Kindlehighlight Quotes

It’s a lot harder to pull your head up and ask why.

~ Jason Fried

I review my three boyfriends, the three men I slept with in my twenties, searching for a common thread. Nothing. No consistent features, coloring, stature, personality. But one theme does emerge: they all picked me. And then dumped me. I played the passive role. Waiting for Hunter and then settling for Joey. Waiting to feel more for Nate. Then waiting to feel less. Waiting for Alec to go away and leave me in peace. And now Dex. My number four. And I am still waiting. For all of this to blow over. For his September wedding. For someone who gives me that tingly feeling as I watch him sleeping in...

~ Emily Giffin

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response

~ Robert B. Cialdini

Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want

~ Jeffrey Zaslow

Kindle, isn’t it?” the waitress asked. “I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I’m reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult’s books.” “Oh, probably not all of them,” Wesley said. “Huh? Why not?” “She’s probably got another one done already. That’s all I meant.” “And James Patterson’s probably written one since he got up this morning!” she said, and went off chortling.

~ Stephen King

The perfect human being is uninteresting. — Joseph Campbell

~ Laura Greenwald

It’s my belief that animals can help a human being travel to the wounds of childhood. The best part is, once you go there, you can fix things. Get on with life.

~ Jo-Ann Mapson

New Rule #1 – Don't date women who paint. Arty-farty doesn't just equal freaky in the sack, it also equals nasty genius revenge. I don't like genius when it's happening to me.

~ Naomi Kramer

Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.

~ Mark Twain

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

~ Seth Godin

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .

~ Robert J. Sawyer

Surely God loves to get out of church buildings and go visit people where they hunger for reality.

~ Dylan Morrison

followed a step behind. My thoughts churned as my emotions seesawed

~ Maria V. Snyder

What are you not doing today that you were doing when I first met you?

~ Tim Sanders

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

~ Italo Calvino

The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors

~ Sebastian Junger

we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone.

~ Jane Austen

Stop doing stuff that doesn’t help you reach your goals. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s a shame almost no one does it. The most common way we work more and do less is by working on the wrong stuff. We spend our time doing, doing, doing, even if the doing has nothing to do with our goals, business, or life.

~ Stever Robbins

I fell, as they say. Into love. I practiced saying it, first to myself, in my head. I believed in it. I did. I thought love and I bought it completely. I was excited by my belief but was careful not to let this excitement influence or manipulate the belief in any way. The belief had to be pure. So I said it to her, I love you, and she said it back. And this was our contract. We treated the words seriously and respected that they came with implications.

~ Kyle Beachy

Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.

~ Seth Godin

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

~ Douglas Adams

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

~ David Wong

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Taren Ferry folk had a reputation for slyness and trickery. If you shook hands with a Taren Ferry man, people said, you counted your fingers afterwards.

~ Robert Jordan

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

~ David Wong

If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.

~ Benjamin Franklin

No man should live longer than his teeth.

~ George R.r. Martin

You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.

~ Philip Pullman

You know, you remind me of my younger brother. I miss that kid, so much that I sometimes regret killing him.

~ Jack Kilborn

Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.

~ Anne Rice

Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

~ Charles Stross

We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?

~ Frank Herbert

Cripes, I can’t keep up on this political correct shit. I don’t even know what to call myself. One minute I’m black. Then I’m African American. Then I’m a person of color. Who the hell makes these rules up, anyhow?

~ Janet Evanovich

over his own dark Cealdish beard. “Nothing like your marvelous facebear

~ Patrick Rothfuss

We must choose with our agency to obey in faith that the promised blessing will come, that the promise is true because it comes from God.

~ Henry B. Eyring

Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …

~ Janet Evanovich

little children never get frozen by their selfishness. Like the disciples, they come just as they are, totally self-absorbed. They seldom get it right. As parents or friends, we know all that. In fact, we are delighted (most of the time!) to find out what is on their little hearts. We don’t scold them for being self-absorbed or fearful. That is just who they are.

~ Paul Miller

Loving means losing control of our schedule, our money, and our time. When we love we cease to be the master and become a servant.

~ Paul Miller