Lives Of Wives Quotes

She saw that the world was evil and yet craved for happines in it, which she thought to get by being evil herself. And she had no more happiness than I have had -- who chose the other way. There was something that was the same in each of us: we were alike in that we hated the world, and yet saw that it could not have been otherwise. And we both tried to love in spite of this hate: perhaps she was more successful than I. Therefore do not talk lightly of a new start. Evil as the old things were, they were all that we had. And if you feel that they are gone now, be sorrowful -- for it will be a long time before new things come to replace them, and we cannot say how much better they will be. ~ Laura Riding Jackson

What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed? ~ Jodi Picoult

Real life issues are not mathematical equations. We're not calculators crunching numbers. We're humans sorting through complex, multi-layered issues, and we're doing so while enduring the (sometimes profound) personal effects of our conclusions. While we want to be reasonable, we are inexorably pulled in the direction of our oldest mental habits and by our deepest life-impacting needs. We're repelled by those ideas which can jeopardize our comfort, safety, and happiness. We can try to be fair, but all the while we are fighting against our needs and fears. There are things we don't want to be true (or false). Our lives are built on certain beliefs which, if disproved, could wreck us. These are the truths that we 'can't handle'. ~ Daniel Ionson

Most of us actually stifle enough good impulses during the course of a day to change the current of our lives. ~ William Moulton Marston

And you're prickly enough about being young."
She was amusing him.
"More than ever, I feel as if I've robbed the cradle."
But she knew how to puncture his mirth. "You are very old," she agreed demurely.
He pushed her backward onto the grass.
She laughed and fought him. Within minutes he had her arms trapped over her head, and he kissed her while the world whirled around them. "I win!" he said against her lips.
"Only because you used brute force."
"It's better than drugs in a glass of wine," he retorted.
"You would think so, since you hold the brute force."
He grinned down at her. "But I did win."
"Yes, yes, you won." She dismissed his boasting as if it were of no consequence. "Are you ever going to forget that stupid manacle?"
"No, I think I'll be bringing it up at inconvenient moments for the rest of our lives."
At his ill-thought-out words, they both froze, their eyes wide with shock.
The rest of their lives?
Their gazes shifted away from each other. ~ Christina Dodd

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out. ~ Matthew Desmond

I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated this nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth. ~ Nicole Krauss

My core message is that God has got a good plan for your lives, and we must trust Him, and let go of the past. That's my main message. ~ Joel Osteen

Value your life, not by the years, but the difference you made in the lives of others. ~ Debasish Mridha

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. ~ Milan Kundera

People, material and situation come in to our lives because of our thoughts and beliefs. When we don't want those experiences, we try to push them away. When we use our vital energy in resisting what we don't want, we attract more of it whether it's a person, circumstance or challenge. ~ Hina Hashmi

Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people. ~ Thomas Lennon

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few. ~ Bell Hooks

Peace is more than a lofty ideal. It is a practical principle that, with conscious effort, can become a normal part of our lives as we deal with matters both large and small. One habit that prevents inner peace is procrastination. It clutters our minds with unfinished business and makes us uneasy until we finish a task and get it out of the way. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

The Scripture can only be read intelligently by inspired men and women. The value we get from our reading is in direct proportion to the measure in which we are filled with God's Spirit. We also need a regular systematic study of the Scriptures. We cannot maintain our spiritual life without it any more than we can maintain our physical bodies without proper nourishment. We also need to let what we study become a vital part of our daily lives. Take it to the store, the office, the school room, etc. Take it, and apply it wherever you go. ~ G. Campbell Morgan

I have no way of portraying the lives of others. I portray my own. ~ Jan Saudek

Within legal enforcement of "morality," there is no sense of how to morally, ethically, or fairly help people live safer lives. It's all about banishment or punishment or forced destitution - all of which creates more desperation, and more social risk-taking by people in moments of crisis. ~ Terre Thaemlitz

Their plan had been very simple: to stay together for the rest of their lives. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Jake, our fearless leader. On a crazed kamikaze mission. I'd never seen him like this. Even in our lowest moments, he'd always been steady. Resolute. He weighed the costs, made a decision, forged ahead.
And I'd always wondered how he did it. How he kept it straight in his mind. Yeerks. Visser One. Aliens conquering humans, conquering the planet. Fighting the enemy without becoming like them. How did he sort through all that? The emotions, the ethical dilemmas, the moral crises? How did he wrap his brain around it all so he could make logical decisions? Smart decisions. The kind that saved the lives of his team. The kind that set the enemy back a small step or two.
But now I knew.
Jake didn't understand any of it better than the rest of us did. If he defeated the Yeerks, freed humanity, rescued Earth, that was good. But that was just a bonus. His main goal was much simpler. To save his family. That goal was what had given him strength. That goal was what had kept him sane. Allowed him to retain a center of calm focus amid the awful chaos.
His family. ~ Katherine Applegate

