Making Up Quotes

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night. ~ Michael Ignatieff

What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen. ~ Lauren Oliver

My dress is caught in the settee. And I would be much obliged if you would help me out of it!" "The dress or the settee?" the stranger asked, sounding interested. "The settee," Pandora said irritably. "I'm all tangled up in these dratted - " she hesitated, wondering what to call the elaborate wooden curls and twists carved into the back of the settee. " - swirladingles," she finished. "Acanthus scrolls," the man said at the same time. A second passed before he asked blankly, "What did you call them?" "Never mind," Pandora said with chagrin. "I have a bad habit of making up words, and I'm not supposed to say them in public." "Why not?" "People might think I'm eccentric." His quiet laugh awakened a ticklish feeling in her stomach. "At the moment, darling, made-up words are the least of your problems. ~ Lisa Kleypas

When we were in New York, you cried for two days and passed out. You said a word in your sleep, over and over. Akinli." Elizabeth stared down at the drawing.
"At first I thought it was gibberish. And then I thought it was the name of a town or a building. . . . I didn't figure out it belonged to a person until you made that." Elizabeth pointed down to the paper, worn from being folded and unfolded who knew how many times.
"When Elizabeth came to me, I had to tell her the truth, and we decided to find him. You gave us the name of the town. We went there looking for someone answering to that name, fitting this image." Miaka smiled ruefully. "Very small town. It wasn't hard."
Tears pooled in my eyes. "You've really seen him?"
They both nodded. I thought about all those trips they had taken, making up ridiculous stories so they could get to him without me knowing.
"How is he?" I asked, unable to contain my curiosity. "Is he okay? Has he gone back to school? Is he still with Ben and Julie? Is he happy? Could you tell? Is he happy?"
The questions tumbled out without me being able to hold them in. I was desperate to know. I felt a single word would put my soul at ease.
Elizabeth swallowed hard. "That's the thing, Kahlen. We're afraid he's dying. ~ Kiera Cass

Her kiss is hungry, as if long deprived. As if they didn't already spend the morning doing just exactly this, making up for the lost time they were apart. Triton's trident, I could do this all day. Then he catches himself. No, I couldn't. Not without wanting more. Which is why we need to stop.
Instead, he entwines his hands in her hair, and she teases his lips with her tongue, trying to get him to fully open his mouth to her. He gladly complies. Her fingers sneak their way under his shirt, up his stomach, sending a trail of fire to his chest.
He is about to lose his shirt altogether. Until Antonis's voice booms from the doorway. "Extract yourself from Prince Galen, Emma," he says. "You two are not mated. This behavior is inappropriate for any Syrena, let alone a Royal."
Emma's eyes go round as sand dollars. He can tell she's not sure what to think about her grandfather telling her what to do. Or maybe she's caught off guard that he called her a Royal. Either way, like most people, Emma decides to obey. Galen does, too. They stand up side by side, not daring to be close enough to touch. They behold King Antonis in a polka-dot bathrobe, and though he's the one who looks silly, they are the ones who look shamed.
Galen feels like a fingerling again. "I apologize, Highness," he says. It seems like all he does lately is apologize to the Poseidon king. "It was my fault."
Antonis gives him a reproving look. "I like you, young prince. But you well know the law ~ Anna Banks

Brain tissue requires over 22 times as much energy as an equivalent amount of muscle tissue. In a modern human, the brain uses around 16 percent of the body's energy budget despite making up just 2 percent of the body's overall mass. ~ Christopher Seddon

Many of the silliest ambiguities in the Internet memes come from newspaper headlines and magazine tag lines precisely because they have been stripped of all punctuation. Two of my favorites are MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH and RACHAEL RAY FINDS INSPIRATION IN COOKING HER FAMILY AND HER DOG. The first is missing the hyphen that bolts together the pieces of the compound word that was supposed to remind readers of the problem with piranhas, man-eating. The second is missing the commas that delimit the phrases making up the list of inspirations: cooking, her family, and her dog. ~ Steven Pinker

There are things you haven't thought of in centuries."
I waited for the joke, then realized he was serious. Apparently our break up had turned him into a raving lunatic. I should probably be flattered. "Really Alex, you don't have to act like an immature kid. It's fine if you want to see me again, but next time, just say so instead of making up asinine stories. ~ Angela Corbett

Makeup should have one function only - to make you look better, to make you more attractive ... Makeup is a luxury, so it should be fun ... Making up is like telling yourself a secret. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do. ~ George MacDonald

He sleeps as if making up for years of being awake. ~ Erika Swyler

In the hospital, Jenny Fields felt she was making up for lost time; she was discovering that people weren't much more mysterious, or much more attractive, than clams. ~ John Irving

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes. ~ David Lynch

A suicide attempt can be very much like falling in love. You're not really sure, as you proceed, what is real and what you're making up as you go. You're genuinely uncertain how the whole thing's going to turn out. You want it, but you don't. It seems both inevitable and impossible. ~ Clancy Martin

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn't even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and yo ~ Kevin Powers

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author. ~ Victoria Hanley

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down. ~ Herb Ritts

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life. ~ Saul Williams

I've always been making up my own restrictions for myself, from day one, and it's compelling, because it forces me to think. That's always been a driving force for me. ~ Jack White

Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness ~ Eckhart Tolle

Rules are restrictions given by other privileged men. I enjoy making up my own mind. Everyone ought to have the same human right. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

At sixteen
I though
Iwould've made it
by now.

Now
I'm making up
what making it
means
as i go. ~ Jason Reynolds

In our story logic which we're making up, if we're saying he's alive, then like a quadriplegic who's in bed he can move his head and shoulders, but he can't move his arms. If he could just turn on that power to his legs and arms, the nerves could get through and he could walk. ~ John Badham

Determination is learning to form a habit, and never breaking it in future. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

So naturally, I caught myself making up personalities for him - you know, the way you do with pets and cute boys and famous people. What's that called? Anthropomorphism. You do it so that you feel like you can relate personally to whatever it is – your dog, or God or whatever. You do that so you can care about things, and so that life at least appears to make sense. And maybe you do it so you can feel like something cares about you.
The dangerous thing about doing that, Paul told me one time, is what you end up caring about isn't necessarily what's really there – just what you've decided is there.
Which may be very far from the truth. So you could very easily end up depending on a lie. Or a dream. ~ Kristen D. Randle

Samsa sat there for a long time with his eyes closed. Then, making up his mind, he stood, grabbed his black walking stick, and headed for the stairs. He would return to the second floor and figure out the proper way to dress. For now, at least, that would be his mission. The world was waiting for him to learn. ~ Haruki Murakami

She genuinely likes people. All people, not just a select few she's spent years making up her mind about. ~ Suzanne Collins

Perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality. - Christ Firth, from Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World ~ Alberto Cairo

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

Back. So why am I so worried about making a first impression? I answer my own question: Because you only get to do it once. Every time after, you are only making up for what happened during that initial meeting. ~ Jodi Picoult

Jack," said Charles, "he's making up words again."
"Yes," Jack replied, "but he's getting better at it, don't you think? ~ James A. Owen

Flaws are awesome - so, 'flawsome!' I love making up a word. ~ Tyra Banks

People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul - satisfying emotion than a dozen facts. ~ Robert Keith Leavitt

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world. ~ William Gass

The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives. ~ Brene Brown

For a thorough understanding of rowing, for the what, the how and the why, the books making up Peter Mallory's The Sport of Rowing certainly do it all. ~ Anita DeFrantz

He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said. ~ Virginia Woolf

What does that look like to you?" he said. "A forgery." He shrugged, snorted quietly. "That's right, Heller. We have teams of forgers at work creating phony documents just for you." His sarcasm was subtle. "Now do you see? Starting to recognize your brother's modus operandi? Steal a bunch of money, then, when you realize that you've messed with the wrong guys, do the cowardly thing and run? Wonder where he got that from." "Screw you." I no longer felt bad about making up that story about his cigars. "Oh, believe me, it's the truth. Maybe to Victor Heller's sons that's nothing more than loose change you find under your sofa cushions. But not to me. And certainly not to Allen Granger. ~ Joseph Finder

He looked around and yawned. "I haven't been sleeping well. It's nice in here. But after a while the lushes will fill the place up and talk loud and laugh and the goddam women will start waving their hands and screwing up their faces and tinkling their goddam bracelets and making up with the packaged charm which will later on in the evening have a slight but unmistakable odour of sweat."
"Take it easy," I said. "So they're human, they sweat, they get dirty, they have to go to the bathroom. What did you expect – golden butterflies hovering in a rosy mist? ~ Raymond Chandler

I would point out that I'm an actress for a reason! If I were popular in high school, I would have considered another career because I wouldn't have been alone in my room, making up other characters for myself. I definitely had growing pains. The popular kids didn't want anything to do with the girl who was starting the drama club. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin

There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story. ~ Richard Bach

What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he - or better yet, *she* - watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look.
-Leah said - to Nadine, although she was looking at Marjorie (pg 138) ~ Dean Hughes

Addie was warm and radiant next to me, making up half of us. But I - I was Eva, Eva, Eva, all the way through. ~ Kat Zhang

And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one. ~ Mark Ravenhill

Being a kid myself, I loved playing and I loved playing with words, and making up things and riddles and songs and not afraid of being silly in public. ~ Malachy McCourt

As I said before, the marriage had troubles in it, which is easy to say ... When we were both mad, we would have something to say to each other. It wasn't love, but it beat indifference, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, it would come to love ...
We had often enough the pleasure of making up, because we fell out often enough. But now, looking back, it is hard to say why we fell out, or what we fell out about, or why whatever we fell out about ever mattered. But even then it was something hard to say.
One time we were fussing and Nathan looked at me right in the middle of it and said, "Hannah, what in the hell got us started on this?"
I said, "I don't know."
"Well, I don't know either," he said. "So I think I'm going to quit."
"Well, go ahead and quit," I said.
He said, "I already did." And that was the last word that time. ~ Wendell Berry

What could be more interesting than thinking of mysterious happenings, finding the answers to intriguing questions, and making up new worlds? ~ Jeanne DuPrau

Love isn't jealous. It's kind and patient. It's accepting--it's late night talks and early morning kisses. It's arguing and making up. It's life with the one you can't live without. ~ Marquita Valentine

You know, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. ~ Betty Smith

I'm a professional journalist. Making up lies to fit the facts - it's what we do. ~ Andrew Klavan

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world.
You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said.
No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said.
But no less true for that, Daniel said. ~ Ali Smith

Love is messy. It means arguing and making up and laughing and crying and struggling and sometimes it doesn't seem worth it. But it is. And at the end when you're in love, no matter what happens, you forgive each other. ~ Anon

Conscious In psychodynamics, the adjective "conscious" takes the form of a noun and becomes "the conscious." Animals and even plants may be said to have a type of conscious. In fact, all matter has an internal and external manifestation. The internal manifestation is a rudimentary conscious. It is not really internal because this term is a spatial reference similar to in and out. In contrast, consciousness itself (consciousness without content) transcends space and time. For this reason, the conscious is not an object that can be detected and dissected in the same way that the brain can be detected and dissected. It is a manifestation of reality that is unrelated to physical matter and energy. Any system that has some kind of rudimentary, connected, and organized processing is conscious on some level. We may even say that subatomic systems, such as ones making up an atom, are rudimentarily conscious. ~ John G. Shobris

I can see why we need fellows who know how to light fires," Bluth said. "But I don't see why we need people to use fancy words."
"Shhhh," Shallan said. "Don't say that so loudly. If the lighteyes hear, they might stop wasting their time making up new words, and instead start interfering with the business of honest men. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different ~ Marie Brennan

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do. ~ Dido Armstrong

I think the biggest pushback comes from people who perceive me to be a threat. Having bloggers who are dedicated to making up false information about you, having anonymous people write nasty emails and letters, having organizations file legal requests for your work-related emails, and all the other things that happen can be very depressing and discouraging. ~ Katharine Hayhoe

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing ... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away. ~ Ann Voskamp

For a while now, I have been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you," Svetlana said. "And I think that's the reason. It's because we both make up narratives about our own lives. I think that's why we decided not to live together next year. Although obviously it's also why we're so attracted to each other."

"Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives."

