Top 100 Turns Out Quotes
#1. Something has worked in the past, until - well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#2. It's hard to be disappointed when what you expected turns out to be true.
Jay Asher
#3. So much of what folks want in the world turns out to be just a thing they say. Words change the way you feel for a small time and that just about goes as far as it can go toward being a true thing.
Robert Bausch
#4. In the middle of all this, as Sean slips out of his jacket, he looks over his shoulder at me and he smiles at me, just a glancing, faint thing before he turns back to Tommy. I'm quite happy for that smile, because Dad told me once you should be grateful for the gifts that are the rarest.
Maggie Stiefvater
#5. It turns out that the 'Cry It Out' method of baby sleep training, where you ignore that your kid is screaming, crying and turning 40 shades of purple so that she can break herself out of the habit of being spoiled and cuddled to sleep, does more harm - way more - than good.
Denene Millner
#6. Nothing ever turns out the way people expect it to.
Barry Sanders
#7. The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
#8. Never regret trusting someone. It proves you have a heart. But if he turns out to be a lying worm ... I'm not going to waste my time crying. Because I am way too fabulous for that.
Jude Watson
#9. the poor don't have much in the way of money or possessions to steal - so it turns out that the most profitable thing to steal is the whole person.
Gary A. Haugen
#10. Lo didn't have a splendid time either. He drank something Captain America gave him. Turns out the Cap imposter wasn't too noble, having spiked his booze with roofies. Nerds can be vicious too.
Krista Ritchie
#11. Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
Thor Benson
#12. It turns out Enron workers were not only shredding documents at work, they were having sex at work. Having sex and shredding documents. Those are two things you don't want to get mixed up.
Jay Leno
#13. I'm not somebody who plans. There were times I planned a lot in my life, and it never turns out how you plan it. So I think it's important not to. I'm a very spontaneous person.
Preity Zinta
#15. God turns clouds inside out to make fluffy beds for the dogs in Dog Heaven, and when they are tired from running and barking and eating ham-sandwich biscuits, the dogs find a cloud bed for sleeping. God watches over each one of them. And there are no bad dreams.
Cynthia Rylant
#16. Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.
E. Stanley Jones
#17. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#18. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
Gregory Maguire
#19. One hand traced small circles against my back, and I pressed closer to him, listening to his heartbeat. "I used to think that having nothing to live for made you a better fighter," he murmured. "Turns out I was wrong on a lot of fronts.
Julie Kagawa
#20. There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation.
Warren G. Harding
#21. Guilt is not a healthy emotion. It rots you from the inside out, turns you bitter.
Blair Richmond
#22. I love being able to create characters, give them problems, and make sure everything turns out right in the end. Writing gives me limitless opportunity to study the human condition, and a love story with a positive ending always lifts my spirits and warms my heart.
Jennie Adams
#23. I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.
James Lipton
#24. Never make a decision. Let someone else make it and then if it turns out to be the wrong one, you can disclaim it, and if it is the right one you can abide by it.
Howard Hughes
#25. It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
Alison Gopnik
#26. And while all of your friends are grieving at your wake, I hope the sprinkler system turns on and sprays them with AIDS, hepatitis C and liquified genital warts. And while they're all running out and crying, I hope one of them slips and accidentally molests a child.
Jim Norton
#27. As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.
Susan Faludi
#28. Inside, I've got a real purist desire and dream about the music. I like the idea of being able to carve out a kind of magical, colourful, artistic, inspirational life. And the reality just turns out to be quite different, working with the business to bring this thing you have created into the world.
Damien Rice
#29. Never do things for money. It's always the things you do for love that turn out to pay the best.
Eric Idle
#30. The world eclipses and it's just her and him. No it's just her eyes and his soul. Her eyes expose and violate him, she turns him inside out. Then, her eyes drop him like a boring toy.
Stefan Emunds
#31. I figured managing people was obvious - I'd tell someone what they needed to do and they'd do what I wanted. It turns out that's not the case. It was frustrating at first.
Jon Oringer
#32. You know you are getting old when yesterday turns out to be a fading memory you have difficulties recollecting, when today becomes a challenge that is hard to grasp and when tomorrow promises an uncertainty that you dread encountering.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#33. The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.
Susanne Bier
#34. The success of love is in the loving - it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.
Mother Teresa
#35. It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
Thomas Pynchon
#36. Kayso, it turns out that driving an actual car is way harder than it is in 'Grand Theft Auto: Zombie Hooker Smackdown.
Christopher Moore
#37. People forget ... that we structured it so that the government, or the people, would be repaid with a really good rate of return. And as it turns out, that aspect of TARP, that's what happened.
George W. Bush
#38. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin - consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#39. The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. And there's no better way to thaw a face, as it turns out, than with another face.
Laini Taylor
#41. Actually, he told me later that I had turned him gay . . . by taking codeine again. And I said, "You know, I never read that warning on the label." I thought it said heavy machinery, not homosexuality - turns out I could have been driving those tractors all along! Turning
Carrie Fisher
#42. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.
Matt Taibbi
#43. From what I could tell, whenever an archangel or a burning bush turns up, it's generally not to say, 'Hey, go out and have a happy and uncomplicated life.' (p. 205, Highway to Hell).
Rosemary Clement-Moore
#44. To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.
Robert Krulwich
#45. As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.
Jodi Picoult
#46. Well, someone told someone and someone told someone else, you know how it is, that if you filled jugs with water and placed them around the edges of your lawn that you'd be protected. Ghost and witches can't cross over water, it turns out.
Richard Yanez
#47. Pain. You overwhelm me," he said quietly. "And every time I see you or think of you, I can't grab a brush fast enough. I thought I couldn't paint you, but it turns out I've been painting you all along, from the beginning, before I even knew you.
Joey W. Hill
#49. What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?
Douglas Coupland
#50. It turns out that good actors can make anything believable.
Paul Haggis
#51. Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry
Richard Dawkins
#52. All your life you pretend to be someone else, and it turns out that you were someone else pretending to be you.
Robert Breault
#54. The one piece of advice I can give you is, do what turns you on. Do something that if you had all the money in the world, you'd still be doing it. You've got to have a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.
Warren Buffett
#55. Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.
John Podhoretz
#56. And what you need ironically. Will turn out what you want to be. If you just let it.
Lauryn Hill
#57. I wanted to stay this way forever.
Which, it turns out, was exactly five more minutes.
Kami Garcia
#58. And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.
Seth Godin
#59. But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.
Timothy Ferriss
#60. The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
Richard P. Feynman
#61. In geometric and physical applications, it always turns out that a quantity is characterized not only by its tensor order, but also by symmetry.
Hermann Weyl
#62. You disappoint yourself more often by not doing things because of cowardice and temerity than you ever did by doing things that turn out to be wrong.
Fred Hollows
#63. It's a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it's full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.
Louise Jameson
#64. It turns out you have to be an apprentice in this world.
Cheryl Strayed
#65. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#66. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#67. I thought he was someone I wanted to know. As it turns out, it was a case of
mistaken identity.
Jodi Livon
#68. Good will starts out fat and sweet
as tub butter and turns slowly rancid.
It must be made again daily
if we want it fresh.
Marge Piercy
#69. Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair.
Yuval Noah Harari
#70. It turns out that if you're a 24-year-old whose only line on their resume says CEO, you are totally unemployable.
Sam Yagan
#71. Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Anton Chekhov
#72. I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
John Dufresne
#73. Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.
Rumer Godden
#74. I'm too busy being the bad guy." It was one of those things that get said in a marriage, something that starts out as a genuine compliment but turns into a criticism without either party noticing or caring all that much.
Sarah Dunn
#75. There's a funny thing I've noticed about life. When you really dread something, it turns out not to be so bad. It's the unexpected awful things that get you down.
Elizabeth Laird
#76. Turns out, there's not a lot of information about pickles on the Internet.
Brian Posehn
#77. When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?
Elif Batuman
#78. Relationships don't only fail because the person you're with turns out to be the wrong person; they also fail when you yourself aren't yet the person you need to be.
Paul Hudson
#79. I always hated...all sad songs. I thought they made happy people miserable. Now I think I understand them better. Bards write them because they can't hold them back. Sadness has got to flow out or it gets stuck and turns bitter.
Jonathan Renshaw
#80. The root of heterosexual fear of male homosexuality is in the fact that anyone might be gay. Straight men aren't threatened by a flamboyant faggot because they know they aren't like that; they're threatened by a guy who's just like they are who turns out to be queer.
Vito Russo
#81. Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood - and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.
David Harsanyi
#82. Chris is the engineer down at the studio where we do these things. And he's just such an integral part and he has such a marvelous ear. Also it turns out, we didn't know, but he's a pretty good fiddle player.
Guy Clark
#83. It turns out that the Bible is right - "It is better to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). People generally do find greater joy in giving freely to others than they do in rampant self-indulgence.
Francis Chan
#84. I thought I was rescuing her ... I thought I was the knight in shining armor ... But it turns out; she was the badass princess that was rescuing me.
Steve Maraboli
#85. This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
John Steinbeck
#86. He turns me inside out, take me apart, and puts me back together - all in the span of one night.
Anna Zaires
#87. I talk to myself through the computer. I ask myself questions, leave things to be looked at again, things that you would do with a notepad. It turns out today that it's much better today to do with a personal computer rather than a notepad.
Seymour Cray
#89. Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top?
Charles Wheelan
#90. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
Kevin Systrom
#91. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
Richard Hofstadter
#92. The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.
Ellen Goodman
#93. She's my friend."
"Good for you."
"Just my luck," I said. "Finally meet my twin brother and, turns out, he's an ass.
Kelley Armstrong
#94. What we find as we listen to the songs of our rage or fear, loneliness or longing, is that they do not stay forever. Rage turns into sorrow; sorrow turns into tears; tears may fall for a long time, but then the sun comes out.
Jack Kornfield
#95. As it turns out, American-made technology had helped Mubarak and his security state collect, compile, and parse vast amounts of data about everyday citizens.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#96. It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are also the ones who are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most.
Seth Godin
#97. I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor.
Alessandro Nivola
#98. Creative ideas make people uncomfortable. It turns out that, at least subconsciously, we can have a hard time recognizing ideas as both new and useful at the same time. This cognitive dissonance between creativity and practicality may actually create a subtle bias against creative ideas.
David Burkus
#99. Notwithstanding all the care and anxiety of the persons who frame Acts of Parliament to guard against every event, it frequently turns out that certain cases were not foreseen.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#100. It turns out that American Express honors recurring payments even if the vendor is unable to supply an accurate card number and expiration date. An Amex phone representative said this is a feature, not a bug, which makes sure my bills are paid.
Barton Gellman
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