The major problem in our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities. To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality. This commitment, according to Peck, "requires the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination." Such an ability requires a good relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no shame-based person has. In fact, a toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with himself. Toxic shame - the shame that binds us - is a core part of neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behavior. ~ John Bradshaw

There are times in relationships, when we blow it. In spite of our best intentions, we wrong others. Our jealousy makes us feel inferior. Our own wounds cause us to act irrationally. Our insecurities lead us to say hurtful things.
And so, we find ourselves acting out. In short, we cloud our lives with muddy water. We trash around the pond of our emotions until things are just too messed up to figure out how to fix them.
It is in the times of muddy water that we learn how to wait it out. We have to wait until the mud settles. We must wait until we can clearly see where the water of our lives ends and the mud of misplaced emotions begin.
Have the patience to wait until the mud settles. Be still until the water is clear. In clear water, words come. Right actions reveal them selves and healing appears.
From the Devotional A Word in Season ~ Stella Payton

The hardest task for the historian ... is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we're looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, is always partial and prejudiced no less than our own interior lives: both are just a sum of contingent memories. ~ Christopher Evans

When the lights go down, that's 30,000 peoples lives colliding. Everyone there working is working for that moment, everyone watching is watching for that moment. It's when you're all in agreement about what you're all doing so it's a wonderful feeling of togetherness and possibility. ~ Chris Martin

One of the greatest problems people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures. Instead, they need to keep the bigger picture in mind. ~ John C. Maxwell

Naive optimism and pervasive pessimism are both to be avoided, therefore. It's not an easy balance to maintain, to be asked to work away in the Ninevehs of our lives without being so conscious of the coming cataclysm that we are not serious citizens of our communities and nations. By living and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are doing the most relevant thing we can do by way of helping. (There are civic and other chores to be done, of course.) Day in and day out, the gospel is the one thing that is most relevant, and we are to be of good cheer. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever ... It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some authority. Like it's been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance. ~ Deb Caletti

Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things - the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this - joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy. ~ Ross Gay

Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is ... a lie. ~ Isak Dinesen

There are many different types of beginnings. And who's to say we haven't imagined our lives up to this point? Who's to say we haven't been propelled into this world from a parallel universe? One that's just come into existence? This could be the very beginning of it, now. I mean, there's no one else here. Listen. It's completely quiet. ~ Jen Campbell

Hamas, they are using civilians' lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate. ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation. ~ Teju Cole

You are too young to know how the world changes everyday,' said Mrs Creakle, 'and how the people in it pass away. But we all have to learn it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when we are old, some of us at all times in our lives. ~ Charles Dickens

I'm a human just like any of the people that you adore, whether they're in TV shows or movies or they're writers or YouTubers. Their lives are not perfect. ~ Tyler Oakley

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us? ~ Bruce Feiler

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in the mold of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and become me. ~ Jack London

My suggestion to young people is that not only should they read about the history of science and engineering, but that they should read about the lives of those that have made contributions to these fields. ~ Warren M. Washington

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. ~ Fernando Pessoa

P5 - It is matter for wonder: the moment that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a specter to trouble the quiet of a later moment ... the beast(animals) ... forgets at once and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished forever. The beast lives unhistorically ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The best thing about all of us, no matter how troublesome our lives are, we don't quit and fight back.. ~ Himmilicious

She had suddenly realized something about people like this -- whether they were businessmen, policemen, civil servants, hotel proprietors, landlords, or what: it was that they didn't mean what they said. They never told the truth. What they seemed to be doing -- catching criminals, buying and selling, banking, administering, making things -- wasn't the real business of their lives at all. It was a cover. They were only playing at it, and they didn't even do it well, because they didn't believe in it. The real, secret business of their lives lay in keeping power for people like themselves. That was all they really cared about, and they were desperately serious about it, because the thought of losing the little power they had was terrifying to them: and they didn't mind what damage they did to truth or honesty or justice in the struggle to hang on to it. ~ Philip Pullman