Wind Up Quotes

What we focus on defines us, so if our focus is inward, on ourselves, we wind up defining for ourselves whether we are righteous or guilty. When we begin and end with us - with our self - we miss the heart of the gospel and never truly find the freedom for which we ache. ~ Lydia Brownback

I am not an alcoholic. I'm a social catalyst. People pay me to illustrate for other partygoers the chemical process involved in transforming from one persona into another drunker, more fun one. It's a matter of going from dull point A to exciting point B. And I'm a raving success at it. So successful that sometimes I wind up at Mysterious Point C. ~ Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Most of the producers I work with are decent mixers. We'll wind up in these spots where I'll get the mix back and I'll put a few more pieces of production together and send it back to the mixer. It's so easy to change the entire perspective of the song by changing the mix. ~ Yukimi Nagano

They'll be days like this" my momma said.
When you open your hands to catch, and wind up with only blisters and bruises.
When you try to step out of the phone booth and try to fly , and the very people you want to save, are the ones standing on your cape.
When your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees with disappointment
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say "Thank you". ~ Sarah Kay

Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man. ~ Tennessee Williams

Drinking and cycling is like drinking and flirting - it's pretty likely you're going to wind up hitting something, and the results are probably going to be ugly. ~ BikeSnobNYC

People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you. ~ Woody Allen

Maybe it's been like that for you till now. But you're not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right ... right? ~ Haruki Murakami

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

It is very important to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff - as much stuff as possible - with as little fear as possible. It's much, much better to wind up with a lot of crap having tried it than to overthink in the beginning and not do it. ~ Stefan Sagmeister

So many businesses today have wind-up because of fear of failing. ~ Godwin Elendu Ph.D

Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-- none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women--I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do "do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points. Do you know why that's a weak point of mine?"
"'Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there's no end to it," I say. ~ Haruki Murakami

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While ~ Fred Waitzkin

I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get. ~ Mel Brooks

I did a bunch of blue-collar jobs, because I knew I'd wind up with a white-collar job at some point, and I wanted to, I don't know, I just wanted to taste life. I dug graves for a while, I worked as a stock boy in a big department store, I worked in a bank. ~ Graydon Carter

There are certain episodes that on the page I thought, "Oh boy, this is going to be the funniest episode." And there are other ones that went in, fingers crossed, saying, "Oh well, let's hope something good comes out of it." Oftentimes, those ones wind up being the best ones. ~ Charlie Day

Your job is always the same if it's a juggernaut or if it's just one of these little jewels of a film that's gonna wind up at the Laemmle or something, so your job doesn't change whatsoever ... give it your best shot. ~ Morgan Freeman

Reference when we talked about Machiavelli, didn't you? I could've sworn you did." "Just because I don't enjoy it doesn't mean I know nothing about it. Tupac was around back in my wind-up phonograph days, you know." I cast her a sardonic look, which makes her laugh and shrug, as if to say 'hey, not my fault you're an old ass man.' "I'm surprised you know anything about him, actually. He died around the time you were born." "Yeah, well, music never really goes out of style, especially Tupac," she says with a smile. ~ J.M. Darhower

I like to be a little more difficult to nail down that that just inside myself, but when someone's motivations, even if they wind up falling in one side or the other of the debate, when they're personal and also when they're masked by something that only the audience knows is really their motivation, that to me is just what I call entertainment. ~ Robert Downey, Jr.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. ~ Jason Fried

Stretch targets energize. We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don't quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done. ~ Jack Welch

Everyone is born a freak," notes Hayley. "Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place ... Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I never sought to be a pundit, or on TV, or a writer-it just kind of came to me. If you just keep doing what you want to do, you wind up doing precisely what you want to be doing. Don't resist how life bats you around. ~ Ann Coulter

HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives? ~ Atul Gawande

If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D. ~ Gerald Vizenor

He acts like he's in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn't know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be. ~ Sorin Suciu

Avoid participating in any religious community where the clear truth-claims of Scripture are ignored while contemplative and mystical practices are favored simply for their spiritual experience. Be careful of any church or ministry wherein acts of mercy and environmental stewardship are devoid of a theology of the cross and wind up being little more than the worship of created people and things. And be careful not to worship a good thing as a god thing for that is a bad thing. ~ Mark Driscoll

Most women don't like good men. They say they want a good buy, but most women always wind up with the bad boy. ~ Stephanie Mills

I think in the bullpen you can tell during your warmups, if you have a good feel for it. But anything can happen once you get into a game. Sometimes you just wind up throwing it better than ever before one day without knowing why. ~ Barry Zito

Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

When you're constantly thinking of others and what they must be thinking or feeling or expecting, you wind up in this perpetual state of trying to please them. You see yourself through their eyes and you lose sight of who you are. ~ Michael Soll

I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere. ~ Coleman Barks

My comedy is unapologetic and fearless. Like, sometimes you'll wind up having condomless sex with someone that you probably shouldn't. I'm interested in sharing that part of myself unapologetically so that other people will hopefully feel better. ~ Amy Schumer

"You laid it on a little thick out there."
Morpheus clucks his tongue. "I performed masterfully," he answers, at last managing to claim his hat from Chessie.
"Right," Jeb scoffs. "Pretty sure my mistreatment wouldn't have sent you into hysterics, drama queen."
Morpheus smirks. "Fair enough. On the other hand, your portrayal of a brainless wind-up numbskull was spot on."
Jeb's lips quiver, as if he's fighting a smile himself. "You know, I still have enough paint to make that flyswatter."
"Tut. No need for violence." Morpheus taps the dust from his hat and places it on his head. "I'm simply giving credit where it's due." ~ A.G. Howard

Dear Artie: "The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. "Roy ~ John Pearce

Running is a very natural activity. If you get too caught up, you find yourself constantly seeking to make running something that it isn't. You should let it be what it is - a very simple activity. Running has become too complicated for many people and they wind up turning sour on the sport, or losing the focus of their direction. ~ Bill Rodgers

The funny thing about being in your early twenties is that it's a lot like being any other age, except you don't know it. For a long time, you think you'll change and become a better version of yourself, but really, you just wind up being a little more tolerant of the person you've always been. Or something like that. ~ Stephanie Reents

If I think about what I wanted as a kid and what I want now they aint the same thing. I guess what I wanted wasnt what I wanted ... Hell, I dont know what I want. Never did ... When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I tink you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain. ~ Cormac McCarthy

(P)eople's good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins. ~ Gayle Forman

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another. Said he didn't want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore. Name was Breed. I asked him if he was any relation to the boss of the fugging Research Laboratory. He said he fugging well was. Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory's fugging son. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass.

If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote.

There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon. ~ Michio Kaku

My grandfather used to like the word 'mitigate,'" Harry said. "He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. 'You cant talk your way out,' he'd often say, 'and you can't buy your way out, and you can't shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody-no, not one.'"
"I know, I know," said Mr. Hewitt, "but what's the purpose of it?"
"You supported your wife, didn't you?" asked Harry. "You raised a family, didn't you? That's the purpose of it."
'That's no purpose," said Mr. Hewitt. "The same thing that's going to happen to me is going to happen to them."
"The generations have to keep coming along," said Harry. "That's all I know."
"You're put here, " said Mr. Hewitt, "and you're allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there's no purpose to it whatsoever. ~ Joseph Mitchell

Everybody who has dealt with China over an extended period of time has come to more or less the same conclusions. There are nuances of differences, but not fundamental differences. I think that President Bush was heading in this direction, and I have no doubt that he will again wind up in this position. But right now he has to be preoccupied with the atrocity committed in New York and Washington. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Another day, a different hour, take a left and not a right, you'd wind up a whole different being. Knowing if that would be better requires a realm of experience only decades can build. ~ Ellen Hopkins

I do admit that I've never been one to fit in easily to any given pattern. It's not my choice. It's just the way I am. So if the characters I wind up playing are all a bit different, it must be because that's the way I like it. Anna Kendrick is different, and she's going to stay that way. ~ Anna Kendrick

People don't understand the devastation the murder of a child does to someone. Eighty percent of parents of murdered children wind up in divorce. The only thing you have in common is that horrible sadness. You can't see the joy of your previous life. ~ John Walsh

This is what you get in life. Wee flannel-arsed naebodies sittin' behind a desk tryin' to make you sweat in your stool. And see when they do? Y'can feel the wind-up key take another turn in your back. ~ Ian Pattison

How can we make sure we wind up behind the right door when the going gets tough? The answer is: craftsmanship. ~ Robert C. Martin

The physician who waits until dead certain of a diagnosis before acting is likely to wind up with a dead patient. Sometimes things develop so rapidly that only early action-back when you're still somewhat uncertain-stands a chance of being effective, as in catching cancer before it metastasizes. ~ Joel Garreau

You're doubtless well aware that most of the great hypnotic patients wind up referring to themselves in the third person, like little children. They see themselves from outside their own organisms, outside their own sensory systems. In order to get further outside themselves, and help them escape their physical personality, some of them, once in the state of clairvoyance, have the curious custom of re-baptizing themselves. The dream name comes to them, no one knows whence, and by this they INSIST on being called as long as their luminous sleep endures – to the point of refusing to answer to any other name. ~ Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

You were greedy. You wanted it all," the smaller man said. "There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone does. But you can wind up with nothing if you're not willing to pay the price. ~ Jennifer Valoppi

You can love one man and leave another and love a man and still leave him and leave a man without ever loving him, you can fuck everybody you meet or live like a nun and in the end you still wind up at Target. ~ Kim Wright

You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That's how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything everyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too. And salt and lizard and pearl and umbrellas and typewriters and a lot of other things I'm not at liberty to tell you, because I took vows, and a witch's vows have teeth. Magic is funny like that. It's not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you're very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent. ~ Floyd Abrams

But if they did really refer to some kind of a "personal relationship," it would in effect be a case of channeling. I suspect this is why fundamentalists who condemn New Age channelers do not dismiss it as a fraud ... , but instead think that Ramtha and the others are channeling demons. If they said it was sheer delusion, they know where the other four fingers would wind up pointing! ~ Robert M. Price

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. ~ Adelle Waldman

Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That's the sort of thing that is bad education. I'd say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that's good for photography. ~ Henry Holmes Smith

Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I'll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it's pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others - other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On that list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I've made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you're not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow ... ) help me to come back "here" little by little. ~ Haruki Murakami

Poor little old human beings – they're jerked into this world without having any idea where they came from or what it is they are supposed to do, or how long they have to do it in. Or where they are gonna wind up after that. But bless their hearts, most of them wake up every morning and keep on trying to make some sense out of it. Why, you can't help but love them, can you? I just wonder why more of them aren't as crazy as betsy bugs. "

Aunt Elner, 1978 ~ Fannie Flagg

If you'd told me even a year before ... that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.
I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director ... a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. ~ Mary Karr

In life you wind up with one of two things - the results or the reason why you don't have the results. Results don't have to be explained. They just are. ~ Werner Erhard

Even when the thing I want most is right in front of me ... I keep thinking about how I'll just wind up losing it in the end ...
Kisa Shouta(Sekaiichi Hatsukoi)Vol.6 ch.4 ~ Shungiku Nakamura

I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia. ~ Francine Prose

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them. ~ Neil Gaiman

We get the best people we can get and it turns out a lot of them are women. I've said this before If you hire people solely on their merit you wind up hiring a lot of women. I wonder how many other shows even come close to our numbers. ~ Callie Khouri

Winning is like shaving - you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum. ~ Jack Kemp

I'm consumed with tech - medical, computational, impossible tech. So, I don't know exactly what I'll wind up doing, where I'll go with all this schooling, but I'm willing that it be better than my dogmatic vision of it all. ~ Justine Bateman

I believe that the only possible reason for our being here is to serve in some form or another but that the form is not always readily found or recognized. And I've noticed that those who refuse to serve often wind up as slaves. ~ Hildegard Knef

