Top 100 Had To Quotes
#1. I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Max Beerbohm
#2. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
Julian Barnes
#3. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.
Jeanette Winterson
#4. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#5. When TJ and I got to the bottom, we found Hope staring terrified at Molly. The dog had something long and horrible and meaty in her jaws. It took me a moment to register that it was a very fresh-looking human spine. Damn, she was hungry.
David Wong
#6. She had spoken it; but she trembled when it was done, conscious that her words were listened to, and daring not even to try to observe their effect.
Jane Austen
#7. Our ... advantage was that we had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration ... If either of us suggested a new idea, the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but non-hostile manner.
Francis Crick
#8. He wanted to write someone and demand a refund on his dark side which clearly ought to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be defective.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#9. Let us all so live as we shall wish we had lived when we come to die; for that only is well, that ends well.
Benjamin Whichcote
#10. Anything that grows is, by definition, alive. Washington, D.C. was no exception. As a living organism, the Federal Government's number one job was self-preservation. Any threat to its existence had to be dealt with.
Brad Thor
#11. I looked over at Edwart. It occurred to me that I had never seen him in direct sunlight. Interestingly enough, I had also never seen him sparkle. Could the two be related?
The Harvard Lampoon
#12. Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.
Marcus Sakey
#13. Why had he wanted to be rich, or to feel rich? Was he an unhappy mouse before? Didn't he see the King himself often looking sad? Was anyone completely happy?
William Steig
#14. He had the feeling that he must make a decision, and though he was used to making many decisions every day, this time he was beset with uncertainty; in fact he had no idea what was being asked of him
Amos Oz
#15. During the civil war, the Sudanese government armed the Misseriya nomads as proxy. Even though both groups had coexisted quite well prior to the conflict, it all become much more difficult as a consequence.
Rebecca Hamilton
#16. What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over.
Paul Feig
#17. If kings would only determine not to extend their dominions until they had filled them with happiness, they would find the smallest territories too large, but the longest life too short for the full accomplishment of so grand and so noble an ambition.
Charles Caleb Colton
#18. My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three a.m. that morning saved my life.
Trey Anastasio
#19. About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.
Billy Corgan
#20. If my life had no meaning there was no reason not to end it.
Dan Wells
#21. Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.
Hanif Kureishi
#22. When I was younger, I felt very much like, 'Oh, I have to be a certain way, I have to look a certain way.' You really, really don't. That's the way women are treated differently than men. I mean, I've had actors argue with me about this.
Anne Hathaway
#23. That I happened to fall into a career that no other girls wanted isn't surprising to me. I wanted something that didn't exist, so I had to create it.
Ronda Rousey
#24. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#25. Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on - she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better - in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.
Larry McMurtry
#26. I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up
Lenny Bruce
#27. It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
Gregory Maguire
#29. Somebody came up to me after a talk I had given, and say, "You make mathematics seem like fun." I was inspired to reply, "If it isn't fun, why do it?"
Ralph P. Boas Jr.
#30. She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away.
Roman Payne
#31. If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#32. I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.
Tom Peters
#33. I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#34. He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.
Louis L'Amour
#35. Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
#36. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
Paulo Coelho
#37. Leo waited while the fish centaur put away his supplies. Aphros's lobster-claw horns kept swimming around in his thick hair, and Leo had to resist the urge to try and rescue them.
Rick Riordan
#38. Schumacher wouldn't have let him past voluntarily. Of course he did it voluntarily, but he had to do it.
Murray Walker
#39. I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
Sigrid Undset
#40. Nations could not return to their settled an independent life again without noticing that they had unconsciously adopted, and come to feel here and there previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#41. I wanted to go home to the safety of my bed and to my stuffed animals and to my people I'd known my whole life. I had nothing to say to anybody, and fervently prayed that no one there would have anything to say to me.
Rachel Cohn
#42. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.
Don DeLillo
#43. The last time I was this scared, I peed myself."
"The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.
John Green
#44. I'm one of those people who had Christmas and my birthday always combined, and generally, my birthday was pretty much ignored. But my parents are always good about making some kind of special effort to make me feel like I also have a birthday that exists.
Noel Wells
#45. Some women, he thought, had the power to turn a man in the opposite direction from what he wanted. It seemed his fate to run up against them. And, damn it, to care.
Nora Roberts
#46. I gave a silent prayer of thanks that I didn't seem to be lousy. I had probably been too filthy for any self-respecting louse to take up residence.
Patrick Rothfuss
#47. At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.
John Gould
#48. I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.
George R R Martin
#49. Then you go ahead and cry, " Will said.
That ended my weeping. Had he asked me not to cry, I would not have been able to stop, but his permission somehow quit my tears.
Kathleen Grissom
#50. Fatima's hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she'd put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of
Katherine Boo
#51. I'm a huge fan of Canadian rock-and-roll. When I was growing up, Rush came out with a record called Hemispheres, and I must have listened to that record for two years straight. Even when I was asleep I had it on. So, yeah, whenever I hear a Rush tune, the first thing I think of is Toronto.
Kiefer Sutherland
#52. I convinced my parents to let me see an agent, but because I had been taught never to speak to strangers, I was so quiet during the interview, they said to bring me back when I was older.
Jason Fuchs
#53. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#54. If he had uttered the word "come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the finality of despair.
Ford Madox Ford
#55. It didn't matter that Daniel had already seen her at her absolute, tear-streaked, bedraggled worst. She still had an overwhelming desire to be pretty for him. Which made her resent herself.
Frankie Rose
#56. If I had to sit in Heaven forever, knowing that there are these people, millions and millions- probably billions of people, suffering these eternal horrible torments and there was nothing I could ever do for them, that, to me, would be Hell.
Richard Carrier
#57. Someday I hope Americans will not believe that anyone had to spend his or her days fighting for limited government because everyone they know wants maximum freedom and minimum statism.
Grover Norquist
#58. A feeling erupted in my stomach, like nothing would ever be the same again. Like good karma was catching up with me. Like someone had opened up the lid to my lobster tank and I was finally breathing in the shockingly fresh air.
Francesca Zappia
#59. Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!
Charlotte Bronte
#60. I wanted to keep the music very electronic, very filmic, and give it an almost sci-fi like quality. Music is a necessity for me. I go into the studio at least five days a week, every week, so once I had the idea and the template, the process was quick and fun.
Martin Gore
#61. The other girls in the village never felt restless. Nhamo was like a pot of boiling water. 'I want ... I want ... ,' she whispered to herself, but she didn't know what she wanted and she had no idea how to find it.
Nancy Farmer
#62. There was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do everything now, every kind of sin.
Anne Rice
#63. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#64. I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.
John McCain
#65. I did comics on the Internet because it was free, and if I had made printed copies, I wouldn't have known what to do with them. But I knew how to make a website when most people didn't, and back then, that was enough!
John Allison
#66. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#67. Back in the day, no one had digital cameras. They took these pictures of me, got them developed, and then mailed them to me.
Erika M. Anderson
#68. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#69. Klaus had not told his siblings about the book, because he didn't want to give them false hope.
Lemony Snicket
#70. I've had offers to sign a record deal, but the people I've talked to have wanted to package me and have me meet with songwriters who've written stuff for Whitney Houston, that sort of thing. That's not at all my style.
Lukas Haas
#71. I think what my father appreciated was the science experiment of life. He had these kids, and they had their own experiences. He wanted us to discover the world for ourselves.
Ahmet Zappa
#72. Sturmhond had a way of talking that made me want to shoot someone. Preferably him.
Leigh Bardugo
#73. I had to do a lot of dancing in 'Queens of Country.'
Lizzy Caplan
#74. When I started Biocon in 1978, the obstacles I needed to navigate were manifold - ranging from infrastructural hurdles to issues related to my credibility as a business woman. With no access to venture capital, money was scarce and high-cost, debt-based capital was all I had.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
#75. Big deal, so he scored. The last time I saw someone dance like that I had to pay her $20 and have my pants dry cleaned the next day.
Dennis Miller
#76. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#77. I was able to shoot a movie like 'Tree of Life' because I had done 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.' The camera needed to capture that sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young.
Emmanuel Lubezki
#78. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.
Cesar Aira
#79. We created a new kind of agency ... We had to retrain our people. But the corporations that will be successful will be those that are willing to change.
Howard Draft
#80. I've had my own personal stalker. I would get nude drawings of my body with a knife and a message saying 'I'm watching you' and 'I'm going to get you.'
Erin Gray
#81. I didn't care that we'd caught a few stares from students passing by. I didn't care that the bell to begin class rang. I didn't care that everything between us had changed. All I cared about was the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get any closer to Jack.
Brodi Ashton
#82. The best thing to do is try and make sure you're getting something at your end. We had stretches where we didn't get that.
Bo Ryan
#83. When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.
Laura Donnelly
#84. And suddenly I felt completely strange, like the distance between us was much much greater than what I could see from where I was standing. Like that line, always so clear to me, had somehow shifted, or never even been where I'd thought it was at all.
Sarah Dessen
#85. From the commotion, Franks figured it had to be pretty impressive-looking, but then again, if they weren't easily impressed, they wouldn't be cultists to begin with. "Hurry!
Larry Correia
#86. Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.
Jeanette Winterson
#87. Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it's more horseshit.
Amy Bloom
#88. The trouble with that movie is that you had to see Chinatown the day before you saw The Two Jakes.
Eli Wallach
#89. I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.
Kanye West
#90. And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.
Paul Kalanithi
#91. I had hoped that the board would accept Johnny Hon's offer of a loan to buy the stadium back for the club, as I think this would be best way of continuing the long tradition of Cambridge United in Cambridge - and it was a generous offer.
Anne Campbell
#92. Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#93. I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
William, Saroyan
#94. It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.
Donald Hall
#95. Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast ... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published.
Patrick Kavanagh
#96. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
Eric Schmidt
#97. never to ask a Lapp how many reindeer he had. Such a question, he said, would be as tactless as to ask an American how large a bank balance he carries.
Carveth Wells
#98. I did a lot of thinking, and used mental activity to relieve whatever feelings I had. I became very left-brained, and I was good in school. That is, I was a smart kid.
George Carlin
#99. She had a passion for all people who did anything to perfection.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#100. I used to build my own PCs ... and actually had one of the first water-cooled, overclocked PCs around. I ran it at over 4Ghz, and this was back in 2001 ... but alas, I do not have the time for that fun anymore.
Brian Krzanich
