They Did It Quotes

#1. LUCK is a word used by people who did not take action when greatest opportunities were presented. They use it to describe the success of those who have acted.
Some use FAITH to describe what others call LUCK

Elie Jerome

#2. To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit. In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn't do it.

Augusten Burroughs

#3. Since I only got one life to ive, God forgive me for my sins, let me make it and i'll never steal again, or deal again, my only friend is my misery. Wantin revenge for the agony they did to me.

Tupac Shakur

#4. True, we might never have arrived, but the fact is we did. If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worth worrying about so much.

Mikhail Lermontov

#5. I didn't want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn't want to do a thing doesn't mean they ought to shirk.

Catherynne M Valente

#6. It is very annoying - things have been written by people who didn't know me at all or Princess Diana. They were written by people who never knew me or met me. It did make me angry. I just stopped reading the papers.

Hasnat Khan

#7. (On her work in Keep Your Powder Dry) I didn't want to do it, but they said if I did it they would give me Undercurrent with Robert Taylor. Then they gave Undercurrent to Katharine Hepburn, so I left MGM.

Laraine Day

#8. When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD - they called it shell shock - and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn't know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars.

Anita Diamant

#9. when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal.

Michael Lewis

#10. If anyone wants to know why three kids in one family made it to the big leagues they just had to know how we helped each other and how much we practiced back then. We did it every minute we could.

Joe DiMaggio

#11. I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

Sarah Wayne Callies

#12. I am wary of sequels. I understand them from the studio's point of view, but the audience doesn't want more, they want better, and I thought the second 'Ghostbusters' was not very effective, it did not really work, so there's no reason to believe a third would. I'm more interested in new things.

Rick Moranis

#13. Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

Claire McCaskill

#14. What happened was, my parents after 'Circus Boy' decided to take me out of show business for two years to go back to normal school. It was the smartest thing they ever did.

Micky Dolenz

#15. They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.'
As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.

Paulo Coelho

#16. Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

Paul Strand

#17. Those who have done the impossible, often didn't know it was impossible when they did it.

The Prophet Of Life

#18. Abruptly he started the car and put it in gear and drove away, trying not to look back. And of course he did, and of course the porch was empty. They had gone back inside. It was as if the Overlook had swallowed them.

Stephen King

#19. I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed

William McIlvanney

#20. I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.

Guy Mankowski

#21. I do know that when my children are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm ... and when the wind did not blow her way - - and it surely has not - - she adjusted her sails.

Elizabeth Edwards

#22. I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

Julie Walters

#23. To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.

Henry Adams

#24. In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.

Yukio Mishima

#25. I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

Neil Gaiman

#26. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where "traditional values" meant "hang someone." He did not have a problem with this, broadly speaking, but it never hurt to understand your employer.

Terry Pratchett

#27. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.

Iain Banks

#28. If I had forty wives in the United States, they did not know it, and could not substantiate it, neither did I ask any lawyer, judge, or magistrate for them. I live above the law, and so do this people.

Brigham Young

#29. It's been years since any hillbilly has reported getting sodomized by an alien. Did they break up and not tell us?

Dana Gould

#30. If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

Neil Gaiman

#31. He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.

Michel De Montaigne

#32. One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'
And the other answers, 'Because they could.'
That is the only answer there ever is.

Naomi Alderman

#33. I don't believe in director's cuts where you make things longer. The coolest thing was when the Coen brothers did a director's cut of 'Blood Simple,' and they made it shorter.

Jason Reitman

#34. How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose.
There was a pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Father.
There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?"
Another pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Eldric.

Franny Billingsley

#35. It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral.

Leland Ryken

#36. You know what's fun? You pick somebody at random, like out of the phone book, and send them about 100 'Just Because' cards. They can't even ask you why you did it.

Brian Regan

#37. There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the wals, echoing in her ears. Stop! she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her.

Kate Williams

#38. I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.

Marilynne Robinson

#39. I guess coming after 'Country Grammar' and everybody thinking, 'Well maybe, that was it.' To come back with something like 'Nellyville' and to have people accept it and appreciate it the way they did, that was a great move.

Nelly

#40. I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

Edward Hirsch

#41. Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

Julia Glass

#42. Why did the ancients praise the Way? Did they not say it was because you find what you seek and are saved from your wrongdoings?

Laozi

#43. An icon didn't do anything of its own volition. A symbol didn't act of its own accord. Both cities projected what they wanted onto me, and wanted me to stay still as they did it.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#44. They're horrible little creatures. All snot and smelly feet and pestering questions."
"Then why did you go into teaching?"
"It was either that or sit at home with Mother all day. I picked the lesser of two evils.

Brian Francis

#45. We did not treat the Americans badly. They left Iran in a relaxed mood. The embassy was active here after the revolution. We didn't have any problem with them. They started it.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

#46. But as a matter of strict fact, did Agnes have any "maternal" in her? When she set her mouth that way, it was hard to see it. Oh shucks, all women had maternal instincts; science had proved that. Well, hadn't they?

Robert A. Heinlein

#47. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#48. You've heard about the knitter's handshake? Two hands go in for the grab-and-shake, but at the last minute, they veer to the closest sleeve or band and grab it instead while we ask, "Did you knit this?

Clara Parkes

#49. Every emotion that is in the human mind is there for a positive reason, and they must be used for positive reasons, anger is a positive emotion if it used correctly, so is aggression. God did not put anger and aggression in you just for negative purposes alone.

Amos Wilson

#50. People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results.

Clayton Christensen

#51. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.

Art Spiegelman

#52. The twins turned out well, not because of anything that Craig or his wife did but because of the kind of people they are. Good, decent people who always put the needs of their children ahead of their own. It was never more complicated than love, one generation raising a better version of the next.

Jung Yun

#53. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

Dorothy Allison

#54. If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself. They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children.

Louise L. Hay

#55. Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

Lauren Oliver

#56. Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

David Mitchell

#57. [ ... ] and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. They probably didn't, anyway. But if they did they wouldn't admit it.

Helen DeWitt

#58. Slave holding is very unusual among the English-speaking peoples. Canadians didn't do it. Australians didn't do it. The Democratic Party and the states they controlled did it!

Sean Hannity

#59. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I'm good for a Haydn quintet.

Daniel Handler

#60. So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they've done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between.

Tom DeMarco

#61. I start to wonder if I'm being creepy. I mean, I am creeping. Does creep-ing automatically make one creep-y? Or are there dispensations for ... romance? I bet all stalkers believe they're being romantic. I did it for love, officer.

Laini Taylor

#62. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.

James Baldwin

#63. I had never heard that before; and so poor Rob Roy who was killed at that hunt was my brother! I did not wonder that my mother was so troubled. It seems that horses have no relations; at least they never know each other after they are sold.

Anna Sewell

#64. My God," Hadrian said. "They finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddly-kitten-here's-a-pic bastard! They finally went and did it!

Steven Erikson

#65. Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'

Jerry Leiber

#66. In all the medical dramas I'd ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.

Morgan Matson

#67. My mom is big on moisturizer and water. She always reminds me to drink a lot of water and wear sunglasses because I always forget them when I go out, even though they are one of my favorite accessories. She always reminds me about wrinkles, and always did, so it's kind of been ingrained into me.

Brittany Snow

#68. It's times like this I am glad I don't look people in the eye. If I did, surely they would die on the spot from the contempt shooting out of mine.

Jodi Picoult

#69. The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it's already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it's nothing like that, but what they mean is they can't remember when.

Helen Oyeyemi

#70. The younger generation watches what's interesting, not whether it's presented by someone who is as old as I am or someone who is as old as a 21-year-old. It's the material. If I did a series of conversations on things most interesting to Millennials, they would respond to it, and I do.

Charlie Rose

#71. I'm doing another Churchill. I did a Churchill for HBO and that was up to 1939 and there's talk of the war years. They were going to do it this fall, but the script wasn't going to be ready.

Albert Finney

#72. The planets. Now footnote, I'm including Pluto in the planets, because I think it's terrible what they did to Pluto. And it's still a planet to me. I grew up with Pluto as a planet, it will always be a planet.

Demetri Martin

#73. Francesca couldn't say anything, because that would just make her mother feel even worse, and so
instead they stood there as they always did, thinking the same thing but never speaking of it, wondering
which of them hurt more.

Julia Quinn

#74. [In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.

Steve Jobs

#75. I knew it wasn't Jess. I love that girl, but I knew it wasn't Jess. I even told Jess that one day the right girl would come along and you'd know. She'd rock your world. That she would heal you. Fix what they did to us.

Abbi Glines

#76. When people asked me what I did, I'd say, 'I work in publishing', and when they then say, 'What side of it?', I say, 'Supply' - no doubt leaving them to think I drive the books around in a van and deliver them.

Jim Crace

#77. We [with David Cunningham] did do Top Of The Pops. It was an eye-opener. I mean, one of the things that was so interesting - I've talked about this a few times recently, and people can't believe it - they used to do this thing called tape switch with the Musicians Union.

David Toop

#78. I would guess that Ray Bradbury would be equally resentful of what they did with Illustrated Man, which, you know, took a central idea thesis of his and pissed all over it - made it into one of the worst movies ever made.

Rod Serling

#79. I get people being frightened of me. One time I did this photo shoot where I had hairy armpits - I was really digging it, but they were like, 'We'll airbrush that out.'

Bat For Lashes

#80. I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost ... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#81. I'm 77. The only reason I'm ever shy about it is that people tend to think of you in terms of what they think that age is. I certainly don't feel any different than I did when I was 35, and my energy seems to be more than it was then.

Robert Osborne

#82. My dad worked very hard for the money he made, and my mom worked very hard to keep this household up and running and all the kids fed and everything. And she did it in a brilliant fashion. They both did. In fact, the work ethic, to me, is so important in this life.

Kim Basinger

#83. A leader is most effective when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, his troops will feel they did it themselves.

Steve Zaffron

#84. U-boat commanders called this their 'Happy Time'. Between January and July 1942 they sank 495 merchant
ships and 142 tankers, a total of 2,500,000 tons. Why did it take America so long to respond to such an obvious threat?

Derek Robinson

#85. I did something a lot of people will have to do in this economy if they want to eventually land their dream job. I turned down an offer to take a high-paying position in another field because it wouldn't fulfill me.

Mika Brzezinski

#86. I did work at Christie's for a couple of weeks, getting ready for 'The Devil Wears Prada,' getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art, and everybody was really nice. It was great.

Anne Hathaway

#87. Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.

Lauren Oliver

#88. If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?

Jodi Picoult

#89. They have left us fruit and drink, and bread,' said Pippin. 'Come and have your breakfast. The bread tastes almost as good as it did last night. I did not want to leave you any, but Sam insisted.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#90. Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.

Rory Bremner

#91. Why, the man killed over two hundred demons with this sword. They say it is charmed such that whomever wields it cannot be killed by a demon." "How did he die?" "Knifed by an exotic dancer.

Robert Asprin

#92. When he'd made it thirty strides or so Logen turned around and looked back. The pot was sitting forlorn by the lake, already filling up with rainwater. They'd been through a lot together, him and that pot. "Fare you well, old friend." The pot did not reply.

Joe Abercrombie

#93. I'm always going to judge somebody on their work ethic, and whether or not they made me feel something, or whether or not I felt they did a good job. To me, it's important to try to block anything personal out and look at the performance, in any field.

Nicolas Cage

#94. I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?'

Harvey Pekar

#95. No one ever did anything worth doing unless they were prepared to go on with it long after it became something of a bore.

Douglas V. Steere

#96. When people were afraid, they did not always do what they knew to be right. They turned away. They closed their eyes. They said, Tomorrow. Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll do something about it. And they said that until they died.

Lauren Oliver

#97. At the end of it all, what flashes before our eyes won't be all the things we did that were bigger than ourselves; they'll be all the moments when we made a difference by being true to ourselves.

Conari Press

#98. What else did you expect from helping someone out? Isn't it enough that you've done what your nature demands? You want a salary for it too? As if your eyes expected a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking. That's what they were made for.

Marcus Aurelius

#99. Fuck, she was so sick of herself-herself and her fucking emotional retardation. How did people do this shit all the time, this wanting people, caring about them? How did they stand it, how did they ever get anything done? She was sick of being lost.

Stacia Kane

#100. He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.

Daniel Defoe