Something Obvious Quotes

Dalí painted melting clocks. I suppose if he'd asked around first, quizzed people if they wanted to see a picture of a melting clock, the answer might have been something obvious, like 'Clocks don't melt!' But, lucky for us, Salvador didn't care what anyone else thought. You use what moves you. ~ Laura Ruby

When your mind wants to bolt, but your heart hangs on, it is because you don't know with absolute certainty what the truth is. When you waste so much time on something that you want to believe is true, you begin to overthink things. Eventually, something obvious becomes twisted into something absurd, which keeps us from believing a simpler answer. Over time, you believe your own lies and fantasies to shield yourself from hurt, when following what is logical would have been the quickest way to healing. It is through your own self-imposed delusions that you lose your perspective. The world then becomes different to you when in fact you are different. Why? Because your own ego gets in the way. Everyone wants to feel special. Everyone wants to have faith in others. Everyone wants to believe in fairytales, happy endings and have all bad interactions with others explained. It is easier to sit in denial with your delusions and pray God will intervene, not realizing he has. He gave you commonsense and intuition, but you didn't like how it made you feel. This is what true mental illness really is: Following your gut instinct through hell because you want to prove you are right, either to yourself or others. You sacrifice choosing to do right, in order to avoid pain. However, you don't realize that you have been in pain for a really long time and believed this was how happiness felt. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Race and sexual preferences are two different things. One is a behavior-related and preference-related and one is something inherently - skin color, something obvious, that kind of stuff. ~ James Lankford

As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, "Wait, wait. I don't get it."
"That's because you have eight functioning brain cells."
"Studies show that Marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes," Hank said.
Alaska swallowed a mouthful of fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew a smoke at Hank. "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents. ~ John Green

Maybe T-shirts should stick to something obvious, like i'm a girl or 80% water or likely to breathe. ~ Shannon Hale

I guess what I'm really saying is something obvious - that there's a unique pride in watching a home team from rival turf, especially when we're not supposed to be any good. ~ Serge Schmemann

You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it? ~ Leonard Susskind

With no relation to social status, class, background, whether it suits them or not, people yearn for a dream. Sustained by a dream, hurt by a dream, revived by a dream, killed by a dream. And even after being abandoned by a dream, it continues to smolder from the bottom of one's heart, probably until the verge of death. A man should envision such a lifetime once. A life spent as a martyr...to the God named "Dream". Ultimately, to be born, and then to simply live for no better reason...I can't abide such a life. They are...excellent troops. Together we have faced death so many times. They are my valuable comrades, devoting themselves to the dream I envision. But to me, a friend is...something else. Someone who would never depend on another's dream. Someone who wouldn't be compelled by anyone, but would determine and pursue his own reason to live...And should anyone trample that dream, he would oppose him body and soul, even if that threat were me myself. What I think a friend is...is one who is my "Equal". ~ Kentaro Miura

Knowledge is nothing without action. Nothing changes until you do something. What you do will directly determine what you learn. ~ James A. Belasco

JOHN: You said "Good day." I think that it is a nice day today.
CAROL: Is it?
JOHN: Yes, I think it is.
CAROL: And why is that important?
JOHN: Because it is the essence of all human communication. I say something
conventional, you respond, and the information we exchange is not about the
"weather," but that we both agree to converse. In effect, we agree that we are both
human. ~ David Mamet

Brenda burst in. "Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn't fit or something. The stores don't give 'em no trouble." Her father turned in a kind of roar. "I never heard such a fool thing in my life. Didn't you hear your mother tell you to shut your mouth, girl! ~ Katherine Paterson

Some people have used this song as evidence that I worship the devil, which is another chapter for the big book of stupid. It's really just laughable. But the sad part is that it's not even remotely a song about devil worship! It's a song about the intersection of some basic human emotions, the place where sadness meets rage, where our need to mourn meets our lust for justice, where our faith meets our inclination to take matters into our own hands, like karmic vigilantes. People who hear the word Lucifer and start making accusations are just robbing themselves of an opportunity to get in touch with something deeper than that, something inside their own souls. ~ Jay-Z

Höderer: You don't love men, Hugo. You love only principles.
Hugo: Men? Why should I love them? Do they love me?
Höderer: Then why did you come to us? If you don't love men, you can't fight for them.
Hugo: I joined the party because its cause is just, and I shall leave it when that cause ceases to be just. As for men, it's not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Höderer: And I, I love them for what they are. With all their filth and and all their vices. I love their voices and their warm grasping hands, and their skin, the nudest skin of all, and their uneasy glances, and the desperate struggle each has to pursue against anguish and against death. For me, one man more or less in the world is something that counts. It's something precious. You, I know you now, you are a destroyer. You detest men because you detest yourself. Your purity resembles death. The revolution you dream of is not ours. You don't want to change the world, you want to blow it up. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there. ~ Han Kang

And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don't give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers
perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In the universe we have not to do with repetitions, each time that a cycle is passed, something new is added to the world's evolution and to at its human stage of development ~ Rudolf Steiner

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. ~ Pauline Kael

Every noble impulse, every unselfish expression of love; every brave suffering for the right; every surrender of self to something higher than self; every loyalty to an ideal; every unselfish devotion to principle; every helpfulness to humanity; every act of self-control; every fine courage of the soul, undefeated by pretense or policy, but by being, doing, and living of good for the very good's sake - that is spirituality. ~ David O. McKay

Reed: "What's up?"
Vanessa: "There must be an accident or something."
Reed: "I'm the accident."
Vanessa: "I couldn't agree more."
Reed: "What I meant was, those people out there are waiting for me. ~ Jenny O'Connell

I love directing. It's something I started doing in theatre when I was in university in Chicago and I started a theatre company right out of college and was directing for many years. ~ David Schwimmer

Now, religion professes a special role in the protection and instruction of children. "Woe to him," says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, "who harms a child." The New Testament has Jesus informing us that one so guilty would be better off at the bottom of the sea, and with a millstone around his neck at that. But both in theory and in practice, religion uses the innocent and the defenseless for the purposes of experiment. By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means - for all I care - let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as sin. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Do you have a dream? If you do, what is it? Is your dream similar to mine? I hope that even more people dream the same dream as me, because my dream is so big I couldn't handle it by myself. If you are someone who has the same dream as me, this is what I have to say to you. Right now, you are planting a single tree. Right now, you are sowing a single seed. And you are beginning to knit something with one strange of yarn. The first step or two are nothing, but imagine that you continue that work for ten years. One tree becomes a forest, one seed becomes a field, and that single thread becomes a beautiful cloth. Believe in the life inside you, believe in the great and holy mind within you, and push forward with the dream you have chosen until you make it. ~ Ilchi Lee

You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we'll see. ~ Oliver Stone

Other extremely alluring traits in people are simplicity and naturalness. Simplicity and naturalness are never painfully obvious qualities, and yet which I come across them in a person, I get this sense of a firm foundation and of a direct access to truth. ~ Wojciech Kurtyka

To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so, is something worse. ~ John Quincy Adams

The two men, Tiste and Azathanai, had begun forging something between them, and whatever it was, it was unafraid of truths. ~ Steven Erikson

I would love the opportunity to work in Chicago. It would be like a dream come true, if I could work there on something like the way ER was filmed. ~ Joe Lando

We didn't grow up with the sense that where we were was where we were gonna be. We grew up with the sense that where we were almost didn't matter, because we will be becoming something greater. ~ Will Smith

It is when things are at their worst that Allah will raise the best generation. The generation that the Prophet would be told Sahabat should look up to. So maybe the fact that you are living in the darkest of time means that Allah thinks you can be the strongest source of light.
Allah thinks you
you
were born for this time. That's Allah's decision. Which means you have something significant to offer the world. You have some serious trees to plant. And you have to not get overwhelmed with the news around you. Even if dajjal is tapping you on the shoulders. Say (to Dajjal), "Hold on, I'm planting a tree".
You do what you gotta do. You gotta focus. ~ Nouman Ali Khan

The biggest rap on me is that I don't find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It's not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused. ~ Bob Woodward

I like the idea of doing something outside my comfort zone. ~ Joe Wright

If Edgar sounded overeager, even rushed, the race was with his own temperament. He placed a premium on savvy. Yet since you could only obtain new information by admitting you didn't know it already, savvy required an apprenticeship as a naive twit. You had to ask crude, obvious questions ... you had to sit still while worldly-wise warhorses ... fired withering glances as if you were born yesterday.
Well, Edgar was born yesterday for the moment, although his tolerance for being treated liked a simpleton was in short supply. He'd needed to rattle off a multitude of stupid questions before he embraced his next incarnation as an insider. The trouble was that savvy coated your brain in plastic like a driver's license: nothing more could get in. Hence the point at which you decided you knew everything was exactly the point at which you became an ignorant dipshit. ~ Lionel Shriver

Nancy herself noted that the fact that Mom had run a food bank and soup kitchen for ten years and that I'd volunteered at the Cocina almost every day after school made for a "great backstory." There was something so hollow about hearing Mom described as a backstory that my breath caught cold in my throat. ~ Jenn Marie Thorne

Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different. ~ Kate Atkinson

He kissed her, and the magic that had been building up steadily around them exploded, raining down in arcs of silver fire that made her half-remember a prophecy from her dreams.
One by one, they all will die.
Something had been set into motion. ~ Nenia Campbell

I can tell you that if there's nothing wrong with you except fat it is easy to get thin. You eat and drink the same as always, only half. If you are handed a plate of food, leave half; if you have to help yourself, take half. After a while, if you are a perfectionist, you can consume half of that again … On the question of will-power, if that is a factor, you should think of will-power as something that never exists in the present tense, only in the future and the past. At one moment you have decided to do or refrain from an action and the next moment you have already done or refrained; it is the only way to deal with will-power. ~ Muriel Spark

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. ~ Virginia Woolf

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely. ~ Hesketh Pearson

When you give me art - give me something that reaches inside of my core and twists, taking the very breath that sustains me away.
Give me something that wakens me from my lethargy.
Give me something that causes me to ponder and question all that I have come to know; due to my circumstances that I have been allotted in this life.
Give me something that causes me to question my pride and arrogance of knowing that I am right in my thoughts, beliefs and perceptions.
Shake me: as if you had grabbed me and pushed me against the wall - shattering all of my preconceived notions; causing me to break out of the box that I have put others in.
Give me something that scraped over the scar tissue of wounds that you carry within, opening them afresh and causing you pain - real core pain - pain that you had pushed down; pain that now resides in your closet of skeletons.
When you give me art, give me you, or give me nothing at all…
©2014 Suzanne Steele ~ Suzanne Steele

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane. ~ Kevin Hearne

It's the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag. The human night is filled with the crouching forms of dreams, desires, vanities, self-interest, mad love, envy, and the thirst for revenge, as the desert night conceals the puma, the hawk and the jackal. ~ Sandor Marai

A sense of religion is something one is born with, like a musical ear. One can develop it, cultivate it, enrich it, but if one hasn't got its seed to begin with, no powers of the intellect, no sophistication of 'evidence' can awaken it. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

Despair. I'd been told I suffered from it too. The thing was, I never sensed myself in despair, but rather, in love with something I felt closest to only when walking or riding my bike in the city. I felt it when I kept my windows open all night, or sitting on the rickety wood of the porch my landlord called a fire escape, peeled paint flaking under my hands and feet, looking over the empty lot. It had to do with a texture, with the moon and a stray white cat I'd been feeding, a cat that saw me as home now. ~ Monica Drake

It will take an unprecedented act of courage, on a grand scale. You may have to do something virtually unknown in the annals of human history ... You may have to give up some of your most sacred beliefs ... let me make something clear. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I don't have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like ~ Adele

Oshima's silent for a time as he gazes at the forest, eyes narrowed. Birds are flitting from one branch to the next. His hands are clasped behind his head. "I know how you feel," he finally says. "But this is something you have to work out on your own. Nobody can help you. That's what love's all about, Kafka. You're the one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark. Your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself. ~ Haruki Murakami

THE ARTISTIC IMAGE IS ALWAYS A METONYM, WHERE ONE THING IS SUBSTITUTED FOR ANOTHER, THE SMALLER FOR THE GREATER. TO TELL OF WHAT IS LIVING, THE ARTIST USES SOMETHING DEAD; TO SPEAK OF THE INFINITE, HE SHOWS THE FINITE. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Take advantage of the opportunities you have during your program. It's not every day that you get to live in Florida with incredible people and make magic daily. During the last two months of my program, Sara and I made sure we conquered as much on our bucket list as possible. If you make a bucket list, use it. Don't regret not doing something when you have the chance. ~ Sara Lopes

Pink Balloons

My name is Olivia King

I am five years old

My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist. She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand.

"Here Livie, I bought this for you."

She called me Livie.

I was so happy. I'd never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloon wrapped around other kids wrist in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, but I never dreamed I would have my very own.

My very own pink balloon.

I was excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! I couldn't believe my mother bought me something! She'd never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours. It was full of heliu and it danced and swayed and floated as I drug it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it in the bathroom, the closet, the laundry room, the kitchen, the living room. I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother's bedroom!

My mothers

Bedroom?

Where I wasn't supposed to be?

With my pink

balloon...

I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off her nose! She slapped me across the face as she told me how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never ~ Colleen Hoover

You want something you can't have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can't provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive. ~ Anonymous

At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke