Shawn Woods > Shawn's Quotes

“Having a disability and abusive mother, I managed to graduate in college and became a purchasing manager, but my story does not stop there. My life is full of disappointments and struggles with work and relationships.

My biography will explain how my strong will kept me going and got me through the tough times in life. As a father who raised two sons and let them be themselves, he stood by their side to support and watch them succeed in life.”
― Shawn Woods , I Was a Mistake: Another Type of Abuse

“I hope this book helps people to heal & their not the only one because no one is a mistake God put you on earth for one reason. I am not a mistake.”
― Shawn Woods

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, and must empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in his love than in your weakness.”
― Mother Teresa

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Because I always feel like running
Not away, because there is no such place
Because if there was, I would have found it by now
Because it's easier to run,
Easier than staying and finding out you're the only one who didn't run
Because running will be the way your life and mine will be described,
As in "the long run"
Or as in having "given someone a run for his money"
Or as in "running out of time"
Because running makes me look like everyone else, though I hope there will never be cause for that
Because I will be running in the other direction, not running for cover
Because if I knew where cover was, I would stay there and never have to run for it
Not running for my life, because I have to be running for something of more value to be running and not in fear
Because the thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from,
Not without showing the fear as I see it now
Because closer, clearer, no sir, nearer
Because of you and because of that nice
That you quietly, quickly be causing
And because you're going to see me run soon and because you're going to know why I'm running then
You'll know then
Because I'm not going to tell you now”
― Gil Scott-Heron, Now and Then...

“Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.”
― Virginia Woolf , A Room of One’s Own

“What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
― Mark Twain

“Always live your life with your biography in mind.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.”
― Jeffrey Rasley, Bringing Progress to Paradise: What I Got from Giving to a Mountain Village in Nepal

“if you want it really, you get it !!!”
― Ravinder Singh

“So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book

“They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.”
― Bob Monkhouse, Crying With Laughter : My Life Story

“I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”
― Rachel Carson

“I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.”
― Alexander Vassilieff, ODYSSEYA -- An Epic Journey: From Russia to Australia

“I don’t read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.
You've got to become them."
(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“I turned to books for comfort.”
― Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart Collector's Edition

“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Tout est question d'équilibre”
― Mireille Guiliano

“He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.”
― George Plimpton

“We had a teacher called Fanny Menlove, and I remember once when she was out of the room Nancy went up to the blackboard and wrote it backward - Menlove Fanny - and we all fell around laughing. She got into big trouble, but she didn't seem to mind. She had no fear.”
― Peter FitzSimons, Nancy Wake

“For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“Anyone who likes or hates Dana White should take a look at this.”
― June White, Dana White, King of MMA

“Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying.
"Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason,
but at the very least you will be living grandly.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics