Top 100 What They Had Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I think what my father appreciated was the science experiment of life. He had these kids, and they had their own experiences. He wanted us to discover the world for ourselves.
Ahmet Zappa
#3. When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.
Laura Donnelly
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. As much as the Pulitzer is the hallmark of journalism, I think what I love the most is when somebody says they took my column and it's in their wallet. I have had people open their wallet and show me a corner of a column.
Regina Brett
#7. I've never had any problem with criticism. I've given a lot, and I've copped a lot. But I believe I've got a role to play by insisting that women be judged by their contribution - not somebody's view of what they should be about.
Joan Kirner
#8. It was important for a person not to let their body or mind become slow and dull. Oba believed it was important to learn new things. He believed it was important to grow. He thought it was important for a person to use what they had learned. That was how people grew.
Terry Goodkind
#9. Christ was crucified by the Jews who had wanted a temporal ruler to rescue them from the oppressive Roman authorities. Instead God sent them a spiritual leader to rescue them from their sins ... He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.
Paul Weyrich
#10. D-Bo had a great game, so now a lot of teams, they're not sure what to do. They can't just key on me. They've got to key on both of us. D-Bo had a coming-out party.
Calvin Johnson
#11. 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
#12. What was Christmas for, if not joy?
And they had the most special gift of all to celebrate.
Roxanne Snopek
#13. But what really gets me is that in order for Mr. Daniels to come up with this plan, he must have thought of me outside of school - when he didn't have to think of me. I bet other teachers have never let me sit in their head one second longer than they had to.
Lynda Mullaly Hunt
#14. 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
#15. Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they'd say on television later.
Orson Scott Card
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.
Austan Goolsbee
#19. 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
#20. They're politicians,' Win said. 'They'd lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.
Harlan Coben
#21. 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
#22. Life was too short though to agonize over the little stuff; sometimes you had to do what was best for you and if your family loved you they would be happy regardless.
L.A. Fiore
#23. Griff held his breath, waiting for it, knowing the axe would fall and he'd start dying as soon as he walked out the fucking door, and Dante would just grin and joke and try to forget what they had done together in this room.
Damon Suede
#24. 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
#25. China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel.
Rosemary Mahoney
#26. In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Yanko Tsvetkov
#27. 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
#28. Iain didn't know what to say to her. They had all asked an incredible amount from her. She was such an innocent, too. Hell, she wasn't even married, and yet they'd demanded she deliver a baby. He wasn't even certain if she knew how Isabelle had conceived the babe.
Julie Garwood
#29. It seems that England's royal family is running out of money. They are down to just $1.6 million. Well sure, that's what happens when nobody in your family has had a job for the last thousand years.
Jay Leno
#30. When you see somebody who's got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they're constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into - constantly horrified by the things people do.
Daniel Clowes
#31. This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn't understand what they meant for a long, long time.
Adam Johnson
#32. People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.
Peter O'Toole
#33. 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
#34. Circumstances being what they are, I haven't had the opportunity to fall in love. Have you?" "Yes,
Kiera Cass
#35. Maleela stalked up to him and slapped him hard across the right cheek. Her eyes fumed with anger. "You idiot! Do you have any idea what would have happened if they had caught
Christian Warren Freed
#36. What the hell did people have to keep them occupied on a damp and windy day in January apart from sitting indoors and lapping up the story of somebody who had suffered even more than they were doing.
Hakan Nesser
#37. What they didn't tell you about absolute power was that it was never absolute; the instant you had it, someone had already lined up to try to take it away. Princes could sleep soundly, but never kings. The ear was always tuned for the creak on the
Dennis Lehane
#38. Poor Mary. They married her to Jesus, and Jesus is an asexual circumcised revolutionary. What future is there to be had in that scenario?
Rawi Hage
#39. But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.
Siri Hustvedt
#40. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.
