Nagging Quotes - Page 3

• Reducing our desires and eliminating false neediness is the answer to resolving the nagging inner discomfort that we feel.

  Angelina Love

  Angel, Desire, Answers

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• The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

  Paul Goodman

  Children, Long Ago, Profound

  Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (p. 85), 1956.

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• The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present--tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.

  Daniel Levitin

  Mind, Moments, Undone

  Daniel Levitin (2015). “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload”, p.90, Penguin UK

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• Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.

  William S. Burroughs

  Special, Flesh, Aging

  William S. Burroughs (2012). “Junky: The Definitive Text of "Junk"”, p.150, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Eventually, competition and adventure wane, and I enter my ibuprofen phase. Tweaky hamstrings and achy knees restrict mileage, but I continue running for health, sanity, and the ritual of a Sunday trail run with like-minded buddies. We discuss the nagging injuries that bedevil us, and remember the good old days when we were kings.

  Don Kardong

  Running, Kings, Adventure

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• Washington is nicknamed "The Evergreen State" because it sounds better than "The Incessant Nagging Drizzle State."

  Dave Barry

  Sound, Drizzle, States

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need”, p.97, Ballantine Books

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• There's only one way kids will wear helmets, and that's if their parents are nagging them to. They will never wear helmets because some state passes a law requiring it.

  Dave Barry

  Kids, Law, Parent

  "'All I Think Is That It's Stupid': An Interview with Dave Barry". Interview with Glenn Garvin, reason.com. December 1, 1994.

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• We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two. Our dreams are pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days.

  Paula Gunn Allen

  Dream, Memories, Two

  Paula Gunn Allen (1997). “Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995”

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• Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn't "matter", that it's trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I'd write about art.

  Susan Orlean

  Fashion, Art, Writing

  "Ask the Author Live: Susan Orlean on Jean Paul Gaultier". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. September 16, 2011.

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• Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper...and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn't know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind's corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.

  Mary Cantwell

  Happiness, Girl, Blue

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• Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

  John Green

  Alaska, Way In Life, People

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• When we are capable of living in the moment free from the tyranny of "shoulds," free from the nagging sensation that this moment isn't right, we will have peaceful hearts.

  Joan Z. Borysenko

  Life, Peace, Heart

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• The weather's cold. My club's bad. My knee hurts. I can't putt no more. I'm off my diet. My wife is nagging me. Other than that, everything's great.

  Don Zimmer

  Hurt, Weather, Wife

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• There were probably a few games I played where I should not have played, because of some nagging injuries or something. I used to always talk the managers into playing me, because I wanted to play so badly.

  Gary Carter

  Games, Play, Injury

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• He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

  Terry Pratchett

  Book, Imagination, Interesting

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• Senator John McCain, who spent over five years in a Vietnamese POW camp, publicly releases 1,000 pages of medical records. Now people are left with only open nagging questions: what kind of freak has 1,000 pages of medical records?

  Jon Stewart

  Years, People, Records

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• These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Wise, Book, Hands

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• Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream - of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete - lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs.

  Glenn Kurtz

  Dream, Giving Up, Athlete

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• I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

  John Guare

  Real, Believe, Artist

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• The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn't remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he's telling the truth.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Lying, Knowing

  Dave Barry (1994). “The World According to Dave Barry”, Outlet

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• Do you feel insecure because you keep getting the nagging feeling that you're not that smart? Well, I've got good news for you, my friend. You have no need to be insecure. That nagging feeling is absolutely right on target. You are not that smart. But I have more good news for you. You are also not alone.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Smart, Insecure, Feelings

  Ellen DeGeneres (2003). “The Funny Thing Is...”, p.79, Simon and Schuster

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• There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

  Lauren DeStefano

  Dream, Clothes, Feelings

  Lauren DeStefano (2012). “Fever”, p.152, Simon and Schuster

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• The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Doubt, Mind

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• Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren't my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

  Phil McGraw

  People, Goal, Expectations

  Dr. Phil McGraw (2003). “Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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• She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.

  Laini Taylor

  Girl, Missing, Magic

  Laini Taylor (2011). “Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy”, p.35, Hachette UK

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