That Was Then Quotes

#1. People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'

Natasha Trethewey

#2. I learned a great deal doing Brooklyn Bridge. I was able to take a giant step into the terrible reality that was then. We saw the cattle cars that took folks away. Just knowing it was real, it would be impossible not to feel.

Marion Ross

#3. When I was just beginning to have "celebrity" status, I would think I was a star and rolled with it a little but that was then.

Jai Uttal

#4. I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.

Stephen King

#5. He didn't believe in keeping leashes on pussy and expected the same courtesy in return. That was then. This was now.

Em Wolf

#6. It was fear that was then making you a good citizen, which is never a lasting teacher of duty.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#7. Only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!

John Crowley

#8. That was then, this is now.

Me

#9. When I was pregnant, a few of my friends told me that their babies slept in bed with them. I remember thinking how crazy that was. Then I started reading up on it and decided it was something I actually wanted to try.

Kourtney Kardashian

#10. Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.

John Grisham

#11. But that was then, and then is a world away from now.

Sam A. Patel

#12. The difference is that was then, this is now.

S.E. Hinton

#13. When Fargo came out, I hired a publicist for the first time in my life. I thought, if ever I was going to make it, that was then.

William H. Macy

#14. The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg's looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace.

B.J. Novak

#15. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

David Maraniss

#16. Oh my God! Why did I leave India? I fell in love with a white man. That's what it was. It was the most boring, predictable reason in the world. I met him in India, we fell in love, and we got married. And then, we got divorced. Sorry about that.

Deepa Mehta

#17. I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.

Rodney Dangerfield

#18. I was kicked off a record label and didn't get picked up again. It was devastating at first because I thought, 'Oh my God. My career is over. What's gonna happen? What am I going to do?' Once I got that I could have a career, a very good career, without having a hit record, then I changed.

Thelma Houston

#19. But you'll be killed!"
"I'll be fine. Besides, we've got no choice."
Annabeth glared at me like she was going to punch me. And then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me.

Rick Riordan

#20. I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling

Robert Fulghum

#21. Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

Julian Barnes

#22. I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#23. Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years.

Nicholas Sparks

#24. 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

#25. One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away.

Jack Kerouac

#26. The thing about 'Watchmen' that people should know is that when it came out there was absolutely nothing like it. Up until then, comics were about the same thing: a guy in tights fighting another guy in tights and saving the girl - that was it.

Gerard Way

#27. It's interesting how we often can't see the ways in which we are being strong - like, you can't be aware of what you're doing that's tough and brave at the time that you're doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you'd be scared.

Lena Dunham

#28. My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

#29. Love was not in it for me at first. I dated guys because of the way they looked. And then I began to learn that it's what's inside that counts. Love to me now is understanding. It's giving.

Crystal Waters

#30. It's fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it's fall-that's sure a curious idea.

Ken Kesey

#31. If you walk by something that I've done and you like it then I don't think I did what I was supposed to do. It should hit, it should either make you feel uncomfortable, or it should make you feel great, as long as it makes you feel something.

Jason Shawn Alexander

#32. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

Rachel Hartman

#33. Here, also, the future was cried aloud by the wind through the rocks, so that all those who heard would shiver, and then the liquid spring song of the thrush would make all the beauty of moonlight and sunlight blend together, making it true, so true, that happiness must come again

Elyne Mitchell

#34. Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

Gerhard Richter

#35. It occurred to her then that there was a reason age drained the pleasure out of life, slowly stripping away all the things you enjoyed or took for granted. It was so you wouldn't need convincing when the time came. You'd be ready, because everything good in life was gone.

Laura McHugh

#36. To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other possibility.

Fred Alan Wolf

#37. I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.

Ian MacKaye

#38. His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

Alice Munro

#39. I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now.

Robert Sheckley

#40. I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

Josef Albers

#41. I was a loser, a bad kid, I wasn't really into anything, and then someone gave me a camera and I found that this was the thing I wanted to do.

Steven Klein

#42. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.

Neal Stephenson

#43. It had not had much effect, but that was beside the point. "Love is like a flame; it burns itself out eventually," Sabiha had told Selva. "What will you do then?

Ayse Kulin

#44. He was the man I mentioned who was obsessed by the idea that he had cancer, although X-rays had proved to him that it was all imaginary. Who or what caused this idea? It obviously derived from a fear that was not caused by observation of the facts. It suddenly overcame him and then remained.

C. G. Jung

#45. What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.

