Simpler Times Quotes

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don't remember mixed genes with a woman I can't recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life - unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable - and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. ~ Isaac Marion

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [ ... ] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. ~ Gregory Maguire

Throughout it all, I loved her as much as I always had, and I found myself aching for those simpler times of the past. I knew what was happening, of course. As we were drifting apart, I was becoming more desperate to save what we once had shared; like a vicious circle, however, my desperation made us drift apart even further. ~ Nicholas Sparks

People love westerns worldwide. There's something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It's a simpler time. There's no organized laws and stuff. ~ Clint Eastwood

Slow food, free-range, no steroids, eat local, and natural winemaking are all part of a general yearning for simpler times. But the fact is that most winemakers these days, big and small, have drastically lessened the use of chemicals in the vineyard, embracing such concepts as organically grown, biodynamic, and sustainable. ~ Roger Morris

Hearing from you makes me long for simpler times, but perhaps the attraction of the past is that it is over, and we can make of it what we will. ~ Starling Lawrence

Our world isn't about ideology anymore. It's about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions - just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are. ~ Matt Taibbi

Remember that every man at times stumbles and must be helped up: if he's down, you cannot carry him. The only way in which any man can be helped permanently is to help himself." - Theodore Roosevelt ~ Zig Ziglar

Many times in life, we say we want change but are then terrified when the opportunity for it arrives. ~ Marianne Williamson

Which meant she might as well return to a topic no man would ever bore of.Sex. "That concludes my overall dissertation on bedside manners before and after an encounter. Moving on to the last topic evolving around the setting of the bedroom. Would ine of yoy please define the purpose of a dildo and why a man should consider keeping one at his bedside at all times? ~ Delilah Marvelle

I should have died in ambushes a hundred times. ~ Sam Childers

I want people to go into space, to orbit around the world a few times, even to stay there for 24 hours and then come back to where they took off. And I also want people with a low income to be able to do that, not only rich people. ~ Buzz Aldrin

I'm here tonight, not as a Republican, not as a Democrat, but as an optimistic American who understands that we must come together behind the one man who can lead the way forward in these challenging times: my president, our president, Barack Obama! ~ Charlie Crist

You're seeing something that you've seen a thousand times and you just like it. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a revelation. It's not a surprise. It's comfort. ~ Lucy Corin

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them. ~ Renata Adler

There isn't any questioning the fact that some people enter your life, at the exact point of need, want or desire - it's sometimes a coincendence and most times fate, but whatever it is, I am certain it came to make me smile. ~ Nikki Rowe

Let me do my work each day, and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times ... ~ Max Ehrmann

Two of the great leaders of the past - Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass - had White fathers - who deserted them. Now Margo Jefferson, who is hard on me and the fellas, wrote in the Times that she has nocturnal, erotic fantasies about John Wayne. What's up with these feminists? Do you see these double standards these feminists have? They dream about John Wayne, but they're hard on us [Black men]. ~ Ishmael Reed

Institutional nepotism might be tolerated in prosperous times. Setbacks can become crises, however, when there is incompetence in key positions at crucial moments. ~ Stewart Stafford

A wave formed, swelling around Ariel's body. It lifted her up higher and higher- or maybe she herself was growing: it was hard to tell. She held the trident aloft. Storm clouds raced to her from all directions like a lost school of cichlid babies flicking to their father's mouth for protection. Lightning coursed through the sky and danced between the trident's tines.
Ariel sang a song of rage.
Notes rose and fell discordantly, her voice screeching at times like a banshee from the far north.
She sang, and the wind sang with her. It whipped her hair out of its braids and pulled tresses into tentacles that billowed around her head. She sang of the unfairness of Eric's fate and her own, of her father's torture as a polyp, even of Scuttle's mortal life, slowly but visibly slipping away.
Mostly she sang about Ursula.
She sang about everyone whose lives had been touched and destroyed by evil like coral being killed and bleached, like dead spots in the ocean from algae blooms, like scale rot. She sang about what she would do to anyone who threatened those she loved and protected.
And then, with her final note, she made a quick thrust as if to throw the trident toward the boats in the bay, pulling it back at the last moment.
A clap louder than thunder echoed across the ocean. A wave even larger than the one she rode roared up from the depths of the open sea. It smashed through and around her, leaving her hair and body white with foam. She grinned fie ~ Liz Braswell

It was only one of a dozen or twenty vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world. ~ W.H. Hudson

That's where the challenge has been. Balancing football and life. Trying not to replay every play in my head while I'm with my family. Sometimes, I've done it well. Other times, I haven't. ~ Chad Pennington

The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build. ~ Booker T. Washington

Offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only means of defence. ~ George Washington

Frugal is an old-fashioned, mostly unused word and frugality is is an old-fashioned mostly unused virtue that has been waiting for hard times to come back. The Scots have another word for it - canny.

Keith Smith, Hard Times Handbook, 1984 ~ Keith Smith

Most times with vanity projects, publishers don't believe in the work; they just believe in the name. ~ Gerard Way

I was very active but I was dyslexic and had a really hard time at school. ~ Ashley Scott

All those nights of sharing a bed
All those times he put an arm around me
All the things he's done to make my happy
...encouraging me to give Ty a chance
He must really love me if he'll watch me date another guy just to ensure I'm happy
But he's like my brother
And Ty is my boyfriend now
My dream boyfriend
The guy I lost my virginity to
What's scary?
I'm so hot for Ty
but Henry makes me feel whole
in a totally different sort of way
even if I've never considered jumping him
F***ety, F***, F*** ~ Miranda Kenneally

I've freed you once tonight, and I would rather not do it again. I prefer to commit treason as few times as possible. ~ Gillian Bronte Adams

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity. ~ Joyce Meyer

I look for an interesting and often times, fresh character. Something different that what is done all the time or than I've done recently. I look at who is directing. Those two variables as well as a third, which is the content and the quality of the screenplay. I look at the arcs of the scenes and characters and relationships. ~ William Baldwin

Our sense of time's passage is rooted not in one region of the brain but results from the combined working of memory, attention, emotion, and other cerebral activities that can't be singularly localized, Time in the brain, like time outside it, is a collective activity. ~ Alan Burdick

There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life. ~ Athol Fugard

Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times - letting pass infinite other examples - a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated - indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us - I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible - as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy... ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Let's always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year - let it always be an affair. ~ Kate Millett

Marathon training doesn't have to be a grind. By running for about 30 minutes two times a week, and by gradually increasing the length of a third weekly run-the long run-anyone can finish a marathon. ~ Jeff Galloway

The most striking impression was that of an overwhelming bright light. I had seen under similar conditions the explosion of a large amount - 100 tons - of normal explosives in the April test, and I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. Our eyes were accommodated to darkness, and thus even if the sudden light had been only normal daylight it would have appeared to us much brighter than usual, but we know from measurements that the flash of the bomb was many times brighter than the sun. In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible. ~ Emilio Segre

This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex. ~ Dan Rather

When you can share the lessons you learnt through tears and heartache and others find life in it and are better off for it, then beauty has come out of those ashes. ~ TemitOpe Ibrahim

The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. ~ Emily Bronte

You couldn't expect good times to last. ~ C.S. Lewis