Henry David Thoreau
#41. When people talk about how in America, anybody can grow up to be President, I'm not sure George Bush is exactly what they had in mind.
Will Durst
#42. I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind.
Etta James
#43. What does happen constantly with all kinds of people I meet is they say "I had this encounter with Jesus, can you help me understand it ... " The labels, more than ever, simply aren't big enough to contain what the cosmic Christ is up to in the world.
Rob Bell
#44. It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.
Jodi Picoult
#45. There were nine children in my father's family and eight in my mother's. My grandparents did the best with what they had. After the Depression, they were scratching out a living and working hard. They kept the family going.
Cheryl Ladd
#46. People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.
Terry Pratchett
#47. Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.
William S. Burroughs
#48. What right had they to make me suffer like that?
Anna Sewell
#49. I have cervical cancer. I'm what they call a DES baby ... I have been cancer free for 7 years now ... I had it the first time when I was 19 and then it came back a few years later after I went through treatment.
Amy Weber
#50. 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
#51. Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?
Josephine Baker
#52. As they walked he glanced sideways and at last asked, "You are the one they call Pug?"
If Pug hadn't already been surprised by what they had encountered, he was now openly taken aback. "Yes," he said.
"I'd thought you'd be taller," mused the Pantathian.
Raymond E. Feist
#53. Most people - however much they might deny it - had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.
Donna Leon
#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. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell ... I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.
John Muir
#56. "Faith is what's wrong with the world, Aidan. Or don't you follow the news?"
"That's not faith," he says. "That's the complete lack of it. If any one of those mass-genocidal idiots had faith, they wouldn't have the insane need to prove it to others."
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
#57. Sarah Michelle Gellar's made some really good choices. She's had some bad breaks. She goes with the independent, interesting young filmmakers and then they get slammed, like 'Southland Tales.' I'm proud of what she's trying to do. It's hard.
Joss Whedon
#58. Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn?
Thanhha Lai
#59. There was no justice in the world, but he had known that ever since the death of his father. The spirits took no part in the lives of men once they had been born. A man either endured what the world sent his way, or was crushed.
Conn Iggulden
#60. I like to pour my wines for people. I watch their eyes, I can see what they'll like. Most people say they don't like dry wine because they haven't had a dry wine that's clean and fruity, instead of a big, oaky thing.
Pat Paulsen
#61. I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
David Antin
#62. Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
Isabel Wilkerson
#63. Everyone had heard what happened and they were all so pleased, so very pleased. Which seems a little odd, but in Cainsville "a little odd" was the norm.
Kelley Armstrong
#64. Do what?she asked, leaning forward, imagining what he had in mind that they might do and would it include her hands on his dragon.
Ophelia London
#65. Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.
Mariella Frostrup
#67. I don't seem to have ever had a plan, but I have always been quite good at walking through doors when they are opened. I am never any good at anticipating what will happen next, but I always go for it when it does.
Julian Fellowes
#68. When I first heard the term 'training bra,' I was freaked out. I was pretty young and I said, 'Did you just say training bra? They're training their chests? I had no idea.' See some lady, her boobs are everywhere. 'What's her deal?' Those are untrained titties.
Demetri Martin
#69. You were just a caretaker. They didn't have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.
George Saunders
#70. When I go speak to these kids through my foundation and am able to sit down and tell them some of the things that I've been through, they can look up and relate to me, and they can understand the feelings I had that are similar to what they're going through and feeling.
Marshawn Lynch
#71. Neil worried for a moment what they'd do with Andrew's rude brand of teamwork at their backs, but the next time he got a good look at Matt, Matt was grinning like this was the most fun he'd had in years. It
Nora Sakavic
#72. I would challenge anybody in their darkest moment to write what they're grateful for, even stupid little things like the green grass that made them feel good, the friendly conversation they had with somebody on an alevator. You start to realize how rich you are.
Jim Carrey
#73. The cavemen, when they saw the antelopes, they had to scratch them on to the caves because they needed to express the immediacy of what they were being affected by - and I love that. That is why I do what I do. I need to express myself.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#74. Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to.
Faye Wattleton
#75. I grew up in the church and had always questioned what they were telling me.
Jimmy Cliff
#76. Death was hard, I got that, but it was only hard for those you left behind. Life was what was really difficult. Everyone here no longer had to suffer, be in pain, relive past mistakes. They were sleeping on, unaware of the problems around them. Death seemed like the easy way out. Life was harder.
Bailey Ardisone
#77. We knew, very early on, that we had to be very, very clear that directors need to speak to actors and actresses and be very clear about what is expected, and find out whether they're comfortable with that. Wardrobe has to be in place. There have to be checks.
Michael Sheen
#78. The questions had become: What can we forgive in others? How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them?
Hanif Kureishi
#79. The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.
Mary McCarthy
#80. When I sit near you, my hands suddenly become alien things and I don't know where to put them or what they usually do, like this is the first time I've ever had hands and maybe they go in my pockets and maybe they don't.
Pleasefindthis
#81. Before my first child was born, I had nothing going on professionally really, and it's been a very blessed period of creativity for me since he arrived. It's very surreal. It's almost as if the babies are out there pulling strings somewhere, deciding what kind of life they want to be born into.
Seth Gabel
#82. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#83. If more men would see a story of what it was like to be pregnant, and how it felt to be in a place where you had to make a decision about whether to keep a pregnancy, maybe they would feel differently about women's health care.
Reese Witherspoon
#84. I was very lucky in that my parents were very broad-minded. Because they had come from another country and hadn't been able to fulfill their dreams, they wanted me to be more of myself, if you know what I mean.
Anne-Marie Duff
#85. The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.
Sol Luckman
#86. By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac's "1984" commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B's, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told.
Brent Schlender
#87. In football we always said that the other team couldn't beat us. We had to be sure that we didn't beat ourselves. And that's what people have to do, too-make sure they don't beat themselves.
Woody Hayes
#88. If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.
Kathleen Norris
#89. Now, having had this experience, I can't say really what they were looking for. I don't know their minds. But every time I see a reality show, it seems that the most entertaining parts on other reality shows are when they make their guests look foolish.
Liza Minnelli
#90. In the old days, spies had done they'd done because they loved their country, because they believed in what they were doing. But he'd never been given a choice. Nowadays, spies weren't employed. They were used.
Anthony Horowitz
#91. And when they looked at her they thought that they had never before known what beauty meant.
C.S. Lewis
#92. If anybody is so mad at Vladimir Putin, you know what they could do? They could advocate for a gas tax. He gets all his leverage from selling gas and oil. If we had a gas tax that made that less palatable, he would be less of a player on the world stage.
Bill Maher
#93. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
George Eliot
#94. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
Dashiell Hammett
#95. It's such a relief to see Catholic and Protestant ministers getting on - that's so rare. And in 'I'd Do Anything,' I've had so much support from folks back home, no matter what side they're on.
Rachel Tucker
#96. Pescatore marveled at the seascape. It gave him vertigo. The wind deployed cloud formations. The sun seared the Moroccan coastline. He had read a line once about "the lion-colored hills of Africa." Were they lion-colored? What color was a lion exactly?
Sebastian Rotella
#97. What they had felt as fragile as a floating dandelion seed rising through the hot summer air. Matt had no idea where it would go.
Jan Irving
#98. I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that's what I did.
Gretchen Mol
#99. Sometimes in a defeat, you can set the stage for future victory. I wanted them to feel good about what they had accomplished. Not to like losing, but to like the success that they had.
Mike Krzyzewski
#100. Kiki had to be carried whenever they left the house, or she'd be eaten by wild animals. At least, that's what Frank seemed to think. The dog, spoiled as she was, wholeheartedly agreed.
Nicole Castle