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

In the United States economic system you can lose big or you can win big. If you lose you wind up wearing a Hefty bag and sleeping in a doorway. If you win you can have sex with Catherine Zeta Jones when you're seventy-five. ~ Richard Jeni

I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth. ~ Malcolm X

No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was not aware of my actions. Everyone must find out who they are and be aware of their actions before they wind up in a vicious predicament. ~ Richard Ramirez

We singer-songwriter people, we're used to getting up and doing our own thing in front of people, and we're it. We're the band, artist, writer, producer, front man. We're the whole thing. You develop, it's not smugness, but this self-reliance, that can limit your creativity. When you're willing and able to invite others into it, you wind up getting a piece of work that's bigger and better than anything you ever imagined it could be. ~ Andy Wilkinson

I'd been reborn since Marlboro Man had entered my life; his wild abandon and unabashed passion had freed me from the shackles of cynicism, from thinking that love had to be something to labor over or agonize about. He'd ridden into my life on a speckled gray horse and had saved my heart from hardness. He'd taught me that when you love someone, you say it--and that when it comes to matters of the heart, games are for pimply sixteen-year-olds.
Up until then that's all I'd been: a child masquerading as a disillusioned adult, looking at love much as I'd looked at a round of Marco Polo in the pool at the country club: when they swam after me, I'd swim away. And there are accusations of peeking and cheating, and you always wind up sunburned and pruney and pooped. And no one ever wins.
It was Marlboro Man who'd helped me out of the pool, wrapped a towel around my blistering shoulders, and carried me to a world where love has nothing to do with competition or sport or strategy. He told me he loved me when he felt like it, when he thought of it. He never saw any reason not to. ~ Ree Drummond

I think that when we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we're alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange. ~ Paulo Coelho

Now, I know from experience that the trouble with one lie is that it usually takes more lies to cover it up. And if you don't watch out, you wind up telling lies to cover up the lies that are covering up the original lie. ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

we leapt into our saddles. Or rather, most of us leapt into our saddles, while Calvin flailed helplessly for a few seconds with his legs beating the air like on of those wind up swimmer toys. ~ Garrett Robinson

There are a lot of issues with the three-tens," I said. "First off, a lot of the time, the poor kids who wind up cast as 'princes' get thrown out of second-story windows and permanently maimed. There have been reports of Rapunzels who sunk so deep into their stories that they actually could cure blindness with their tears, but we haven't had one of those in years, and it's not company policy to let unmonitored memetic incursions progress to that level. ~ Seanan McGuire

We wind up disappointed with our life and end up depressed because we have wasted it ~ Sunday Adelaja

After graduation, we can just ... ride into the sunrise," he says. "The sunrise?" His lips twitch. "If we ride into the sunset, we'd wind up in the middle of the Pacific. ~ Heather Demetrios

It seems every morning I wake up to face a list of 20 things to do, with time only to do 10, and somehow I always wind up squishing in 30. ~ Karen Salmansohn

Better she never be a bride than wind up a widow ~ Holly Black

It's hard to get fluffed up about love anymore. I've lived it. I try to avoid it. If I'm extremely fond of a woman, if I think I might really wind up walking down the aisle again ... I go in another direction. ~ Phil Everly

Success is feeling good about the work you do throughout the long, unheralded journey that May or may not wind up at the launch pad. You can't view training solely as a stepping stone to something loftier. It's got to be an end in itself. ~ Chris Hadfield

Change sucks. No one's going to argue about that. Change is hard and painful and sometimes we wind up losing things we wanted to keep forever. ~ Seanan McGuire

Workaholism

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.

Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality - people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive. If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra eff ~ Jason Fried

Proud to steal her anything she sees, but you will wind up peeking through her key hole down upon your knees. ~ Bob Dylan

He walked me to the door--the same one to which I'd been escorted many times before by pimply high school boys and a few miscellaneous suitors along the way. But this time was different. Bigger. I felt it. I wondered for a moment if he felt it, too.
That's when the spike heel of my boot caught itself on a small patch of crumbling mortar on my parents' redbrick sidewalk. In an instant, I saw my life and any ounce of pride remaining in my soul pass before my eyes as my body lurched forward. I was going to bite it for sure--and right in front of the Marlboro Man. I was an idiot, I told myself, a dork, a klutz of the highest order. I wanted desperately to snap my fingers and magically wind up in Chicago, where I belonged, but my hands were too busy darting in front of my torso, hoping to brace my body from the fall.
But someone caught me. Was it an angel? In a way. It was Marlboro Man, whose tough upbringing on a working cattle ranch had produced the quick reflexes necessary to save me, his uncoordinated date, from certain wipeout. Once the danger was over, I laughed from nervous embarrassment. Marlboro Man chuckled gently. He was still holding my arms, in the same strong cowboy grip he'd used to rescue me moments earlier. Where were my knees? They were no longer part of my anatomy.
I looked at Marlboro Man. He wasn't chuckling anymore. He was standing right in front of me…and he was still holding my arms. ~ Ree Drummond

Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed? ~ Stephen King

The violence you witness is Denzel doing it and we're taking some visual effects and doing some things and you see something happen it's happening in front of you as opposed to cutting away and doing a bunch of tricks. It's in front of you. So it's hard not to make it a hard "R" if you see a guy get punched and teeth wind up in someone's knuckles. ~ Antoine Fuqua

August 18, 2006

It was so nice to talk to you tonight. I always wind up in a better mood after talking to you. Somehow you always manage to brighten my life even when in a hell hole like this. You are the greatest woman ever, and I will never understand how I got so lucky to have been blessed with you. I appreciate all you do. You are the strongest person I know, and I admire you, and respect you. I am always extremely proud of you. I know with all that has happened with Marc and Biggles, you have gone out of your way to try to make everyone feel better. Even though I know that is your worst nightmare. I don't know many people who could be there, and put themselves through the pain just to make someone you don't even know more comfortable. You are an angel sent by God. Now you have given me two more angels. Remember Satan was once an angel of God, so Bubba is an angel, but just which side is sometimes debatable. Just joking. I know he can be very trying sometimes, and you have kept your cool way better than I ever could have. Our kids are so lucky to have you as their mother. So am I.
I cannot wait to get back into your arms. Talking about it tonight felt so good. Knowing that this whole thing is coming to an end. I dream about the day I step off that plane to see you. Hope you have no plans for the rest of your life, because you're gonna be a little busy. I miss you so much!!!
I loved talking to Bubba tonight. I love hearing him tell me he loves me, but ~ Taya Kyle

The way that I look at it is that, when we film for eight months straight for a new 'Jackass' movie, I know that I'm going to wind up with at least two broken bones. I don't know when it's going to happen, but you can't contemplate how you're going to fall and what's going to happen. ~ Bam Margera

If we contest with a lesser opponent, we reduce ourselves, and in the process wind up being lesser accomplished. ~ Sandeep Sahajpal

[ ... ] it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [ ... ] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

Don't talk to the crazy kids. I longed to shout back that we weren't crazy. I'd mistaken her kid for a ghost, that's all.
I wondered whether they had books about his sort of thing. Fifty Ways to Tell the Living from the Dead Before You Wind Up in a Padded Room. Yep, I'm sure the library carried that one. ~ Kelley Armstrong

More often, I'd meet people like Brett Favre. Not literally like Brett Favre, in the sense that they were forty-year-old football players, but that they were people who loved Wisconsin but couldn't find a way to make it work there, took off for NewYork, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes. Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the rural and suburban Upper Midwest wind up. It's a city full of people who, though they'd never say it, secretly suspect they don't belong here, that they're not Minneapolis enough, because they didn't go to a city high school, or because they didn't hang out at First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate.They came from the Iron Range or Fargo–Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville, or from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. Wherever they came from, Minneapolis is their home now, and it belongs to them. It belongs to us. ~ Andy Sturdevant

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. ~ John Carmack

The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behaviour patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largerly responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan