Laurena Chatters > Laurena's Quotes

“You see, the universe still had accounts to settle. And Susie and I were way overdrawn.”
― J.K. Franko, Eye for Eye Trilogy: Boxset 1-3

“Managing activities, not results, requires a comprehensive application of the skills inherent in gained ownership. It is the true test of your management abilities and will cause you the greatest amount of personal growth and satisfaction.”
― Raymond Wheeler, Lift: Five Practices Great Managers Do Consistently: Raise Performance and Morale - See Your Employees Thrive

“Right? I don’t know why I did it. Temporary insanity, maybe. Did you ever do something that makes absolutely no sense, but you couldn’t help yourself?”
― Robyn Mundell, Brainwalker

“A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Neurotics, because of their willingness to assume responsibility, may be quite excellent parents if their neuroses are relatively mild and they are not so overwhelmed by unnecessary responsibilities that they have scant energy left for the necessary responsibilities of parenthood.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“They'll be fine," Wickersham said. "Practice makes perfect."
I had to ask. "You practice running away?"
"We knew we'd make enemies. Other organizations have fire drills; we have oh-shit-someone-found-our-ass drills.”
― Scott Westerfeld, So Yesterday

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.”
― Rick Warren

“Ach, darling, why aren't we rich? We have such marvellous ideas of what to do with it. There are so many rich people who can do no better than go backwards and forwards to their banks and offices."
"That's why they are rich, of course," said I. "If we were rich we certainly wouldn't be so for long.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Zachary Blake lost his practice, his wife and kids, his home, and his money. He was at rock bottom in only three short years. He also lost the most valuable possession of any successful trial lawyer. Zachary Blake lost his will to fight. His luck, however, was about to change.”
― Mark M. Bello, Betrayal of Faith

“We don't have adoption issues, we have an issue with adoption.”
― Janine Myung-Ja, Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

“Millions more people in Africa, Asia, South America, and the rest of the world have also had the benefit of racist European “cleansing” and “civilising” in which Christian religious orders played a heinous role that contradicted every godly thing they preached about and claimed to stand for. When Europe’s imperial powers sought new geographic regions to expand their spheres of influence in the nineteenth century, Africa — with its wealth of natural resources — became a prime target for colonisation in which Christianity played a major role as one of Colonialism’s “Three Cs”: Civilisation, Christianity, and Commerce.”
― William Hanna, The Grim Reaper

“Embedded in their psyche was the story of what had happened to the world, and the boys felt glorious to be on the other side of the madness”
― Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

“The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“You get your freedom by not being confined. You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom. You'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it...So dont you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who's depriving you of your rights. They're not your friends. No, they're your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you'll get your freedom. And after you get your freedom, your enemey will respect you. He will respect you. I say that with no hate. I have no hate in me. I don't have any hate, but I've got some sense...I'm not going to let somebody who hates me to tell me to love him. I'm not that way out.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Talks to Young People: Speeches in the United States, Britain, and Africa

“Now toasted cheese is a temptation few men can resist, be they charcoal burners or kings. John Uskglass reasoned thus: all of Cumbria belonged to him – therefore this wood belonged to him – therefore this toasted cheese belonged to him.”
― Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“I'm making a list
I'm making a list of things I must say
For politeness,
And goodness and kindness and gentleness
Sweetness and rightness:
Hello
Pardon me
How are you?
Excuse me
Bless you
May I?
Thank you
Goodbye
If you know some that I've forgot,
Please stick them in you eye!”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. ”
― Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

“If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”
― Stephen Crane, The Open Boat and Other Stories

“you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“Words, words, words.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.”
― Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

“You dont have to live forever just live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.”
― Iain Banks, Transition

“Slavery was a long-established practice among African tribes. Any raiding party that successfully attacked a neighbour would expect to return with slaves. But what made the Portuguese demand for slaves different was its scale. The simultaneous discovery of the Americas by European explorers created an apparently limitless demand for labour to work on the plantations of the New World, and in Europe’s African toeholds slavery was turned overnight from a cottage industry into a major, global concern.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“All that matters is what we do for each other.”
― Lewis Carroll

“The faith itself was simple; he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun HERE. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and i that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all the former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.”
― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels