It Mattered Quotes

#1. I sighed. "Now what do I do?" He leaned against my wall. "What do you want to do?" "Since when has that mattered?" "It's always mattered. It doesn't mean you'll get what you want, but what you want always matters. That's what defines you.

Richard Paul Evans

#2. Oh, to be held as though nothing else in the world mattered. It was a promise. Every touch, every kiss, was a silent pact to love and adore the person to whom it was given.

Alexandria Clarke

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

Umar

#4. I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

Claire Tomalin

#5. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

Iain M. Banks

#6. It's not every day one has a first kiss,' I said.
'May I remind you that it wasn't your first kiss?'
'It felt like it was. It was the first one that mattered.

Mary E. Pearson

#7. It was a dizzying prospect - to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made.

Paul Auster

#8. It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]

Shirley Hazzard

#9. And then, they finally decided that it doesn't matter anymore whether they walked on graves, or on the walls. All that mattered was reaching the light that everyone wanted, but nobody ever reached.

Akshay Vasu

#10. 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

#11. It started to hurt less because it mattered so much less.

Charlotte Shane

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world's chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

Joe Hill

#15. It didn't really matter that we couldn't understand each other, what mattered were those little smiles and nods that said so much more than words.

Anne Fortier

#16. But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times
when the odds were so high against personal happiness
to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.

Bernard Malamud

#17. In the sense of worldly advantage, it no longer signified whether people thought of him as having been an authentic man of virtue. There was no more political power or influence
to be gained from maintaining that identity. But to him it still mattered.

Marisa Linton

#18. When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

Taylor Swift

#19. Escape the safety of the small by taking the risks to become part of something bigger. Your true self demands it. Listen for the timer on the oven to sound-that's when the memory curtain parts, flashing moments that really mattered.

Kirby Wright

#20. The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most, practically the only one that did matter. But I knew that boys were dangerous. They'd say they loved you, but they were always after something.

Jeannette Walls

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. But first he was going to take a drink, a big drink, because he needed one. And it didn't matter whether he drank or not, nothing mattered now; it was all over. All over, or just beginning.

Robert Bloch

#24. 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

#25. I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.

Greg McKeown

#26. This world is filled with things that will never make sense. Trying to make so much sense of them will only result in one thing: Spending the rest of your life trying to remember what you were like before any of it mattered.

Matthew Good

#27. His leg might be weaker, but at least it no longer mattered when one half of a pair of socks went AWOL in the dryer.

Laura Kaye

#28. There in the dim light, staring at the shadow on the wall, I poured out the story of my life. ( ... ) How nothing touched me. And I touched nothing. How I'd lost track of what mattered. How I worked like a fool for things that didn't. How it didn't make a difference either way.

Haruki Murakami

#29. Earlier, looking lighter or slimmer never mattered to me. Frankly, I didn't care. I had more important things to do. But when I figured that it's not that hard, and I have the time, passion and patience to take it up, I jumped onto the health-wagon. I started working out.

Kajol

#30. I never stood for any president in my life, never voted, before Barack Obama. It changed my life to vote. It starts there with me. I never cared for politics before Barack Obama. I never thought it mattered to people like me.

Nas

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. You're finally there, Robbie. On stage in front of huge audiences. All of your hard work has paid off. It's your time.
He didn't want any of that. As he looked at Zoey, the priorities he'd always set for himself fell away, leaving just one. One thing that mattered to him.
Her.

Mari Carr

#34. Lord, What a terrible shame. You're so attractive!'
I know, I want to tell her. It should have happened to someone really ugly. And then it wouldn't have mattered.

Liz Jensen

#35. He kissed her, slow and tender, like she mattered. Because she did, at least to him. And she thought she might even be able to believe it.

Stacia Kane

#36. Why was it that the only choices that truly mattered were the ones you felt least prepare to make?

Eileen Goudge

#37. Come on, make it easy, say I never mattered

Fall Out Boy

#38. ...cool and nonchalant, like none of this mattered anyway. Is that what guys really wanted? Or was it just what the girls thought the guys wanted?

Jodi Picoult

#39. It mattered what someone did to allow you to have the forum to do what you're doing.

Pharoahe Monch

#40. It was ability that mattered, not disability, which is a word I'm not crazy about using.

Marlee Matlin

#41. That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Siri Hustvedt

#42. It's funny because I've never really been into that before. Eyeliner looks good on you though. Not as though that matters." He shrugged, but it mattered to Rod. He was so incredibly fucked.

Riley Hart

#43. A good lawyer is part con man, part priest
promising riches, threatening hell. My ethical rules are simple. I won't lie to the court or let a client do it. But I've never been in this position. How far would I go for a woman who mattered? Is there anything I wouldn't do to win?

Paul Levine

#44. Not that it mattered though. The truth seldom ever did in the face of a juicy lie.

Bianca Scardoni

#45. 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

#46. I've always loved who I loved, and it never mattered to me where they were from. That's how it should be: wherever your heart tells you to go, you go.

Rutina Wesley

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. History mattered. But it could not guarantee what might happen next.

Michelle Gable

#51. Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

John Irving

#52. The truth is that it hurts because it's real-it hurts because it mattered.

John Green

#53. It was so long in the past that it should not have mattered, but it did. It did. Once he had realized that these words and words like them were the truth, once they had broken through his defensive barrier of denial, then they became a part of him, burning their way into his soul.

J.N. Stroyar

#54. It mattered. They mattered, and whatever it was that had made them not kill each other on Bullfinch beach all those years ago ... mattered.

Laini Taylor

#55. 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

#56. I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

Maggie Smith

#57. The people who died in the Twin Towers in that terrible crime mattered. The people who were bombed to death in dusty villages in Afghanistan didn't matter, even though it now seems that their numbers were greater. The people who will die in Iraq don't matter.

John Pilger

#58. When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.

Wes Moore

#59. Time no longer mattered. He knew he would have plenty of it at his disposal. The sight of the star filled him with indescribable longing.

J. Valor

#60. Intentionally, or unintentionally, Kat had spoken with her eyes; tenderly and lovingly conveying a message to Freya that her tongue wouldn't let her speak. It was glaringly obvious they both felt it. The words were not important. The pauses, gazes, and drawn out breaths were what mattered.

Kiki Archer

#61. A trap closed around my heart, and in that moment, I was helpless. Whether she loved me for my money or myself, whether she loved me at all, whether her heart was even available for the winning ... none of it mattered. I was smitten to the core.

Julianne Donaldson

#62. 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

#63. Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me.

Robin Hobb

#64. 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

#65. On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered.

Scott Anderson

#66. 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

#67. She looked at him like he mattered, like she needed him, like all the happiness in her world was somehow bound to him, and it made a fierce longing, like he'd never experienced before, spring up within him.

Katy Regnery

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

Jamie McGuire

#69. It was like Percy had faced death before, like he knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You didn't need to say you were sorry. The only thing that helped was moving on - moving forward.

Rick Riordan

#70. To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed.

Jack Kerouac

#71. Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.

Victor Davis Hanson

#72. Living was okay, but it wasn't the breaths people took that measured a life. It was the moments that took those breaths away that mattered the most. And Dev did that every time he looked at her. Naked or not.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#73. It was a single line amid a wall of hate. It barely made a difference.

But it was a start - and that was all that mattered.

Cole Gibsen

#74. I asked him what it was like to have a dad. He said he didn't think it mattered who you had as long as you had somebody good.

Cath Crowley

#75. 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

#76. The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.

Maya Lin

#77. I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist.

Jonathan Lethem

#78. 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

#79. Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Willa Cather

#80. The world was run by its bankers. The world was run by its investor class. The world was run by its manufacturers. The history of human destiny was money, the men who controlled it, and nothing more. Money, a measure of humiliation, was the only thing that mattered.

Jarett Kobek

#81. It didn't matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it.

Peter Buffett

#82. 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

#83. What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#84. Few of the university's sons had been distinguished in the nation's life--there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.

Thomas Wolfe

#85. I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.

Sandra Cisneros

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Truth is I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it? Bollocks! Not compared to how people matter.

Pete Postlethwaite

#89. They believed that the customer's exact wishes mattered only as far as they were necessary to capture the initial order. Beyond that, they figured, what an importer didn't know couldn't hurt it.

Paul Midler

#90. Ojiugo often asked, 'But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?' as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#91. It had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered
what matters so often in the course of everyday human life
were the surfaces and the joins.

Michael Chabon

#92. When we kissed, it didn't matter that I had been a wolf hours ago, or that I would be a wolf again. It didn't matter that a thousand snares were laid for us as soon as we left this moment. All that mattered was this: our noses touching, the softness of his mouth, the ache inside me.

Maggie Stiefvater

#93. It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. Tabloid news didn't matter. No-compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this?

David Levithan

#94. 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

#95. It mattered not where they were married. It only mattered that they were together and never parted again.

Lisa Tawn Bergren

#96. It hurts because it mattered.

John Green

#97. But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I've shared, and so much that's been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.

Lena Dunham

#98. And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#99. Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Haile Selassie

#100. It didn't matter where, really. What mattered was the connection, the space formed between the two of the, a slice cut from the universe and made private and inviolable.

Scott Westerfeld