George Pierce Baker

#46. I never gave up rapping - it gave up on me. There was no industry and no appetite for UK rap back then and I had a daughter to feed. I couldn't keep doing something full time that didn't pay the bills.

Doc Brown

#47. Sometimes I'll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I'll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels like it was written for me because it was written by me.

Jarod Kintz

#48. I was terrified when my doctor told me that I had a unique and interesting personality trait, but then he told me about new Zoloft or Prozac and now I just take three pills a day and I blend right into this horrible inbred corporate landscape.

Doug Stanhope

#49. Without thinking, I asked, "Are you afraid of temptation?"
He shook his head. "God, no. Just being with you, just seeing you. Fuck." He mostly swallowed the expletive, his hips rolling in a way that made me think the movement was instinctual, then added on a rush, "You breathing tempts me.

Penny Reid

#50. When Facebook acquired Oculus, the game changed immediately. You saw big companies jumping in. You saw people like Google getting fully committed, and then Microsoft came along with HoloLens - there was a lot of stuff that people were doing before, but now the space really ignited.

Brendan Iribe

#51. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

David Foster Wallace

#52. My wife is so analytical with raising kids, and I am not. My feeling is if they turn out good, then that means I was a good daddy and put a lot of effort into it. If they turn out bad, it means they took after her side of the family.

Jeff Foxworthy

#53. When I got the episode where Spider-Man meets Aunt May (voiced by Misty Lee), it was another one of those things where I was like, "I can't believe I have a scene with Aunt May. That's just amazing to me." And they drew her a lot younger and hotter then the Aunt May that I remember.

Clark Gregg

#54. I watched as that dark blob walked out into traffic, then was violently struck by a car. Yup, that's me. I was somewhat proud of humanity when I saw that a few people immediately came over to me to see if I was okay, rather than stealing my wallet or completely ignoring me.

Dennis Liggio

#55. I think the technology today is so much more advanced that it gives kids a lot more freedom ... Back then it was a lot different.

Jared Gilman

#56. Shaunee was digging in her purse like she'd misplaced a tube of one of MAC's seasonal lipsticks that you buy and fall in love with AND THEN THEY DISCONTINUE IT BECAUSE THEY REALLY HATE US AND WANT US TO BE CRAZY.

P.C. Cast

#57. Not so long ago I'd been convinced that losing my voice was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, the worst tragedy. But since then I'd been losing my whole self, everything I stood for, believed in, felt. Everything I ever wanted to be. Everything I ever was.

Sarah Ockler

#58. Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.

Sara Gilbert

#59. I was told by a girl once that I should teach a course on how to kiss properly. I thought that was really a nice compliment. I then asked her what she thought about my sexual prowess and she recommended I talk to a guy she used to date. Body blow.

Dane Cook

#60. If Marcus hadn't already faced the fact that he was head over heels in love with Nicola, he would have fallen right then ... along with five thousand other people in the sold-out concert hall in San Francisco.

Bella Andre

#61. Then teach me how to not care about someone who was everything to me. All I want is to know she's okay. Is that too much to ask?

Ellen Hopkins

#62. Our deal always was that we did one as scripted always, we got it like we thought we needed - so we were all happy with it as written. Then I'd let him play as long as we had time.

Blair Underwood

#63. [After the twins' birth,] I spent two years doing nothing. I was a wife and a mom. But you need that time to grow. You can't be afraid of, 'Oh, I'm out of the public, then I'm going to have to make a comeback.' It's ridiculous. No.

Jennifer Lopez

#64. The phenomenal thing that happened to me is that I was able to create two memorable men: one is the ultimate optimist, Rocky, and then you have Rambo, the ultimate pessimist. You're going to always be remembered for them, no matter what you do.

Sylvester Stallone

#65. Had music not delivered Richard, too, on more than one occasion, from a life he'd believed himself trapped in? The tempos had changed, but that almost didn't matter. The point, now as then, was to tune in to something bigger than yourself, and to feel around you others who felt as you did.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#66. There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight-which was thought a little enthusiastic - and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.

Anne Enright

#67. The script's always important, but there are some things that have come out in the past year that, when we read them, everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be the next best thing!" Then the movie falls completely flat on its face.

Douglas Booth

#68. It was so surreal. We're on the road and a split second-BAM-we jump a median-BAM-we jump a curb.
And then there was this house.
And these sounds.
Splintered glass.
Broken bones.
Severed veins.
And that's all I know.
The decisions that we make.

Jason Myers

#69. It is flat-out strange that something-that anything-is happening at all. There was nothing then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.

Ken Wilber

#70. Then it dawned on me that no one else was going to believe in me until I believed in myself.

David J. Schwartz

#71. I was always incredibly driven and found it impossible to relax. I felt that if I slacked off for a minute to enjoy myself, then so many things would be missed.

Sandra Bullock

#72. I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness.

Conrad Veidt

#73. When I was young and crazy, I was young and crazy. It can be hard enough just to BE in your teens and 20s. Then add fame, money, access, and every single person telling you that you're the greatest person who ever was, and it can be a recipe for disaster. Some people literally don't survive it.

Rob Lowe

#74. I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

Junot Diaz

#75. He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

Katherine Dunn

#76. Bucks, doe - thank God everything boils down to money, I always say."
"During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate."
"So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed.

Lorrie Moore

#77. I was raised to be self-conscious about weight. Then as I got older and started doing television, it became a career issue, like, 'You have to lose weight or you'll lose that job.'

Margaret Cho

#78. When the universe was young, it took a breath, then sighed with a longing so deep, so ancient, that it stole God's attention for a moment. The sigh brushed God's cheek and He recognized it as the breath of love. In that moment God wished for another. The yearning had begun.

Kate Belle

#79. When you meditate the glory of the Divine shines forth.
You realize then that all along there was something tremendous within you and you did not know it.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#80. And that was always our plan. Do well in the first three states, and then compete and have a very strong night on Super Tuesday. I think we're ideally positioned to do exactly that.

Ted Cruz

#81. They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.

Toni Morrison

#82. I look at some of my early stuff - back when I was 12 or 13 years old - and I was already doing cross-hatching back then. I don't know where I picked that up. I think I was in a hurry, and I wanted to shade something really fast, and I tried cross-hatching a shadow.

Bill Plympton

#83. My biggest ambition when I was younger was to appear on stage at what was then Nimrod, which is the theatre where my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons to see matinees. The most extraordinary things used to occur on that stage.

David Wenham

#84. I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.

Ram Dass

#85. It wasn't the type of CIA job you'd find an application for on Jobs/CIA.Gov. It was a deep black-ops organization that hadn't been to a Senate Committee meeting since the Reagan Administration, and even then it was falsely presented as a training program.

Jennifer Arnett

#86. When I was coming up as a kid, there were programs that kept me out of trouble and on the straight and narrow in South Central Los Angeles, and I always felt that when I got to a stage where I could provide similar opportunities to kids then I would do that.

Warren Moon

#87. When I was young and I look at the things that I wrote - I don't think that was the word they used back then, but they had a hipster sensibility. They were a little irreverent.

John Ridley

#88. I do remember, though, when I discovered the third! I was about five years old - it was a very pleasing sound. I remembered that if I hit one note, then skipped one and played the next, I could get this really good sound.

Robert Morris

#89. I think a generation ago, dads went to work, they came home, and they had their dinner, had a drink, and then went to bed. I don't know what it was like in your house, but that is how it was in mine. I think it is cool to have the dads in the trenches and doing the real parenting work.

Zach Cregger

#90. You know the bodysuit that I built my line on? ... That was about me being able to go directly from work to yoga class. It just wasn't as accepted to talk about then.

Donna Karan

#91. It was completely fascinating to me the way that love grew. I kept thinking I'd found a way to give him all that I had, but then I'd learn a new quirk, hear a new story, go through a new experience, and my heart swelled.

Kiera Cass

#92. Always the rationalization is the same-"Once this situation is remedied, then I will be happy." But it never works that way in reality: The goal is achieved, but the person who reaches it is not the same person who dreamed it. The goal was static, but the person's identity was dynamic.

Phillip Moffitt

#93. Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.

Jennifer Worth

#94. It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.

Karl Pilkington

#95. I didn't know then that this was just part of DC, that everyone was always looking ahead to the next step, peeking around to see what other people were doing, calculating the next move.

Jennifer Close

#96. Every program that ever helped working people, from rural electrification to Medicare, was enacted by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. When people tell me they don't like liberals, I ask, "Do you like Social Security? If so, then shut up!"

George McGovern

#97. I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century.

Elaine Dundy

#98. The thing I was always most protective of was my mystery. I worried that if I gave too much of myself, then I would limit the characters I could fall into.

Brie Larson

#99. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.

Saul Bellow

#100. I've played a bunch of different versions of Walter [from Fringe].I loved it when he was being random, which was probably the original version of him, more than anyone else. I loved doing Walter then, and all of the different mental states that we've played.

John Noble