away from work requires two more days to get back into it. ~ Judith Guest

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind ~ Judith Guest

I notice when I'm on these trips, I read like mad. It's the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am! ~ Judith Guest

People use people according to their own needs. Or don't use them. When a primary need is one of safety. ~ Judith Guest

The 'creator' and the 'editor' - two halves of the writer whole - should sleep in separate rooms. ~ Judith Guest

Let the emotional weight of a scene rest on the dialogue wherever possible. This is the easy way to avoid overinterpretation, which seems to be what turns a scene from sympathetic to sentimental. ~ Judith Guest

The monotonous beauty of wealth. ~ Judith Guest

Choir is the one time of day when he lets down his guard; there is peace in the strict concentration that Faughnan demands of all of them, in the sweet dissonance of voices in chorus. He has sung in here since he was a freshman. Faughnan is a serious student of music; also, a perfectionist of the sternest sort, who cares about nobody, about nothing other than the music. His shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, his tie undone, he drives them. Every minute of every hour that is spent there, they work, and there is only one way to prove yourself. You sing, and sing, and sing. All else is unimportant. ~ Judith Guest

She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake. ~ Judith Guest

You have to live your life according to what comforts you, not what the rest of your family thinks you ought to be doing. ~ Judith Guest

My success is not who I am. ~ Judith Guest

Some people have an unrealistic expectation when it comes to getting published; the fact is most publishers will turn down your work which is why you need to be persistent. ~ Judith Guest

A little advice about feelings kiddo; don't expect it always to tickle." Dr, Berger ~ Judith Guest

People have a right to be the way they are. ~ Judith Guest

Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me. ~ Judith Guest

I've never been one to tear the social fabric. ~ Judith Guest

I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired. ~ Judith Guest

Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves. ~ Judith Guest

Two separate, distinct personalities, not separate at all, but inextricably bound, soul and body and mind, to each other, how did we get so far apart so fast? ~ Judith Guest

It has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others. ~ Judith Guest

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to. It's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly. ~ Werner Herzog

Abundance is a state of mind, more than a reflection of wealth. ~ Judith Orloff

When I was starting out, doing guest spots on TV, and even commercials, I would go in with a whole crazy wardrobe and some terrible accent. Obviously, I was doing too much. If you bring too much flavor to it, it's absurd. There's something to just being spontaneous. ~ James Franco

When happiness makes a guest appearance in one's life,it's important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn't it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away. ~ Marian Keyes

Basher shook his head. "No, we climbed in through a ground-floor guest bedroom all ninja-like. Snuck up the back stairs."
"Then you might be the cavalry," said Tom, "but I'm Santa Claus. Let's go downstairs and open some presents. ~ Jonathan Maberry

Tyrants aren't born, they evolve, just as saints do, their characters slowly shaped over time, just as ours are. ~ Judith Arnopp

I wish we lived in a society that made it safe and provided the courage for everyone to come out. ~ Judith Light

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time. It's harder to stay where you are than to get out. For everyone but you, that is. ~ Judith Rossner

The main prank that we play with props is for people's birthdays. The special effects people will put a little explosive in the cake so it blows up in their face - that's always fun to play on a guest star, or one of the trainees or someone who's new. ~ Catherine Bell

At the moment, however, she had an ever larger problem: what to do now, when two defenseless women were completely lost in the wilds of Scotland, at night, in the rain and cold.
Shuffling footsteps sounded on the gravel path, and both women straightened, both suppressing the hope soaring in their breasts and keeping their faces carefully expressionless.
"Well, well, well," Jake boomed. "Glad I caught up with you and-" He lost his thought as he beheld the utterly comic sight of two stiff-backed women seated on a trunk together, prim and proper as you please, beneath a black umbrella in the middle of nowhere. "Uh-where are your horses?"
"We have no horses," Lucinda informed him in a disdainful voice that implied such beasts would have been an intrusion on their tete-a-tete.
"No? How did you get here?"
"A wheeled conveyance carried us to this godforsaken place."
"I see." He lapsed into daunted silence, and Elizabeth started to say something at least slightly pleasant when Lucinda lost her patience.
"You have, I collect, come to urge us to return?"
"Ah-yes. Yes, I have."
"Then do so. We haven't all night." Lucinda's words struck Elizabeth as a bald lie.
When Jake seemed at a loss as to how to go about it, Lucinda stood up and assisted him. "I gather Mr. Thornton is extremely regretful for his unforgivable and inexcusable behavior?"
"Well, yes, I guess that's the way it is. In a way."
"No doubt he intends to tell us that ~ Judith McNaught

And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That's how he saw Bond. ~ Val Guest

We call ourselves a dog's 'master' - but who ever dared to call himself the 'master' of a cat? We own a dog - he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat - he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Minimalism is a girl's best asset, blend tones, smudge hard outlines; if all else fails; Photoshop it. ~ Judith Chambers

The blacksmith's boy went out with a rifle
and a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn branches caught at his eyes to make him blind
and the sky turned into an unlucky opal,
but he didn't mind.
I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare out
any spider I meet,
said he to his dog and his rifle.

The blacksmith's boy went over the paddocks
with his old black hat on his head.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, You'll soon be dead.
And the rain came down like mattocks.
But he only said,
I can climb mountains, I can dodge rocks, I can shoot an old crow any day,
and he went on over the paddocks.

When he came to the end of the day, the sun began falling,
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone and the sun was falling.

But in front of the night, the rainbow stood on the mountain,
just as his heart foretold.
He ran like a hare,
he climbed like a fox;
he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold -
like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain,
like a ring of gold.
Judith A. Wright

I truly hate being a guest in someone's home ... Worst of all, you have to 'make nice' at all hours. I don't want someone across the table from me while I'm eating my breakfast. I don't want to share the newspaper and I don't want to talk to anyone at the end of the day. If I were interested in that shit, I'd be married again by now and put a permanent end to all the peace and quiet. ~ Sue Grafton

Nobody wants to sit where I'm sitting and say, 'Hey, this is the reality. I did two movies, six guest-star spots and I starred in a one-woman show, and I'm not making any money. I'm on TV every day in every country in the world, and I don't make any money.' ~ Beth Broderick

She arranged the bacon on a platter and then debated what to do with the ten-inch biscuit that had actually been four small biscuits when she'd placed the pan in the oven. Deciding not to break it into irregular chucks, she placed the entire biscuit neatly in the center of the bacon and carried the platter over to the table, were Ian had just seated himself. Returning to the stove, she tried to dig the eggs out of the skillet, but they wouldn't come loose, so she brought the skillet and spatula to the table. "I-I thought you might like to serve," she offered formally, to hide her growing trepidation over the things she had prepared.
"Certainly," Ian replied, accepting the honor with the same grave formality with which she'd offered it: then he looked expectantly at the skillet. "What have we here?" he inquired sociably.
Scrupulously keeping her gaze lowered, Elizabeth sat down across from him. "Eggs," she answered, making an elaborate production of opening her napkin and placing it on her lap. "I'm afraid the yolks broke."
"It doesn't matter."
When he picked up the spatula Elizabeth pinned a bright, optimistic smile on her face and watched as he first tried to lift, and then began trying to pry the eggs from the skillet. "They're stuck," she explained needlessly.
"No, they're bonded," he corrected, but at least he didn't sound angry. After another few moments he finally managed to pry a strip loose, and he placed it on her plate. A few moments more an ~ Judith McNaught

Everything we own tells too much about us. ~ Judith Moore

The vices come as passengers, visit us as guest and stay as masters. ~ Confucius

Haji Ali spoke. 'If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated but we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.' That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life. We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly…Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them. ~ Greg Mortenson

For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of Your Life, Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but himself for his child's actions:
It isn't up to the teachers in the schools, nor the Federal Radio Commissioners, nor anyone else on earth. It's up to us - it's our job! Our job to teach them right from wrong, honesty from dishonesty, a clean and intelligent attitude toward sex, a healthful fastidiousness about their own bodies. We can teach these things because we have the daily opportunity of knowing our children and their reactions. ~ Judith C. Waller

She was mourning all her life - not for her husband, who had released her with his death, but for her own dead heart. ~ Judith Ortiz Cofer

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. ~ Judith Butler

English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor. ~ Storm Princeholm

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women. ~ Judith Claire Mitchell

There was something written in pencil in the bottom corner, smudged and faded. I leaned in until my nose was almost pressed against the glass. Narnia, it looked like.
I must have stared for a lot longer than it seemed.
A tap on the door had my jumping. "Ella?" A second later. "Um...Ella? You okay in there?"
Alex looked red-faced and startled when I jerked the door open. Even more so when I grabbed his wrist with both of my hands and pulled him into the bathroom. Another time,I might have been equally red-faced. I would definitely have been uncomfortable, even if it wasn't in a bad way. But at the moment,I was too busy in a different part of my head.
I let go of him and pointed to the sketch. "That's a Willing."
"Is it?" He didn't look particularly impressed. More relieved that I hadn't fallen and hit my head or had some similar mishap.
"Edward Willing. You have to know who Edward Willing is."
He peered past me. "Philadelphia painter. Early twentieth century, right? I was in your art history class last year,you know."
I didn't.Not really. "You were?"
"I sat in back.You sat in front. Never saw your face during class,but I remember you arguing with Evers about Dali.I remember. You don't like Dali."
"Not much."
"You like this guy?"
"Yeah." I took a breath. "Yeah.I do. And you have one of his sketches. In your guest bathroom. ~ Melissa Jensen

There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag. ~ Robert Galbraith

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.

But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.

She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

We're dancing from here, from inside, not from outside. You could look at anybody throwing their leg and kick their leg up and a million pirouettes and do all kinds of tricks and stuff like that. But that's not what dance is really about. ~ Judith Jamison

I would love to be a guest on a talk show or a panel that shows women who have been on reality shows who've had success, to prove to audiences that you don't have to be a fool to become successful. ~ NeNe Leakes

If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree. ~ Carolyn Hax

Dead Butterfly
By Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived - so briefly - in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar. ~ Ellen Bass

I want be a guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. The fact that television ultimately made me famous was very gratifying for me. ~ Dave Chappelle

I'm moved by contraries, by opposites, the strength that was my mother's eyes, the beauty of my father's hands. ~ Judith Jamison

I'm going to hurt you, sweetheart, because there's no other way. If I could take the pain for you, I would."
She did not turn her face away from him or try to twist free of his imprisoning grasp, and what she said made Ian's throat ache with emotion. "Do you know," she whispered with a teary smile, "how long I've waited to hear you call me 'sweetheart' again?"
"How long?" he asked hoarsely.
Putting her arms around his shoulders, Elizabeth braced herself for whatever pain was coming, knowing as he tensed that it was going to happen, talking as if she could calm herself. "Two years. I've waited and w- ~ Judith McNaught

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour. ~ Judith Butler

Was it me you were discussing?" he countered with lifted brows. "I couldn't tell from the description you were giving. Since when am I kind, considerate, refined, and amiable?"
"You're angry," Victoria concluded on a sigh.
A low chuckle rumbled in his chest and his arms tightened, drawing her close to his leann, muscular body. "I'm not angry," he said in a husky, gentle voice. "I'm embarrassed ~ Judith McNaught

Wake up, my guest /
You have slept long /
In the house of my ribs, /
The House of my heart /
Wake up now, /
See through my eyes, /
Walk with my feet, /
Yush, my old friend ~ Greg Keyes

When not deeply engaged in creative activities, or numbed out by the TV, I felt empty. My heart hurt. I often felt hollow or as if I were some sort of wispy ghost, barely existing. ~ Judith Wright

When I lived in New York and went to Chinatown, I learned that these flavors and their meanings were actually a foundation of ancient Chinese medicine.
Salty translated to fear and the frantic energy that tries to compensate for or hide it.
Sweet was the first flavor we recognized from our mother's milk, and to which we turned when we were worried and unsure or depressed.
Sour usually meant anger and frustration.
Bitter signified matters of the heart, from simply feeling unloved to the almost overwhelming loss of a great love. Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest. ~ Judith Fertig