Message In A Bottle Quotes

My Dearest,

I miss you, my darling, as I always do, but today is especially hard because the ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together. I can almost feel you beside me as I write this letter, and I can smell the scent of wildflowers that always reminds me of you. But at this moment, these things give me no pleasure. Your visits have been coming less often, and I feel sometimes as if the greatest part of who I am is slowly slipping away.

I am trying, though. At night when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me. Last night, in my dreams, I saw you on the pier near Wrightsville Beach. The wind was blowing through your hair, and your eyes held the fading sunlight. I am struck as I see you leaning against the rail. You are beautiful, I think as I see you, a vision that I can never find in anyone else. I slowly begin to walk toward you, and when you finally turn to me, I notice that others have been watching you as well. "Do you know her?" they ask me in jealous whispers, and as you smile at me, I simply answer with the truth. "Better than my own heart."

I stop when I reach you and take you in my arms. I long for this moment more than any other. It is what I live for, and when you return my embrace, I give myself over to this moment, at peace once again.

I raise my hand and gently touch your cheek and you tilt your head and cl ~ Nicholas Sparks

And one of the things she had learned early in her life
was that if you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn
more about it. If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and
in many ways that was worse than finding out you were wrong in the first place. Because if you
were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and
wondering what might have been ~ Nicholas Sparks

Nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I'd rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I send my words to you over the ether net like a message in a bottle ... ~ John Geddes

A month has passed since I've written, but it has seemed to pass much more slowly. Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part. I simply drift along like the messages I write you. I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.

Even work does not take the pain away. I may be diving for my own pleasure or showing others how to do so, but when I return to the shop, it seems empty without you. I stock and order as I always did, but even now, I sometimes glance over my shoulder without thinking and call for you. As I write this note to you, I wonder when, or if, things like that will ever stop.

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it is an impossibility, but I cannot help myself. My search for you is a never-ending quest that is doomed to fail. You and I had talked about what would happen if we were forced apart by circumstance, but I cannot keep the promise I made to you that night. I am sorry, my darling, but there will never be another to replace you. The words I whispered to you were folly, and I should have realized it then. You - and you alone - have always been the only thing I wanted, and now that you are gone, I have no desire to find another. Till death do us part, we whispered, and I've come to believe that t ~ Nicholas Sparks

Choose between yesterday and tomorrow. ~ Paul Newman

My Dearest, Can you forgive me? In a world that I seldom understand, there are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one's cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore. You, my darling, are the wind that I did not anticipate, the wind that has gusted more strongly than I ever imagined possible. You are my destiny. I was wrong, so wrong, to ignore what was obvious, and I beg your forgiveness. Like a cautious traveler, I tried to protect myself from the wind and lost my soul instead. I was a fool to ignore my destiny, but even fools have feelings, and I've come to realize that you are the most important thing that I have in this world. I know I am not perfect. I've made more mistakes in the past few months than some make in a lifetime. I was wrong to deny what was obvious in my heart: that I can't go on without you. You were right about everything. I tried to deny the things you were saying, even though I knew they were true. Like one who gazes only backward on a trip across the country, I ignored what lay ahead. I missed the beauty of a coming sunrise, the wonder of anticipation that makes life worthwhile. It was wrong of me to do that, a product of my confusion, and I wish I had come to understand that sooner. Now, though, with my gaze fixed toward the future, I see your face and hear your voice, certain that this is the path I ~ Nicholas Sparks

Love is Love no matter old you are, and I knew if I gave you enough time, you'd come back to me. ~ Nicholas Sparks

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. ~ Edward Hirsch

I've always wanted to send a message in a bottle, with my message saying something like, "Don't litter. ~ Jarod Kintz

I started writing everything down.I wrote for the same reason someone lost sticks a message in a bottle.
I'm here. Help. Please find me. ~ Heather Sellers

Writing... is like putting a message in a bottle, and casting it into the evening tide... It is a container of yourself, bled through your fingertips, and it travels the world in your place. ~ Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle. ~ Umberto Eco

My Darling,

It is late at night and though the words are coming hard to me, I can't escape the feeling that it's time that I finally answer your question.

Of course I forgive you. I forgive you now, and I forgave you the moment I read your letter. In my heart, I had no other choice. Leaving you once was hard enough; to have done it a second time would have been impossible. I loved you too much to have let you go again. Though I'm still grieving over what might have been, I find myself thankful that you came into my life for even a short period of time. In the beginning, I'd assumed that we were somehow brought together to help you through your time of grief. Yet now, one year later, I've come to believe that it was the other way around.

Ironically, I am in the same position you were, the first time we met. As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on. Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever. It would be easy for me to do that because loving someone else might diminish my memories of you. Yet, this is the paradox: Even though I miss you greatly, it's because of you that I don't dread the future. Because you were able to fall in love with me, you have given me hop ~ Nicholas Sparks

It's impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me
like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message. ~ Aimee Bender

There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one's cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore. ~ Nicholas Sparks

If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her
then don't let her go. ~ Nicholas Sparks

A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership. ~ Robert Breault

I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again. ~ Nicholas Sparks

There isn't an hour of my life without you in it. I mend the boats, test them and all the while the memories come in like the tide.
I was thinking today of when we were young, and you left our world for a bigger world. I was a lot more scarred then I would admit. I fought my fear by telling myself you'd come back someday, and trying to think of the first thing I'd say to you when I saw you again. I must have tried out a hundred possibilities. What did I finally say? Not much, my mouth wouldn't work except to kiss you, and when you said I'm here to stay that said it all. Well, I'm doing it again. I keep imagining what I'd say to you if somehow you came back. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I'm sorry l haven 't talked to you in so long.
I feel l've been lost... no bearings, no compass. I kept crashing into things, a little crazy, I guess. l've never been lost before. You were my true north.

l could always steer for home when you were my home. Forgive me for being so angry when you left. l still think some mistake's been made... and l'm waiting for God to take it back.

But l'm doing better now. The work helps me. Most of all, you help me.

You came into my dream last night with that smile that always held me like a lover... rocked me like a child. All l remember from the dream is a feeling of peace. l woke up with that feeling and tried to keep it alive as long as l could.

l'm writing to tell you that l'm on a journey toward that peace. And to tell you l'm sorry about so many things. l'm sorry l didn't take better care of you so that you never spent one minute being cold or scared or sick.

I'm sorry I didn't try harder to find the words to tell you what I was feeling.

I'm sorry I never fixed the screen door. I fixed it now.

I'm sorry I ever fought with you. I'm sorry I didn't apologize more.
I was too proud.

I'm sorry I didn't bring you more compliments on everything you wore and every way you fixed your hair.

I'm sorry I didn't hold on to you with so much strength that even God couldn't pull you away.


All my love. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday. ~ Taylor Swift

You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person. ~ Isabel Allende

So I think the Guru can be a delusion. But everything can be deluding. The thing central about the Guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle of the spirit, namely, that you don't follow your own path; you follow a given path. And that's totaly contrary to the Western Spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization- authenticity in your life out of your own center. So you must take the message of the East, assimilate it to your own dimension and to your own thrust of life, and not get pulled off track. ~ Joseph Campbell

We live in a day that nobody's lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I'll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It's just an amazing day. ~ Joel Osteen

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[ ... ]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When we look closely, not only at what Jesus taught but at how he went about disseminating his message, time and again we find that what he was preaching was the gospel of a partnership society. He rejected the dogma that high-ranking men - in Jesus' day, priests, nobles, rich men, and kings - are the favorites of God. He mingled freely with women, thus openly rejecting the male-supremacist norms of his time. And in sharp contrast to the views of later Christian sages, who actually debated whether woman has an immortal soul, Jesus did not preach the ultimate dominator message: that women are spiritually inferior to men. ~ Riane Eisler

Art, she said, is more nuanced than life. If a teacher is lecturing and looking out of smudged windows, smeared with obscenities (sure enough, ours were) it doesn't mean anything, in life, except that the cleaning crews are lazy. But in a story, if a professor is lecturing and the windows are smudged, we are obliged to think that his words are similarly untrandescent, right? ...
One of the great problems with artists, she said, is that they don't keep nuance and nature distinct. Import raw nature into a story or a poem and you've only ruined a story. Import nuance into life and you'll go mad. There'll suddenly be too much significance everywhere, a message in everything. ~ Clark Blaise

The question I'm most commonly asked is "Why?" A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit. ~ Robyn Davidson

In fact, the messages actually seemed to increase drug use. Kids aged twelve and a half to eighteen who saw the ads were actually more likely to smoke marijuana. Why? Because it made drug use more public. Think about observability and social proof. Before seeing the message, some kids might never have thought about taking drugs. Others might have considered it but have been wary about doing the wrong thing. But anti-drug ads often say two things simultaneously. They say that drugs are bad, but they also say that other people are doing them. And as we've discussed throughout this chapter, the more others seem to be doing something, the more likely people are to think that thing is right or normal and what they should be doing as well. ~ Jonah Berger

She'd gone and let her hair loose, he thought. Why did she have to do that? It made his hands hurt, actually hurt with wanting to slide into it.
"That's good." She stepped in, shut the door. And because it seemed too perfect not to, audibly flipped the lock. Seeing a muscle twitch in his jaw was incredibly satisfying.
He was a drowning man, and had just gone under the first time. "Keeley, I've had a long day here.I was just about to-"
"Have a nightcap," she finished. She'd spotted the teapot and the bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. "I wouldn't mind one myself." She breezed past him to flip off the burner under the now sputtering kettle.
She'd put on different perfume, he thought viciously. Put it on fresh, too, just to torment him. He was damn sure of it.It snagged his libido like a fish-hook.
"I'm not really fixed for company just now."
"I don't think I qualify as company." Competently she warmed the pot, measured out the tea and poured the boiling water in. "I certainly won't be after we're lovers."
He went under the second time without even the chance to gulp in air. "We're not lovers."
"That's about to change." She set the lid on the pot, turned. "How long do you like it to steep?"
"I like it strong, so it'll take some time. You should go on home now."
"I like it strong, too." Amazing, she thought,she didn't feel nervous at all. "And if it's going to take some time, we can have it afterward."
"This isn't the ~ Nora Roberts

If you look at what is happening in Republican conventions across the country, they are energized. And the message is really the same - that is, big government is a problem, spending is a problem. ~ Pete Sessions

The cross is a very powerful symbol and it symbolizes suffering, but it also is connected to a person who was loving and sharing and his message was about unconditional love. I tried to take a powerful image and use it to draw attention to a situation that needs attention. For me, we all need to be Jesus in our time. Jesus' message was to love your neighbor as yourself and these are people in need. ~ Madonna Ciccone

I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink ... how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep ... ~ Carew Papritz

As information processing machines, our ability to process data about the external world begins at the level of sensory perception. Although most of us are rarely aware of it, our sensory receptors are designed to detect information at the energy level. Because everything around us - the air we breathe, even the materials we use to build with, are composed of spinning and vibrating atomic particles, you and I are literally swimming in a turbulent sea of electromagnetic fields. We are part of it. We are enveloped within in, and through our sensory apparatus we experience what is.
Each of our sensory systems is made up of a complex cascade of neurons that process the incoming neural code from the level of the receptor to specific areas within the brain. Each group of neurons along the cascade alters or enhances the code, and passes it on to the next set of cells in the system, which further defines and refines the message. By the time the code reaches the outermost portion of our brain, the higher levels of the cerebral cortex, we become conscious of the stimulation. However, if any of the cells along the pathway fail in their ability to function normally, then the final perception is skewed away from normal reality. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

It has taken me much of my life to begin to get to the second gaze. By nature I have a critical mind and a demanding heart, and I am so impatient. These are both my gifts and my curses, as you might expect. Yet I cannot have one without the other, it seems. I cannot risk losing touch with either my angels or my demons. They are both good teachers.

I am convinced that guilt and shame are never from God. They are merely the defenses of the False Self as it is shocked at its own poverty - the defenses of a little man who wants to be a big man. God leads by compassion toward the soul, never by condemnation. If God would relate to us by severity and punitiveness, God would only be giving us permission to do the same (which is tragically, due to our mistaken images of God, exactly what has happened!).

God offers us, instead, the grace to "weep" over our sins more than to ever perfectly overcome them, to humbly recognize our littleness. (St. Thérèse of Lisieux brought this Gospel message home in our time.) The spiritual journey is a kind of weeping and a kind of wandering that keeps us both askew and thus awake at the same time. Thérèse called it her "little way."

So now in my later life, contemplation and compassion are finally coming together. This is my second gaze. It is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God's own eyes, which are always eyes of compassio ~ Richard Rohr

I hate the things they preach. They found a gimmick that sells. The fact that they're making money off all these teenage kids who actually believe in their message is disgusting. ~ Christina Ricci

Mix ingredients. Close bottle with a cork and fix cloth rags around the mouth. Soak rag in kerosene immediately before use. Light and enjoy! ~ Matt Kindt

I can't speak in too much detail about a book or story I'm working on because I find that it takes the energy out of my writing. When I begin to work, it's like a soda bottle that's been jostled before it's opened. There's a lot of pent up energy in there. I have to let it out slowly, carefully, so that I can turn it into a written work. ~ David B. Coe

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.
'My own sons,' he said.
We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside. ~ Colum McCann

The current economic crisis ... has numerous causes and sends a powerful message about the need for a profound revision of the model of global economic development. It's an acute symptom that is added to other more grave and already well-known ones, such as the continued imbalance between wealth and poverty, the scandal of hunger, the ecological emergency and the problem of unemployment, which has now become general. In this context a strategic re-launching of agriculture appears decisive. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

A light turned on in a dark room is like receiving a message from God quickly, completely, and all at once. ~ David A. Bednar

Many animal rescue organizations hit with a hard-core, heartbreaking message. Their videos and stories can become difficult for average people to watch. By taking a more positive, heartwarming approach to animal rescue, I've been able to engage people and keep them engaged for years. Instead of selling the agony and misery - and sadly, there is no shortage of that - I start with the happy endings. I work backwards so the first message they get is joy and success due to their involvement. Opening the mind with humor and joy gets the rescue message in that much deeper. ~ Elayne Boosler

Jeeves," I said. "A rummy communication has arrived. From Mr. Glossop."
"Indeed, sir?"
"I will read it to you. Handed in at Upper Bleaching. Message runs as follows:
When you come tomorrow, bring my football boots. Also, if humanly possible, Irish water-spaniel. Urgent. Regards. Tuppy.
"What do you make of that, Jeeves?"
"As I interpret the document, sir, Mr. Glossop wishes you, when you come tomorrow, to bring his football boots. Also, if humanly possible, an Irish water-spaniel. He hints that the matter is urgent, and sends his regards."
"Yes, that is how I read it. But why football boots?"
"Perhaps Mr. Glossop wishes to play football, sir. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Don't be superior. Everyone drinks blood. Blood is a word that means alive. You can do without almost anything: arms, legs, teeth, hope. But you can't do without blood. Lose even a little and you grow slow and stupid and not yourself at all. We are all of us beautiful and complicated vessels for carrying blood the way a bottle carries wine. I suppose you think there's no blood in your roast beef? Life eats life. Blood makes you move, makes you blush, makes the pulse pound in your brow when you see your love walking across a street toward you, makes your very thoughts fly through your brain. Blood is everything and everything is blood. ~ Catherynne M Valente

You are supposed to stand before a congregation, brimming over with a great message. Here I am trying to find a new little message each Sunday. If I really had great convictions I suppose they would struggle for birth each week. As the matter stands, I struggle to find an idea worth presenting and I almost dread the approach of a new sabbath. I don't know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing light and inspiration in regular weekly installments. How in the world can you reconcile the inevitability of Sunday and its task with the moods and caprices of the soul? The prophet speaks only when he is inspired. The parish preacher must speak whether he is inspired or not. I wonder whether it is possible to live on a high enough plane to do that without sinning against the Holy Spirit. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches. ~ Simran Keshwani

The three cardinal tenets of rum drinking in Newfoundland. The first of these is that as soon as a bottle is placed on a table it must be opened. This is done to "let the air get at it and carry off the black vapors." The second tenet is that a bottle, once opened, must never be restoppered, because of the belief that it will then go bad. No bottle of rum has ever gone bad in Newfoundland, but none has ever been restoppered, so there is no way of knowing whether this belief is reasonable. The final tenet is that an open bottle must be drunk as rapidly as possible "before all to-good goes out of it. ~ Farley Mowat