"But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don't mean that she doesn't have an inner life, or that she doesn't think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn't compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She's in my story – I'm not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It's like an unspoken contract. With you, there's more instability and tension, because I know you're making up a story, too, and in our story, I'm just a character."

"I don't know," I said. "I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn't have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?"

"That's a weak definition of narrative. That's saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too."

"But I don't think that's because of our personalities," I said. Isn't it more about ~ Elif Batuman

I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along. ~ Ann Leckie

Candy is natures way of making up for Mondays." ~Unknown Author ~ Rebecca Gober

I think living is serious. Living well, accepting yourself, using your talents to the fullest, enjoying yourself, that's all serious and important ... But I think makeup and fashion should not be taken that seriously ... You should have fun making up for a party. You should have fun wearing a sexy dress. When you're beautiful it should give you pleasure. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

Epicurus grasped how incredibly bad we are at being happy, and how talented we are at making up reasons to be miserable. We might put off our happiness, telling ourselves as we squeeze onto the Tube to go to our spirit-crushing job that at some point in the future we'll be happy, when we're promoted, when we're rich, when we're retired. Meanwhile the present moment flows by, unnoticed and unenjoyed. ~ Anonymous

I'm giving you one minute to play, Kenna, then it's time to start wearing you out. I'll be making up for lost time with that sinner's body. ~ Anonymous

I do nothing, with as little shame as satisfaction. It is the state that suits me best. I write the odd poem when it is there, that is the only thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of accidia - will-less in a grey tumult of idées obscures. There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations. It is good for children & insects. There is an end of making up one's mind, like a pound of tea, an end of patting the butter of consciousness into opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgments. ~ Samuel Beckett

Let's not delude ourselves with fantasies of objectivity. How can anyone be objective about New York? It's not a souvenir snow globe or a designer coffee table. It's a living thing, an unwieldy ecosystem filled with many smaller ecosystems, all interdependent, making up the complex, multicellular organism of the city. ~ Jeremiah Moss

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to. ~ Maurice Sendak

Given that I don't know anything, when I am making up stories about the future, why not make it a good story instead of a scary one? ~ Sharon Weil

After three League games, we have the same number of points as last year even if we have played two away games this time round, ... As we got back on the right track last season, including making up an eight-point gap in a few games, we just need to stay calm. ~ Adriano Galliani

You're always making up stuff from the past," she said. "And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened. ~ Sherman Alexie

The main thing I'm into is going about on a bike, taking random routes; I'm really into the idea of making up journeys, and just seeing where they take you, because they always end up taking you someplace freaky. ~ Tom Jenkinson

Maybe that's where it started and they brought it back from the desert, some kind of contagious psychic wound, guilt based. Maybe it's the dark matter, invisibly making up most of the universe. Maybe it was methane thawing at the bottom of the sea, releasing some ancient spore from the melted icebergs. Maybe it was the hole in the ozone, the collapse of the upper atmosphere. Maybe it was the overload of information, the swarms of data generated by every human gesture. Maybe it was the networking craze, the resurrection of dead friendships and memories meant to be lost, now resurfacing like rusted shipwrecks to reclaim our attention and scramble our sense of time. Maybe it was the death of an artist at the hands of a zealot. Maybe it was the particles made to collide. Maybe the mapping of the genome. Maybe the clashing of gods, the tug-of-war over our souls, not one of them refusing to let go, instead opting to see us sliced in two by Soloman's sword. Maybe it was food becoming a prop for food. Maybe it was a distant comet dusting us with its tail of poisoned ice. Maybe it was someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered. Maybe it was the emergence of collective intelligence, the flattening of the world. Maybe the game we inhabit had a glitch. Maybe the angel's horn had finally been blown. ~ Kenneth Calhoun

I never understand," he said, shaking his head, "why anyone would go to the trouble of making up new people in this world when there's already billions of the buggers I don't give a shit about. ~ Jenny Colgan

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The essence of leadership is making up your own mind and then being able to take other people with you. ~ Eva Cox

- If Francis has really made up his soul [...], what lies ahead of him? Hasn't he achieved the great end of life?
- [...] Having got his soul under his eye, so to speak, Francis must now begin to understand it and be worthy of it [...]. Making up a soul isn't an end; it's the new beginning in the middle of life. ~ Robertson Davies

