Way Things Were Quotes

#1. Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn't happened this morning, either.

Margaret Atwood

#2. Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters."
Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.

Neal Stephenson

#3. Things happened the way they were supposed to, and it was no use trying to predict what was going to come next. People liked to think otherwise, but what you thought had no practical influence on what eventually happened. You can't think yourself well. You can't make yourself fall out of love.

Sarah Addison Allen

#4. Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.

Gil Amelio

#5. To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn't the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.

Michael Koryta

#6. Goodbyes are on of the hardest things about life. One way or another people were always leaving ... Always moving on.

Karen Kingsbury

#7. Obviously, I've made statements that were ludicrous and crazy and outrageous and all those things, because that's the way I always was.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#8. How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.

Catherynne M Valente

#9. He had many hardships and adventures before he got back. The Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it in those days beside goblins; but he was well guided and well guarded - the wizard was with him, and Beorn for much of the way - and he was never in great danger again.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#10. I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.

Bret Easton Ellis

#11. Some were bitter. Some were sweet. Some were hardly anything. That was just the way of things.

Patrick Rothfuss

#12. That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

Ann Patchett

#13. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

Natalie Goldberg

#14. If there was one thing I knew, it was that our demons were what shaped who we were. The things we do, the way we act, are all driven by the things we want locked away forever.

Barbara C. Doyle

#15. Things happen along the way in our path. Instead of looking at it as a wall that's being put up in front of us, look at it as as opportunity to scale new heights and to climb that wall - to see and do things you didn't think you were capable of.

Robin Roberts

#16. He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things "one day at a time," as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

Matt Haig

#17. She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#18. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of "things I know." New

Frank Herbert

#19. It's funny to think that Anson and I were here, in this same place, together all that time ago, and now here we are again. It makes me feel good, makes me feel that perhaps everything doesn't just disappear, that some things are circling back, taking the long way, but circling back towards me.

Helen Humphreys

#20. Don't stop yourself from greatness before you've begun from fear or from self-doubt. You were put here on this planet to do great things, to pioneer change by way of your own personal uniqueness, and to express yourself and share your happiness with others.

Kaiden Blake

#21. Looking back, I didn't realize until years later what a huge influence Red Skelton was in my stage demeanor with the band. I mean, I always liked things that were funny, and later I realized that having a sly sense of humor was a way to get attention and even respect in school.

Jello Biafra

#22. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.

Janet Fitch

#23. What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone's memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

Andrea Lochen

#24. Having a separate bathroom for the black domestic was just the way things were done. It had faded out in new homes by the time the '70s and '80s rolled up.

Kathryn Stockett

#25. There were so many things Sebastian and I had to work out: we'd both been single for so long that blending our lives together wasn't going to be easy.
I'd promised Sebastian we'd find a way. He deserved to be loved for everything he was. And for whatever crazy reason he had, he loved me, too.

Jane Harvey-Berrick

#26. I thought Google was the coolest place. People there were so smart and they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt really lucky to be a part of it even in a small way.

Ben Silbermann

#27. He got Alice, the way we did, or maybe even more so than us. He made her more confident, funnier, smarter. He brought out all the things that were there already and let her be fully herself, so she seemed to shine with this inner light.

Liane Moriarty

#28. Smith, you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others.' The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.

Jack Kerouac

#29. I wish there were a way to show Trea how I could give her things she doesn't even know she needs. I could fill a spot she won't even admit is empty.

Hilary Thompson

#30. Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real. Why,

Andrew Klavan

#31. There were other things we noticed only at first, before we accepted them as a part of daily life. Then they got harder to describe, the way it's hard to describe what it feels like to breathe air.

Elisabeth Eaves

#32. It was always good to know that things in the field really were the way the officers had said they'd be, if only because this so rarely turned out to be the case.

Django Wexler

#33. So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.

Gordon Parks

#34. I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

Margaret Atwood

#35. I played a definite part in it. I guess the things that I played in films and the way the nudity and the love scenes were handled were really different.

Bo Derek

#36. In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities - things of earth, air, fire and water - are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.

Fred Alan Wolf

#37. There isn't any loving, romantic way to put this: I told Bonnie we needed to get married so she couldn't testify against me, and also so she could visit me if I landed in jail, which was looking like the way things were headed.

Kevin D. Mitnick

#38. My parents always encouraged me and I had a good home life. We were always taught to respect things and other people. It's so different today, because children are just not taught the right way.

Betty Cuthbert

#39. We were way more than close. Things happened. We remembered stuff. Made new memories.

James Dashner

#40. There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.

Cormac McCarthy

#41. The way I viewed it, there were lots of very ugly things in London, so, on the occasions when something beautiful with a glossy coat came along and nudged its cold nose into your hand, it seemed churlish not to take a few moments to celebrate the mere fact of its existence.

Tom Cox

#42. The sun will rise tomorrow. It always does, and all the wishing in the world for the way things were, or for what they could have been, won't change that. It won't change how things are.

Elizabeth Scott

#43. I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.

Thomas Kinkade

#44. When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

Victoria Moran

#45. There were a few things she did know for sure, though. There was no way the pony was going back in the gate. Not when the pony was thirty-four and really liked pulling the milk cart.

Rachel Gibson

#46. Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

Bethany McLean

#47. In a funny way, when things went wrong in my life - and it is my fault that they went wrong, it is not anyone else's fault - and all the glittering outside things were taken away, I was left with the things of most value.

Kimberly Quinn

#48. The big budget films have money to do things that are not necessarily essential but sure are comforting. The catering is usually much better. And you have way more of anything you could possibly need. You definitely get a trailer. My shirt and suit for 'Million Dollar Baby' were tailor made.

Mike Colter

#49. She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you'd want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt.

Mike Gayle

#50. Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

Brad Warner

#51. We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love.

Marianne Williamson

#52. The places we visited were always richer and always more intricate than one could imagine. I loved to find out about the world, the good and the bad, in this way. For me, observing things with my own eyes was the only way. My wanderlust was also a wonderlust.

Luke F.D. Marsden

#53. I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

Ed Helms

#54. Sometimes it felt like looking at his face and just accepting the way things were between us was the hardest thing in the world.

Karina Halle

#55. No. You hurt people because you didn't have any idea what love really was. You were trying to understand it in the only way you knew how. It's horrible, yes. But it's forgivable. I forgive you. I forgive a thousand worse things you may have done. I can forgive anything.

Laurelin Paige

#56. Was sad to think how quickly things became lost. It was no wonder things were the way they were. Memories, people, your own self. You thought you'd always have them, that you'd be able to draw on them in times of need, but they slipped away like the days, gone before you knew it.

Edward W. Robertson

#57. You know we're in a business where things are just unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen ... we were lucky Blessed, I think is a better way to put it.

Aaliyah

#58. My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.

Orhan Pamuk

#59. But all the things Science had promised us hadn't come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn't changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.

Jim Butcher

#60. Growing up in the 80's, I think a lot of us saw things that were "new," an experience we don't get too much of these days. We saw things that were never done before. When Star Wars first came out, no movie before that had ever looked that way.

Gabriel Campisi

#61. I don't believe in monsters."
"Well, Red, I think you might want to start." Pike turned and looked him in the eye. "What do you think those green things were? And what do you think is trying to smash its way in here? A pony?

Jack Keely

#62. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

Lewis Carroll

#63. I am thankful for the way I was raised, to be positive. Even when times have gotten rough I have always tried to look on the bright side. Even when I was put down, yelled at and made feel insignificant, I still thought things were alright. I did realize when enough is enough.

Angela Merkel

#64. Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O'Reilly. He's done certain things to Bill O'Reilly that I believe were way over the line. I think that's bad behavior. But it's okay for him to criticize Bill. And Bill shouldn't be so sensitive. He should ignore that.

Rupert Murdoch

#65. Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

Donna Tartt

#66. The Son of God fasted because He knew there were supernatural things that could only be released that way.

Jentezen Franklin

#67. I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

Paul Lansky

#68. You've got your mission, whatever it is. To accomplish it, like the rest of us you're in the pinch between the way you wish things were and the way they actually are (which always seem to be a disaster). How far are you willing to go? What are you willing to do about it?

Ryan Holiday

#69. The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We

Ray Bradbury

#70. Myth is stories about the way things never were, but always are.

Marcus J. Borg

#71. An emergency stash of Thin Mints. Frickin' Girl Scouts. Those things were way to addictive. They had to be laced with crack. Charlie Davidson Fourth Grave Beneath my Feet

Darynda Jones

#72. It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.

Nella Larsen

#73. Did she ever think of that, that things experienced in ways different from hers were equally valuable? That the way that he chose to love her was, in fact, loving her, that the face of love depended on the person giving it?

Elizabeth Berg

#74. We found out tonight how important and how crucial momentum swings can be. I thought we were playing very well. We were doing a lot of positive things but then we lost the puck two times in our zone and things swung their way. You can't afford to give teams momentum.

Saku Koivu

#75. That's the way people were. Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself, nobody believed that even you were really sincere about it, people believed whatever was good business for them at the time. Nobody believed in anything but good business.

Dawn Powell

#76. I'm not sure why that story came back to me while I sat huddled in Sydney's car on the way to the lake. It happened so long ago. I guess maybe it was because it gave me the assurance that when things got bad, there were certain people you could always count on.

D.J. MacHale

#77. You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

Douglas Coupland

#78. We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.

Naguib Mahfouz

#79. I suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up. THROUGH

Lauren Oliver

#80. Alone doesn't just mean without people. It can mean without anything else. And maybe, even without putting a word on me, she's found a way to take away things I thought were mine. If this is the start I have no way to know when it will stop.

Jael McHenry

#81. If I'd had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how I would have slept that night.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#82. It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.

W. Somerset Maugham

#83. Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.

S.E. Hinton

#84. A lover was affectionate and a husband was authoritative. His work was always way more important than his family. His work and his needs were to be accepted as uppermost in every way. She could take leave from her work for one day to take her child to the carnival but he could not.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#85. I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.

Muddy Waters

#86. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed.

William Maxwell

#87. So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.

Brit Marling

#88. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren't that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they'd been had found release through a necessary valve.

Matthew Thomas

#89. My hat goes off to anybody who can sit down and put their heads together. I am ready for something like that because I am free and I am happy and I have time. There were a lot of things in the way before. I have nothing but time, and I love getting older.

Prince

#90. You imagine that there's no use struggling against fate, that she will always have her way, no matter what we do. But don't you see? It's our very efforts to cheat fate, or to change it, that make things come to pass in the way they were meant to.

Gary L. Blackwood

#91. People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Robin McKinley

#92. I think that giant American corporations should start asking themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the ordinary. Clearly people want things that make their lives the way they wish they were.

John Peterman

#93. I was missing out on a lot of things that my friends were doing, but in another way, they were missing things I was doing. It was kind of a trade-off I had to make.

Victoria Azarenka

#94. It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

Mary Oliver

#95. He pulled himself up short. He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to . . . to . . . The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to. Brusquely

Douglas Adams

#96. When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can." He shook his head sorrowfully. "But no one can ever go back to yesterday.

Robin Hobb

#97. I choose to see my life moving in different directions, all of them equally good. Some things are even better now than the way they were in my youth.

Louise Hay

#98. Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.

Oscar Isaac

#99. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.

Peter Watts

#100. There's something so muffled about the way you experience things. It's as if you were trying to slip through life unchanged.

Kathleen Turner