He was standing in the Inner Court, shouting for his enemy. When Guenever saw him, and he saw her, the electric message went between their eyes before they spoke a word. It was as if Elaine and the whole Quest for the Grail had never been. So far as we can make it out, she had accepted her defeat. He must have seen in her eyes that she had given in to him, that she was prepared to leave him to be himself-to love God, and to do whatever he pleased-so long as he was only Lancelot. she was serene and sane again. she had renounced her possessive madness and was joyful to see him living, whatever he did. They were young creatures-the same creatures whose eyes had met with the almost forgotten click of magnets in the smoky Hall of Camelot so long ago. And, in truly yielding, she had won the battle by mistake. ~ T.H. White

She broke off the kiss again on a strangled gasp, staring at him, her chest heaving. "We're not having sex here tonight." Even as she said it, she rode his thigh harder. Troy's eyes almost rolled back in his head at her barely leashed restraint, at the buck of hips that didn't seem to buy the message her mouth was selling.
"Okay," he agreed. If she chose to dry hump him all the way to orgasm beneath a billion stars he'd be in that. ~ Amy Andrews

That's the choice: eternal death or eternal life. To gain eternal life, you have to let go of your spiritual pride, and die to yourself. To lead others to Christ, to save them from this eternal judgment, you have to speak that truth in love; you have to tell them the truth without pulling any punches. Does that seem impossible? Will your audience turn you off? Well, as we can see, they turned Jesus off. In fact, they hated His message so much, His own neighbors and relatives, in a rage, tried to kill him for preaching it. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

I saw myself as a knight-errant ... but the damsel in distress stabbed me in the back, my sword shattered on the dragon's hide, and my grail turned out to be the bottom of a whiskey bottle. ~ Simon R. Green

If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance. ~ Michael Pollan

I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write. ~ Lois Lowry

Financial literacy is not an end in itself, but a step-by-step process. It begins in childhood and continues throughout a person's life all the way to retirement. Instilling the financial-literacy message in children is especially important, because they will carry it for the rest of their lives. The results of the survey are very encouraging, and we want to do our part to make sure all children develop and strengthen their financial-literacy skills. ~ George Karl

Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn't have to get up and go to work. It wasn't long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn't right. Couldn't plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren't they better than her in that way? ~ Hugh Howey

Like an angel engulfing a lonely soul, the clouds suspended in time. Fruitful waters bring forth new fountains. My life, a fine bottle of wine. ~ Joy Marino

Respect but do not fear your own fear. Do not let it come between you and something that might be deeply enjoyable. Remember it is quite normal to be a bit frightened of being alone. Most of us grew up in a social environment that sent out the explicit message that solitude was bad for you: it was bad for your health (especially your mental health) and bad for your 'character' too. Too much of it and you would promptly become weird, psychotic, self-obsessed, very possibly a sexual predator and rather literally a wanker. Mental (and even physical) well-being, along with virtue, depends, in this model, on being a good mixer, a team-player, and having high self-esteem, plus regular, uninhibited, simultaneous orgasms with one partner (at a time).
Actually, of course, it is never this straightforward because at the same time as pursuing this 'extrovert ideal', society gives out an opposite - though more subterranean - message. Most people would still rather be described as sensitive, spiritual, reflective, having rich inner lives and being good listeners, than the more extroverted opposites. I think we still admire the life of the intellectual over that of the salesman; of the composer over the performer (which is why pop stars constantly stress that they write their own songs); of the craftsman over the politician; of the solo adventurer over the package tourist. People continue to believe, in the fact of so much evidence - films, for example - that Great Art can only be pr ~ Sara Maitland

She was a very small girl with a face as lovely and fresh as her son's face - a very small girl. Most of the time she knew she was smarter and prettier than anyone else. But now and then a lonely fear would fall upon her so that she seemed surrounded by a tree-tall forest of enemies. Then every thought and word and look was aimed to hurt her, and she had no place to run and no place to hide. And she would cry in panic because there was no escape and no sanctuary.

Then one day she was reading a book - brown, with a silver title, and the cloth was broken and the boards thick. It was Alice in Wonderland. But it was the bottle which said, "Drink me" that had changed her life. ~ John Steinbeck

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. ~ Neil Postman

Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case. ~ Chuck Wendig

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you."
Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years. ~ Toni Morrison

I wish I could bottle the feelings of love inside me and save them for a rainy day – to remind myself of their magnitude in those moments of doubt. ~ Giovanna Fletcher

In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply "dropped the ball." We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it's necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor's nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth. ~ Max Brooks