Way Quotes - Page 15

• Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.... To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully, and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock

  Opportunity, Faces, Stamps

  Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1901). “Thoughts for Every-day Living from the Spoken and Written Words of Maltbie Davenport Babcock”

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• Every performer who ever performed in rock and roll or even close to it is lying if they tell you that they weren't influenced in some way or another by Elvis Presley. He turned the world around.

  Mac Davis

  Lying, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  "Interview with singer/songwriter Mac Davis". Interview with David Adams, www.elvis.com.au. May 09, 2015.

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• There are two ways to wake up. You can wake up thinking about what you know, or you wake up thinking and saying 'What can I learn?.' That's a very different approach.

  Tori Amos

  Thinking, Two, Different

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• When something bad happens to me, I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.

  Christie Brinkley

  Fall, Thinking, People

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• I would not leave you in your times of trouble. We never could have come this far. I took the good times, I'll take the bad times, I'll take you just the way you are.

  Billy Joel

  Good Times, Trouble, Bad Times

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• Our patriotic fervor was the result of the old and widespread belief in the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America was a new thing in history, different from other countries. Other nations had evolved one way or another, evolved from tribes from a gathering of clans, from inevitabilities of language and tradition and geography. But America was born, and born of ideas: that all men are created equal, that they have been given by God certain rights that can be taken from them by no man, and that those rights combine to create a thing called freedom.

  Peggy Noonan

  Country, Business, Taken

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• Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

  Richard Dawkins

  Independent, Brain, Reason Why

  Richard Dawkins (2006). “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition”, p.332, OUP Oxford

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• Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, a revolution and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realise during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany's plight.

  Ian Kershaw

  War, History, Political

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• The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.

  Albert Einstein

  Memorable, Goes On, Corruption

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.25, Princeton University Press

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• Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.

  Jack Ma

  Team, Memorable, Intelligent

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• Often nothing keeps the pupil on the move but his faith in his teacher, whose mastery is now beginning to dawn on him .... How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to help him endure his loneliness: he turns him away from himself, from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself has done, and to "climb on the shoulders of his teacher."

  Eugen Herrigel

  Teacher, Loneliness, Teaching

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• Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."

  Amy Hempel

  Girl, Book, Boys

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• ...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

  Anne Lamott

  Cat, Interesting, Crafts

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

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• The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.

  Leon Uris

  Prayer, Men, Discipline

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• The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Facts, Events

  The Sacred Wood "Hamlet and His Problems" (1920).

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• So I made an outline. Well, you know, days are going by, and I am not writing anything because this thing is laid out in front of me. It's as if you get every brochure for a trip you are going to go on and you get the minutest details of every step along the way. Well, I really doubt you're going to then get in the car and go. You know, it's like, why bother if it's all laid out in front of you?

  Steve Tesich

  Writing, Car, Doubt

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• Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

  Lillian Hellman

  Teaching, Majority Vote, Government

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• The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to write in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think that you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel. I think for most people it's just practice, practice, practice, that sense of just learning your instrument until - when you have an idea on the violin, you don't have to translate it into violin-speak anymore - the language is your own. It's not something you can think your way into, or outsmart. you've just got to do it.

  Kevin Canty

  Writing, Thinking, Practice

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• Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

  Roland Barthes

  Father, Oedipus, Law

  Roland Barthes (2012). “How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces”, p.190, Columbia University Press

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• I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.

  William H. Gass

  Mad, Sick, House

  William H. Gass, Theodore G. Ammon (2003). “Conversations with William H. Gass”, p.34, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• You put me in a race where there's a lot on the line, especially when people tell me 'you can't win', or 'you're too small', you tell me those things and I'll find a way to prove you wrong.

  Mirinda Carfrae

  Loss, Winning, Race

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• As soon as you start publishing, you are the star and so people see you that way.

  Jeffrey Walker

  Stars, People, Blogging

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• The word, and the concept of feminism, was a gift because it gave me a sense of identity and a way of defining how I wished to live my life.

  Betty Buckley

  Feminist, Feminism, Identity

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• Feminism has led the way in demystifying personal relations, forcefully insisting they are political to the core.

  Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

  Political, Feminism, Anti Feminist

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