When I look at you, I don't just see your face.
I see my entire future. I see our marriage.
I see our children. I see us fighting. I see us making up. I see us growing old together.
In my version of the future, we are quite lucky.
Because I even see us dying together.
I see my forever in you." - Dev Singham ~ M.V. Kasi

We spend so much time making up for things we failed to say, she mused. If only, she began
for the thousandth time, the images of those days beginning to flash behind her eyes like a slide
show she was powerless to stop ~ Nicholas Sparks

Metabolically active cells, such as those of the liver, kidneys, muscles, and brain, have hundreds or thousands of mitochondria, making up some 40 per cent of the cytoplasm. The egg cell, or oocyte, is exceptional: it passes on around 100000 mitochondria to the next generation. In contrast, blood cells and skin cells have very few, or none at all; sperm usually have fewer than 100. All in all, there are said to be 10 million billion mitochondria in an adult human, which together constitute about 10 per cent of our body weight. ~ Nick Lane

Is Gabriel still mad at me?"
"Nesbitt hesitates and then says, "On a scale of one to ten, I'd say he's at nine and a half."
"So, it could be worse then."
"He'll calm down." Nesbitt nudges me and says, "The best thing about arguments is the making-up after. I see a big reconciliation ahead for you two: you apologise and he takes you into his arms and --"
"Nesbitt, shut up. ~ Sally Green

For an enzyme to be functional, it must fold into a precise three-dimensional shape. How such a complex folding can take place remains a mystery. A small chain of 150 amino acids making up an enzyme has an extraordinary number of possible folding configurations: if it tested 1,012 different configurations every second, it would take about 1,026 years to find the right one. . . . Yet, a denatured enzyme can refold within fractions of a second and then precisely react in a chemical reaction. . . . [I]t demonstrates a stunning complexity and harmony in the universe.21 ~ T. Colin Campbell

Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I
had decided upon, there is always left a trace of envy
for those who have triumphed in the melancholy
struggle for literary supremacy ~ Paul Bourget

The great thing about literature is that it's subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences. ~ Lisa Wingate

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. ~ Amy Tan

In making up my mind as to what Mr. Lincoln really believed, I do not take into consideration the evidence of unnamed persons or the contents of anonymous letters; I take the testimony of those who knew and loved him, of those to whom he opened his heart and to whom he spoke in the freedom of perfect confidence. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I never met David Kelly, but I knew from what he told other people that this was not his view. The BBC were saying that Tony Blair was making up lies so that he could send young men and women to war, maybe to die. I think that if the BBC had done their jobs professionally, they'd have realised that you couldn't justify what they said. And nothing has emerged since to justify that report. ~ Alastair Campbell

He was struck by the sensation she'd made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head. ~ Michael Crummey

As far as subject matter, I'd say most of the songs aren't that personal to me. I love making up characters and kind of having fun in a different kind of way. ~ Carrie Underwood

Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains. ~ Benjamin Graham

Voting is the least arduous of a citizen's duties. He has the prior and harder duty of making up his mind. ~ Ralph Barton Perry

I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it. ~ Kerry Greenwood

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder. ~ Donald E. Westlake

(he'd never faniced himself a butt pilot), and he'd been making up for it ever since. As far as Nemo was concerned, a day without tang was like a day without sunshine. ~ Robert Gregory Browne

There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them. ~ Mao Zedong

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things - as opposed to making things up - that did not quite happen. ~ Geoff Dyer

Soy milk and two sugars." Just this past week, Rachel had become convinced that how people took their coffee gave some secret insight into their characters. Were people who took their coffee black unyielding? Did people who liked their coffee with milk and no sugar have mother issues? She had a notebook behind the coffee counter in which she wrote her findings. Willa decided to keep her on her toes by making up a different request every day.
Rachel walked back to the coffee bar to write that down in her notebook. "Hmm, interesting," she said seriously, as if it made all the sense in the world, as if she'd finally figured Willa out.
"You don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe that how I take my coffee says something about my personality?"
"That's superstition. This is science. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better. ~ Chelsea Handler

I feel at times that I'm making up these little people and I've lost my mind. ~ Carolyn Chute

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires. ~ Simone De Beauvoir