Not What I Thought Quotes

#1. Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#2. I'm single. I just moved to a new city. I'm sort of starting over. I'm in Los Angeles. I don't really know what my life is right now. It's not what I thought it'd be at 37, and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Sutton Foster

#3. As long as I keep moving, I should be OK. As long as I keep the notebook with me, I should stay alive. This is not what I thought life would be like when I turned sweet sixteen.

T.M. Goeglein

#4. The satisfaction that I get from doing what I do is not what I thought. I thought it would be that I'd feel like a star, I'd feel important. But I don't.

Lee Ann Womack

#5. I'm not saying I'm glad it happened. Not exactly. But I'm not sorry to be the person I am today, and to have the life I have now. Even though it's not what I thought I wanted for my future, a year ago, it is what I want now ...

Nancy Werlin

#6. It's not what I thought it would be, but it's alright, too. -- High King Peter in Prince Caspian, written by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis

#7. Even as a child, he said, I knew I wasn't what the others thought but not what I thought, either. I said to myself: I'm another thing, a thing hidden in the veins, it has no name and waits.

Elena Ferrante

#8. Being diabetic was not what I thought of as being normal, and I feared the stigma of having to take medicine and having people stick me with a needle.

Nell Carter

#9. I was among the people in the Superdome. I knew what was going on every minute. I did not have air conditioning nor shower facilities. I made decisions based upon facts and not what I thought was going to happen. So history will judge me based upon those actions.

Ray Nagin

#10. And more importantly what we found with those people is that a lot of them said, "Hey it's not what I thought it was going to be." Which is a great reaction, particularly if they liked it.

Bryan Burk

#11. This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#12. I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I came to America and got a big slap in my face ... Americans were not what I thought. I thought I was going to see bastards and I saw nice people, very friendly to me.

Marjane Satrapi

#13. Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It's not what I thought it was. I thought it wa all about-I don't know, confidence or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there's something else, somethng that these things grow out of. It's joy.

Julie Powell

#14. What the fuck happened to you? [...] You look like you lost a fight with a lamprey. Hickey, hickey...bruise, bruise, bruise...bite. I thought that thing on your neck the other day was just a fluke. I guess not--looks like you get off on picking up a few souvenirs when you...get off. ~Crash

Jordan Castillo Price

#15. I'm not holding Hitler up as a role model, the man was a filthy swine, but as I stood in the suspicious glare of my boss I thought, What would Hitler do?

Anonymous

#16. You want to take me to a movie?" I asked.
"Well, not really," he said. "What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I thought saying that might scare you off.

Sarah Dessen

#17. What I thought as a young adult is you act like you have it together whether or not you do because that is what church people do. That is not what God has called us to do.

Beth Moore

#18. I really thought I couldn't be a mum. We had tried several times with IVF,, and it hadn't worked and we'd given up in a way. We both thought, 'You know what, that's that. It's not going to happen - let's move on.'

Gurinder Chadha

#19. I'm not sure what kind of love you mean, baby, but if you mean do I want you to be with me forever, that I can't bear the thought of being without you as my lover, my best friend, my whole world....one day my wife, and my baby mama, then yes, I Love you, Love you!

S.E. Hall

#20. Clary?" he thought.
Her voice came through, tinged with alarm. "What is it? What's happened? Did my mom find out I'm gone?"
"Not yet," he thought back. "Is Azazel the cat from the Smurfs?"
There was a long pause. "That's Azrael, Simon. And no more using the magic rings for Smurfs question.

Cassandra Clare

#21. I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.

Steven Soderbergh

#22. But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#23. I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic ... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Joe Carnahan

#24. China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel.

Rosemary Mahoney

#25. What she means? Sure, whatever. It's not like I thought that this is the carving, the flying, the healing of my wounds. Sometimes you don't know when you're

Ann Voskamp

#26. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'

Harvey Pekar

#27. I allowed social media to define what I thought of my body. And now I realize that no matter how thin you are, someone will call you fat. No matter how beautiful you are, someone will call you ugly. But you can't spend your time worrying about that. You're just not going to please the world.

Demi Lovato

#28. I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings.

Ralph Goings

#29. I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Christopher Nolan

#30. I know you think you believe you understand what you thought I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is exactly what I meant.

Richard M. Nixon

#31. I'm rather shocked by what I thought was simple mindedness actually. I thought they're not looking, they're not actually looking.

David Hockney

#32. It makes you feel better," my father said. "Hmmm?" I asked, lost in what passed for thought. "Forgiveness." I found I could not refute it.

Gary Amdahl

#33. You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.

Jupiter Hammon

#34. I'd like to ask you a question, if I may."
"What?"
"All these poems you've written and hidden - so many poems. Why?"
While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. "Because I could not stop.

Jeffrey Ford

#35. You are innocent in your heart," she had said to him. "That is the most important thing." And he had thought about that for a few moments before shaking his head and saying, "I would like that to be true, Mma, but it is not. It is what other people think. That is the most important thing.

Alexander McCall Smith

#36. cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know - it just happens.

Sam Harris

#37. I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.

Phife Dawg

#38. It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.

Haruki Murakami

#39. When I grew older, I thought I would become an even more special person. But, it's not true. I eat more and I know a lot more things but I just become more pathetic. Is this what it's like to grow old?

Cheon Eunbi

#40. I've certainly experienced racism, but it has not made a great impact on me. I have always thought, as I got older and older, I was more in charge of who I was. What someone thought about me or said about me made less of an impression on me at very vulnerable times.

Robert Guillaume

#41. Going from PayPal, I thought: 'Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?' Not from the perspective, 'What's the best way to make money?'

Elon Musk

#42. I try not to take people who haven't really thought out what they're doing too seriously. I try not to let them get in the way of what I feel I need to do.

Gil Scott-Heron

#43. Had I known you had pure, or what you thought were pure intentions, in that silly mind of yours, I wouldn't have tried to kill you."
Philip let out a bark of laughter. "Well, as far as apologies go, that wasn't half bad. Not every day a man comes in and apologises for wishing you dead.

Rachel Van Dyken

#44. And then I opened the door to my room and saw you standing there in the parking lot, in the rain, and I just thought, 'This. This is what the perfect time feels like. It's not about the milestones; its about the person.

Dahlia Adler

#45. For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.

Wallace Shawn

#46. Unfortunately, I haven't thought sufficiently about art. What I never realized - and it's really stupid - is the art world is the art world because all these thousands of famous and not-famous artists do things, over centuries. This hadn't occurred to me.

Peter Saul

#47. If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation

Napoleon Bonaparte

#48. I've often thought that beauty can be a
deterrent to love," Fern's father mused.
"Why?"
"Because sometimes we fall in love with a
face and not what's behind it.

Amy Harmon

#49. People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.

George Eliot

#50. Nobody sees the same movie. I'm sure there are people who saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and thought "Finally a gay movie about men who really care about each other. Thank God!" That's not what I saw necessarily but I don't think any two people see the same movie.

Kevin Kline

#51. And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.

Alistair MacLeod

#52. I heard what you told him," he said. "That you thought it would be easy to fall in love with him. You meant it, too." "So?" It was the only thing I could think of to say. "I was jealous - of that. That I'm not ... that sort of person.

Sarah J. Maas

#53. Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country had asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die. There

Kurt Vonnegut

#54. I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

Anna Quindlen

#55. They might be kind, I thought. They might be sensible and good. They will not be like you.
But I did not say it. I knew it would mean nothing to her. I said something - something ordinary and mild, I cannot think what. And after a time she came and kissed my cheek, and then she left me.

Sarah Waters

#56. I don't know what idiot thought it was smarter to let a woman enter a room before him. How does he know if it is safe for her to enter if he does not check it out himself? It's actually a much more caring act to go before her, therefore ensuring that nothing will harm her,

Quinn Loftis

#57. I'm loath to do interviews. What comes out is generally not what I meant or thought I was saying or thought they were asking.

Carmen Dell'Orefice

#58. I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is.

Alan Arkin

#59. When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

Roddy Doyle

#60. I had been to the South many times and I thought I knew what the South was, but not until you live with people and live through their lives do you know what it's really about.

Genevieve Gorder

#61. To this very day, I do not know what he (Hitler) thought or knew or really wanted. I only knew my own thoughts and suspicions.

Alfred Jodl

#62. The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants.

P.G. Wodehouse

#63. I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.

Lee Byung-hun

#64. I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two.

Donna Tartt

#65. I used to love people for what they could be. I thought love was how hard you tried and how much you sacrificed and suffered. That is not love. Acceptance is.

Michael Learned

#66. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)

G. Willow Wilson

#67. I wanted to be a shoe designer, but I never thought it could be a profession. But what was the alternative? Doctor? Too dirty! Air-hostess? Maybe not! Then someone gave me a book on Roger Vivier, and, cheri, instantly I knew that was it!

Christian Louboutin

#68. What a miracle, I thought. One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world. Why, I had, with this simple gesture, actually increased the sum total of light in the universe, had I not?

Anne Rice

#69. People always tell me I'm going to regret not having kids. But what if I have one and then I regret having it? Has anyone thought of that option?

Karl Pilkington

#70. I'm not setting 'Jericho' up to be anything other than what it is, which is, you know, a piece of good, well thought-out, well put-together TV and entertainment.

Lennie James

#71. I never not wanted to be a singer. Since I was 3, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Well, I can't say I wanted to do it, but I fantasized and thought about it all the time. I never thought it would actually happen.

Lisa Marie Presley

#72. You know what I mean. I'm telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn't have the time to be a good parent. Obviously, that's not it. Because you and I, we're both ... wealthy in love.

Maggie Stiefvater

#73. I was a Scout years ago, before the movement started, when my father took me fishing, camping and hunting. Then I was sorry that more girls could not have what I had. When I learned of the movement, I thought, here is what I always wanted other girls to have.

Lou Henry Hoover

#74. I dieted all the time in the Sixties, but we had no idea what dieting meant - we thought it meant not eating anything.

Britt Ekland

#75. I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

Geoffrey Rush

#76. I thought I lost you again. You couldn't know what those four years were like. To not know where you were, who you were with, or if you were being treated well? I wasn't sure for a long time if you were even alive. I don't ever want to go through that again. Vance ... The Elder Effect

D.L. Given

#77. Courtroom for Ted Bundy's trial is packed with women, trying to meet him and give him love letters and wedding-f-king-proposals ... and the first thought that enters my mind is, "And I'm not
getting laid." What am I doing wrong?

Bill Hicks

#78. I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.
Then - I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.
Then - I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.
Then - I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.

Megan Mayhew Bergman

#79. I'm living the dream because its so much more than I ever thought I'd have.

You can't be happy with more, if you're not happy with what you have.

Rebecca Rose

#80. I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

Will Estes

#81. I realized that I hated politics. I mean that is you know ... I realized being in the jungle that what I had thought I could do, I mean changing the way politics were being done in Colombia, was not possible the way I wanted to do it - by confronting, by denouncing.

Ingrid Betancourt

#82. Whenever I held my newborn baby in my arms, I used to think that what I said and did to him could have an influence not only on him but on all whom he met, not only for a day or a month or a year, but for all eternity - a very challenging and exciting thought for a mother.

Rose Kennedy

#83. At first, I thought it was having the picture that made it special, but it's not even that. It's looking at something without being watched, without being told how to see. That's what the picture has given us.

Ally Condie

#84. I felt like I got more comfortable on 'Idol' when I just started being myself and not trying to be what I thought I had to be.

Kara DioGuardi

#85. I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

Edward Norton

#86. She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases.

Robin Hobb

#87. A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: 'If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?'

Mark Zuckerberg

#88. What I don't like to hear in music is something has not been thought through: that a sound is just there randomly. I want to make sure that every single little noise that's in my song is there because it's supposed to be there.

Zedd

#89. Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel.
Huge portions of what is loosely termed "the squirrel brain" are given over to one thought: food.
The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this: I wonder what there is to eat.

Kate DiCamillo

#90. I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, "Good God, what have I said?" and then I knew it was true.

Bertrand Russell

#91. What's really important here," I whispered loudly to myself,"is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself have

Haruki Murakami

#92. I hear laughter and someone asks if I need help, not in a nice way. I snarl, 'What I need is for your mother to have thought a little harder nine months before your birthday.

Maggie Stiefvater

#93. I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.

Kate Morton

#94. Never forget a man who holds a secret holds power. A Chinese proverb says: "If women want to keep a secret, one of them must die." What a splendid prospect, I thought! So far I have not heard one single encouraging word about this job.

John Eppler

#95. Well, because you mysteriously came all this way and obviously are not the man I thought you were, why the heck not. So, Phet, if that's even your real name, tell
me, how do I defeat Lokesh?"
"It's simple. Do to him what I did to you."
"What? Talk to him in broken English?

Colleen Houck

#96. Would it be better to have a president who cries easily? Well, that depends on what he cried about. I would not like the thought of a president who could not cry. That would be worse than one who cried over the right things. Which, in this case, would be the things I would cry over.

Walter Cronkite

#97. One day, a musician asked me what I did. When I told him I was to be a businessman, he laughed and said, 'You are not a businessman.' Sometimes all it takes is one person to put an important thought in your head, and he did.

Alexander Hanson

#98. I think the world would be a lot better off if more people were to define themselves in terms of their own standards and values and not what other people said or thought about them.

Hillary Clinton

#99. You been shopping? no i been shopping. well what'd you buy? i bought a piston engine. well how you going to cook it? you don't cook it it's a piston engine! well your not going to eat it raw are you? oh, i never thought of that ...

Graham Chapman

#100. Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that's what you thought you wanted. You and me, we're not 'normal.

Christina Baker Kline