If It Mattered Quotes

#1. Carli's was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill)

Raymond Chandler

#2. But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.

Lauren Wolk

#3. I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know if it mattered.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#4. Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool - as if the way one fell down mattered.
Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

James Goldman

#5. Neither his family nor his next taste of blood mattered as much as knowing that she was safe and within arm's reach. If that was what it meant to be bewitched, he was a lost man.

Deborah Harkness

#6. I hate that I let myself be so passive my whole life, and I see now how differently things could've been if I'd had faith in myself when it mattered. I don't want to go back to that. I won't. Not ever.

Tahereh Mafi

#7. If romeo was really gone, never coming back, would it have mattered whether or not juliet had taken Paris up on his offer? Maybe she should have tried to settle into the left-over scraps of life that were left behind. Maybe that would have been as close to happiness as she could get.

Stephenie Meyer

#8. She wondered if it ever occurred to those people to ask themselves why it mattered.

Anonymous

#9. Kylie didn't know which one of the fairies were doing it, or if it was both- she honestly didn't care- but the thousands of tiny pinpricks of panic started to fade. She felt safe and that was all that mattered.

C.C. Hunter

#10. Asakawa himself didn't much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

Koji Suzuki

#11. I wondered if everyone had a secret like this, something slightly wretched, bent and corroded with time, like a lost key that might not even unlock anything anymore. And if, in the end, it might be the only thing that mattered.

Jessica Soffer

#12. If it 'really' mattered, you would have done something about it...if you have not,it does not matter or matter enough...!

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#13. You know a person is having a severe personality crisis if you see a high school class ring on a finger beyond the first semester in college. Male or female. It's a big sign saying nothing has mattered to my life since senior year.

Nikki Giovanni

#14. Maybe. Maybe not. Whether it's filler or not, I'm pretty glad to be here." If there's anything I've learned, it's that you need to make the most of it. "It mattered enough for you not to jump.

Jennifer Niven

#15. I know conventional wisdom has always been to go to Europe, and I did that early on, and I tried it, but I realised pretty quickly if I wasn't playing, nothing else mattered - I wasn't going to be happy.

Landon Donovan

#16. Thank goodness for the first snow, it was a reminder
no matter how old you became and how much you'd seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered.

Candace Bushnell

#17. Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn't matter, was Rose's Diary.
It Mattered.

Caroline B. Cooney

#18. He never used a last name if he could help it because the only name that mattered to him was not his own, and unless he found a lifemate, he would not chance ever dishonoring it.
-Andre

Christine Feehan

#19. Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.

Orson Scott Card

#20. Life was precious. Life was all that mattered. Yet it meant nothing if you weren't living as you wanted.

Edward Bunker

#21. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn't entirely certain. It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak - my own first language - doesn't mark gender in any way.

Ann Leckie

#22. He relaxed into the dirt, it was all right, he was infantry and the dirt was home. He felt warm liquid all over his left thigh and wondered if he'd peed himself, it didn't matter, none of it mattered, the stars were out in the blackness overhead and that was where he was going.

Henry V. O'Neil

#23. If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Larry Page

#24. I knew that even if I were second or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered.

Edwin Powell Hubble

#25. I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.

Sarah Vowell

#26. If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.

C.S. Lewis

#27. I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.

Sarah Dessen

#28. There it was, Eve supposed. There was the answer to why people got tangled up with people. Because when you were down, when you were wallowing, someone you mattered to would ask if you were okay.

J.D. Robb

#29. I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran.

Jeff VanderMeer

#30. Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.

Geraldine Brooks

#31. One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what's really happening to me, even if it's a tough pill to swallow for people around me ... I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Taylor Swift

#32. If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?.

Elizabeth Prettejohn

#33. I'm not sure if it was entirely sadness that caused the tears, but there was so much love. And that's all that mattered. Despite the fear, despite the sadness, despite the pain, there was love.

Esther Earl

#34. It mattered not that no one else would bear that moment witness nor remember it, for if the future could not know them, neither could the past confine them, and the choice was always theirs to make, the tale their own to finish,

Susanna Kearsley

#35. The only way anyone ever knows what matters to them is by losing it. If losing something breaks you in a way that can never be repaired, then that was what mattered. Now you know. Congrats. Try to live with it.

Mira Grant

#36. It's funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can't put back together and wouldn't want to even if you could.

Rebecca Harris

#37. Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?

Adam Langer

#38. It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#39. I did not matter what distant iron city had raised him. He had been made by Sorry-in-the-Vale, his bones as much a part of it as the valley and the woods. It was as if she had the whole town spread underneath her. Or the whole world, since right then he was the only part of it that mattered.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#40. If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16

Sam Harris

#41. It no longer mattered if it was the chicken or the egg; it was quite simply a nest from which both beautiful and damaged things came.

Tessie Regan

#42. Maybe I didn't know her as well as I might have wanted. But I can tell you this: love mattered a great deal to Scarlet Montana. I think it must have mattered to Jake too. Because if love hadn't been important to them, they wouldn't have fallen to pieces when it suddenly abandoned them.

Vincent Zandri

#43. It was as if the small differences mattered more than the really big ones - like you had to recognize something before you could hate it properly. No

Karen Traviss

#44. The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#45. I didn't write my speech until the night before, and even then I refused to write it out like I would say it, preferring to keep cribbed notes I could come back to if necessary. I wanted this to feel like a conversation because it was what I wanted to say that mattered, not how it looked on paper.

Corey Taylor

#46. If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn't safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.

M.L. Stedman

#47. If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.

Amanda Ripley

#48. Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#49. A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.

Paula McLain

#50. You've always had me, Ezekiel," I managed, meeting his bright blue stare. "Time never mattered. Vampire or human, if we had forever or just a few years, I'd always choose to spend it with you.

Julie Kagawa

#51. One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all.

Pema Chodron

#52. If patience and gratitude had been she camels, it would have mattered little on which I rode.

Umar

#53. And that's what F**k It does. Sometimes things feel as if they're just too painful to bear. And some part of you just gives up caring. The thing that mattered so much, somehow doesn't matter any more. And the freedom that comes from that is a blast and a half.

John C. Parkin

#54. He was mine, and I was his. If I knew anything at all, it was that only those two things mattered.

Jamie McGuire

#55. It didn't matter to him, he realized, whether he had to swim the distance or walk on water, as wonderful as the latter was. What mattered was that Jesus was with him. Perhaps he was beginning to trust him after all, even if it was only in baby steps.

Wm. Paul Young

#56. And if it all falls apart, I will know deep in my heart, the only dream that mattered had come true. In this life, I was loved by you.

Collin Raye

#57. And yet, when we stopped at the last hamlet and I saw him embrace the elders and leave gifts, saw the hope that he left behind, and remembered it was he who had saved Kaden from the savagery of his own kind, I wondered if anything I felt in my gut really mattered.

Mary E. Pearson

#58. What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.

Mohsin Hamid

#59. And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

Anna Quindlen

#60. It wouldn't have mattered to my mother if I married a black, was gay, lived in a commune or wore a dress.

George Weinberg

#61. Daddy got mad when people made assumptions about him, but I liked it. It made me feel someone wanted to know me. Even if they were wrong, it didn't matter. It mattered only that they were trying.

Alicia Erian

#62. It wouldn't have mattered if they were scratches or not," he says, his voice like liquid. "I was bitten during the escape from the house." My limbs go weak, everything inside me folding in collapsing on itself.
"I was already dead," he says, opening his eyes.

Carrie Ryan

#63. She didn't know if it was God. She wasn't really sure what to call it. She just knew she believe in unconditional love. And that was really all that mattered.

Hannah Brencher

#64. I was looking at my past self through the one-way interrogation window of my current self, and it caused me to experience the strange sadness that accompanies helplessness. If only I could have told teenage Elizabeth that none of it actually mattered. It all seemed to matter so much at the time.

Penny Reid

#65. She saw that he couldn't live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered.

Matthew Thomas

#66. And she knew that her fate wasn't set by how or where she was born, but the decisions she made and the battles she fought. It didn't matter if she had eight toes or ten, amber eyes or blue. What mattered was what she set out to do.

Robert Beatty

#67. Because even if we were struggling, we had goals. It didn't matter that we weren't there yet. What mattered is that we both experienced setbacks, and full-blown failures, but we got up, brushed ourselves off, and kept going-and were making the best of it.

Jamie McGuire

#68. It hardly mattered. She was tired of waiting for him to acknowledge who he was. Tired of donning a false mask of gaiety when she was so much more - felt so much more - beneath. No one had ever noticed her mask. No one but him. If he couldn't or wouldn't make the first move, then damn it, she would.

Elizabeth Hoyt