When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
If you're fighting with emotion instead of structure. . . it's always going to be a mistake.
No one wants to hear about how awesome you were; people want to hear about the time you blew it. So I think the longer you do stand-up, the more comfortable you are. You stop wanting to hide your foibles and instead want to show who you are.
The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense.
We both [with Suzanne Collins ] felt strongly that you wouldn't want to age up the characters, no matter the age of the actors playing the roles. They should be playing the age that they are in the [Hunger Games] books. It would let people off the hook, if you said, "Well, instead of 12 to 18, why don't you make them 18 to 25 or 16 to 21?" If you don't stay true to the horror of the fact that they are 12 to 18, you're not doing justice to the book.
I wish I was CEO of 4chan instead
If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.
Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users' daily routines and emotions.
Almost every day, instead of going to school, I made for the fields, where I spent my day.
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness are like the days of spring. Instead of complaining, O my heart, of their brief duration, try to enjoy them.
there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.
Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
We're looking for stories that speak to us. We're looking for stories that connect us with something true. But, instead, a lot of the time we get strippers. All I'm saying is, when boys are writing the stories, the percentage of strippers is bound to go up. And real stories about real women kinda don't get written at all.
I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.
Who gives an empire, by the gift defeats All end of giving; and procures contempt Instead of gratitude.
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
Printing up extra money - with no backing - used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don't apologize for it. They don't hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they're proud of it. . . announcing that they 'saved civilization,' or some such claptrap.
The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is the time we usually keep an eye on. Kairos was our participation of time. Time that moves us so that we lose our sense of time; timeless time; moments at which the clocks seems to stop; feeding, renewing, more motherly time. It's the time with which we feel one instead of outside of it, the self, the tao, the love that connects us to others.
A lot of "successful" people are tragedies, because what they've accomplished aren't the things they wanted. Intentionally create the question "how" instead of accidentally relenting to the question of "should. " If I'm not intentionally choosing a good attitude, I'm almost always unintentionally choosing a negative one.