Were What Quotes

#1. We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.

John Cage

#2. Perhaps that same concept applied to people as well. Did we love them more when we knew their full story? How they came to be who and what they were? Or was the mystery what kept us coming back for more, slowly enticing us, knowing that once the truth was out, the appeal would be lost?

Amber Lynn Natusch

#3. I think the best comedy is tragicomic. Yeah, I suppose if you were to look at everything I've done, there is a bit of a black streak through all of it. It's not deliberate: it's what makes me laugh, and there's a fine tradition of it, especially in Ireland.

Sharon Horgan

#4. P.S. - This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.

Mitch Hedberg

#5. We became acutely aware of the profound healing that is needed in our species. We knew with conviction that what we were doing, as women and men together, was confronting the cultural dynamics that are killing us all- killing women and men, killing our children, killing the planet.

William Keepin

#6. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#7. 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

#8. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.

John Steinbeck

#9. In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

James E. Faust

#10. Oh, alright. You're no fun," he sighed. "My name is Razor."
"What kind of a name is that?"
"It's a nickname."
"What kind of a nickname is that?"
"Spike, Blade, Fang - all the good, deadly objects were already taken. It was the best I could do.

Ada Adams

#11. But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything?

Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

Ellen Ullman

#12. U.S. Speedskating has been riddled with problems since when I started my career, and we were always able to look past that. When it came down to performing on the ice, regardless of funding issues, we were always able to make it happen. And that's what it's all about.

Apolo Ohno

#13. It's in that moment, when there's nothing, that you find out what you were willing to forgive, and what not. Too late for that, though. Too late.

Kate Wrath

#14. Nothing could do that to them, that's what they used to whisper as they sat on the back stairs, in the dark and the dust, as if desire were a matter of personal choice.

Alice Hoffman

#15. A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.

Caterina Fake

#16. What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Soren Kierkegaard

#17. You can be in a state of mind for a few seconds and forget that you were ever in any other state of mind. That's what we mean by illusion.

Frederick Lenz

#18. Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#19. And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.

Anne Lamott

#20. There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

Jodi Picoult

#21. There was no one to comfort the children, no one to embrace them, no one to love them. Care and control were what the dormitories were all about, not love and affection.

Ruth Hegarty

#22. For each of us, there comes a time when we must awaken and become what we were born to become.

Seth Adam Smith

#23. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!

Jack London

#24. In every single culture I encountered, there were always women who defied cultural norms to do what they believed was right for them. This phenomenon has never been related to how rich, poor, successful or not successful the woman may be.

Zainab Salbi

#25. I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.

Daniel Goldstein

#26. I don't care what you write man, just make sure you make us sound sexy. Say that we looked like we'd just come from the beach and that our bodies were glistening. Say we got no hair on our chests. Anything so the girls will like us.

Nathan Followill

#27. Finally they reached the Colosseum, where a dozen guys in cheap gladiator costumes were scuffling with the police - plastic swords versus batons. Percy wasn't sure what that was about, but he and Annabeth decided to keep walking. Sometimes mortals were even stranger than monsters.

Rick Riordan

#28. I wish i were someone else, even though i know i'll never, ever be able to get away from what i've done and what's been done to me.

David Levithan

#29. Last night you said you wanted to know what to expect so you could better select your attire. I told you we were going to visit a vampire in a Goth-den tonight. Why, then, Ms. Lane, do you look like a perky rainbow?

Karen Marie Moning

#30. But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

Allison Winn Scotch

#31. To give you an idea what it feels like to be going in with some of the best baseball players of all-time, I mean it is fantastic. I have to say this about them, there are so many of these guys up here that were my role models, people I looked up to, people I wanted to be like.

Dave Winfield

#32. Kubrick never explained the ending to us, or what his intentions were. He didn't intend for it to be a predictable film.

Keir Dullea

#33. What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily.

Rosamunde Pilcher

#34. Our leaders have asked for 'shared sacrifice.' But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

Warren Buffett

#35. 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

#36. What data did you notice about the week, what stood out for you? What were your emotional reactions to the week? What made you happy? Where were you challenged? Where were you frustrated? What were your insights? What did you learn? What one or two things will you do based on this week?

Anonymous

#37. And like some part of himself that, two days ago, had thought pray and propriety were antidote enough to what ailed the world.

Zoe Ferraris

#38. Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude
they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.

Herb Elliott

#39. Bookstores contain the residue of thousands of people who went in there to find an experience, a narrative that guided them to a new place or reinforced what they were doing.

Lauren Leto

#40. I wondered if all creatures were drawn to what was dangerous or if we merely wanted light at any cost and were willing to burn for our desires.

Alice Hoffman

#41. What is most heartbreaking to me is the young women who don't report [being raped] because they were drinking, and they feel like it was their fault that they were drinking. I mean, that is so common.

Claire McCaskill

#42. The hardest part of growing old is remembering what it was like when you were young. Alvin in The Straight Story (movie)

Dan Carruthers

#43. The echo of the gunshots lingered; it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob, and I didn't believe what I was hearing. They were chanting, 'We want peace. We want peace.'

Jarreth J. Merz

#44. Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.

Kurt Vonnegut

#45. What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.

Chief Seattle

#46. The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.

Carol Gilligan

#47. What fools the public were! They were exactly like sheep ... thought Mr. Abbott sleepily ... following each other's lead, neglecting one book and buying another just because other people were buying it, although, for the life of you, you couldn't see what the one lacked and the other possessed.

D.E. Stevenson

#48. My last sort of crisis was about overcoming the people who were more interested in what I had done than what I was doing in the present.

Keith Olbermann

#49. The morning, when I need to have opinions and answers across the board very quickly, is a constant fight between ease and inspiration, what will make our lives easier versus what will make us excited because we were ambitious.

Allison Silverman

#50. That's what I loved about show business, no two days were alike. It's an exciting life.

Barbara Mandrell

#51. In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.

Eli Pariser

#52. I always had a love for kids' clothes, but having your own kids is a better education for what is practical. I used to buy such crazy things for the store that were so much fun but not the most practical.

Kourtney Kardashian

#53. All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

Carl Jung

#54. Why, if one were Queen, would one ever want to marry? If one is ruler, is it not better to both King and Queen? That is exactly what a woman can do if she remains without a mate.

Kathryn Lasky

#55. I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

Don McLean

#56. Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth.

Allison Anders

#57. I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for their children.

Muhammad Yunus

#58. When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and newspapers began to take an interest in what I had produced. This sudden Arab interest is a form of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Hassan Blasim

#59. When George first told me about the title, I wasn't so sure he was serious," Burtt says. "It seemed like such an extreme-sounding pulp title. But that's what we were making: a big version of those old serials, with names like 'Fate Takes the Wheel' or 'The Crimson Ghost Strikes Out.'

J.W. Rinzler

#60. If I waited long enough and said, "Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30?" everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way.

Anna Quindlen

#61. My characters were ... rebelling against something ... My own bad writing. I wouldn't do for my characters what they needed for me to do - be courageous enough in my writing to make them interesting.

John Scalzi

#62. There aren't many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don't speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself - people were curious about what I was doing.

John Foster

#63. _I_ boil it." Joseph entered last, closing the door behind them. "Last time, you burnt it."
Connor glared at Joseph. "We were attacked! What would you have me tell the Abenaki? 'I cannae fight just now. I'm makin' candy. Would you like a wee taste?

Pamela Clare

#64. 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

#65. For, were it not good that evil things should also exist, the omnipotent God would almost certainly not allow evil to be, since beyond doubt it is just as easy for Him not to allow what He does not will, as for Him to do what He will.

Saint Augustine

#66. What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

Steve Earle

#67. It was amazing the things you could bring yourself to do when you felt insecure, when you were out to protect your heart. You could deny it what it wants most, just for the sake of saving your pride or dodging another bullet.

Rachael Wade

#68. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

Don DeLillo

#69. But you have so much in common. You're both from strange little backwater planets. You both have odd powers. You're male and she's female. What more do you need? Believe me, buddy, if I were you, I'd go right up there and ask her if she wants to ride on my rancor.

Dave Wolverton

#70. Don't you dare hide behind your illness!"
"You were the one who just said I couldn't help it!"
"You can't help being ill, but you can help what you do about it," Eithne says sharply.

Tess Stimson

#71. It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

Soren Kierkegaard

#72. One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

Kenneth Clark

#73. 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

#74. He could hear his granny speaking. "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.

Terry Pratchett

#75. I have never had a secret hero in my mind but I have kept a lot of mentors in my mind that are heroes. Gandhi, Jesus, Moses, Martin Luther King they were all secret heroes in my mind because they stood for what they wanted, what they believed in.

John Assaraf

#76. What were the unrealistic expectations I had, and how can I better manage these next time?

Lysa TerKeurst

#77. In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

N. T. Wright

#78. Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#79. What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modelled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials.

Maureen Callahan

#80. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#81. Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns: they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name.

Anjelica Huston

#82. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.

Mary Oliver

#83. 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

#84. My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.

Lynn Coady

#85. For my own part, I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.'s - I didn't see any of that coming until it happened.

Janet Yellen

#86. Don't tell me what was said about me. Tell me why they were so comfortable to say it to you.

Jay-Z

#87. It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record."

Justin Vernon

#88. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."

Ronald Reagan

#89. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.

James W. Loewen

#90. We have the opportunity to pour into them what they were created to be; and pullout the treasure that they cannot yet see.

Momma Moon

#91. Are you available to travel? What kind of questions were these? Was the second one even allowed in a job interview? Still, she'd answered as best she could and finally read a question that made sense:

Melody Anne

#92. My parents were not musical, and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The music that I played was loud; it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn't have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do.

Don McLean

#93. 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

#94. We all have a different image of what old is, and if you were exposed to senior citizens at a young age, as I was, it can color your soul with terror.

Billy Crystal

#95. It had rained on some vivid green ferns in Maine and it was quite beautiful. I was moving the camera slightly and studying the ground glass. Looking at those 20 square inches, trying to find out just what were the right elements to include.

John Sexton

#96. The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.

Richard Thaler

#97. What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories
that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

Richelle Mead

#98. What is the cost of replacing and bringing up to speed one of your managers, supervisors, or front-line employees who left because they were frustrated with your organization's leadership?

Liz Weber

#99. So they put them to flight by Allah's permission. And Dawood slew Jalut, and Allah gave him kingdom and wisdom, and taught him of what He pleased. And were it not for Allah's repelling some men with others, the earth would certainly be in a state of disorder; but Allah is Gracious to the creatures.

Anonymous

#100. Were you just smoking and chewing tobacco at the same time?"
"What are you my mom?"
"Do I look like I blow truckers for food stamps?

Ransom Riggs