Gary Lloyd > Gary's Quotes

“What sets lion chasers apart isn’t the outcome. It’s the courage to chase God-sized dreams.”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

“As I look back on my own life, I recognize this simple truth: The greatest opportunities were the scariest lions. Part of me has wanted to play it safe, but I’ve learned that taking no risks is the greatest risk of all.”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

“There are 1,784 ifs in the Bible. Most of those ifs function as conditional conjunctions on the front end of God’s promises. If we meet the condition, God delivers on the promise! So all that stands between your current circumstances and your wildest dreams is one little if. One little if can change everything. One little if can change anything.”
― Mark Batterson, If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God's What If Possibilities

“Don’t give up on your dream. If you do, you aren’t just giving up on its present-tense reality. You’re giving up on its future-tense potential. Were”
― Mark Batterson, Chase the Lion: If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It's Too Small

“Instead of complaining about the current state of affairs, we need to offer better alternatives. [...] we need to stop cursing the darkness and start lighting some candles!”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”
― Mark Batterson, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

“May you keep dreaming until the day you die. May imagination overtake memory. May you die young at a ripe old age.”
― Mark Batterson, The Circle Maker (Enhanced Edition): Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg

“I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to - if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.”
― Rick Bragg, The Best Cook in the World

“You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.”
― Rick Bragg

“I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“A story untold could be the one that kills you.”
― Pat Conroy

“I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau