If you're a voracious reader and you write something that you want to read, odds are other people will want to read it, too.
The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.
I just love seeing people embrace freedom, faith, and courage in the face of enormous odds.
I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
Volunteering is an act of heroism on a grand scale. And it matters profoundly. It does more than help people beat the odds; it changes the odds.
The odds were against us, but we deserve to be where we are.
Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere. . . . Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.
Historically, the stock market is like a gambling casino with the odds in your favor. Over the long pull, stocks are given something like nine and a half to ten percent compounded per year. The banks have probably given you something in the order of four to five.
Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.
There's an awful lot about our society that is at odds with the basic message of "don't smoke, be active, eat a healthy diet, and by the way control stress and get enough sleep. " We don't make those things easy. We ideally would make health lie along the path of least resistance. But if not the path of least resistance, there at least needs to be a path so you don't have to bushwhack your way there.
When you have a powerful, long-term vision for something, even against all odds and adversity, you will continue to make progress and people will want to get on board. Why? Because everybody wants to be a part of something great.
If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
To place your dreams before the crowd is to risk ridicule. To go forward in the face of overwhelming odds is to risk failure. But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard of life is to risk nothing.
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
It's a great challenge to come from little New Zealand and beat the odds in Hollywood.
They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood splatters in the freezer and tossed the tissues in with Howie’s waste. It bothered him that he was leaving evidence behind without some sort of oxygenated bleach, those blood splatters would still show up under Luminol. Of course, the odds of anyone deciding to spray down the morgue freezer and switch on an ultraviolet light were pretty minimal, so it’s not like it was evidence that anyone would ever find or use. Still: Billy Dent’s First Commandment was “Thou shalt not leave evidence.
A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.
Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
I won’t bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave.