Kindlehighlight Quotes

“Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.”
― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

“They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

“Like people would ever want to read books on an electronic screen.”
― Blake Crouch, Serial Uncut: Extended Edition

“Has a sense of humor. (Preferably warped.) We know who we are”
― Susan Scott, Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst "Best" Practices of Business Today

“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

“Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Taren Ferry folk had a reputation for slyness and trickery. If you shook hands with a Taren Ferry man, people said, you counted your fingers afterwards.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It’s a lot harder to pull your head up and ask why.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.”
― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

“My Spanish is limited to burrito and taco,”
― Janet Evanovich, Hard Eight

“At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.”
― Brian D. McLaren

“To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“You know, you remind me of my younger brother. I miss that kid, so much that I sometimes regret killing him.”
― Jack Kilborn, Serial Uncut: Extended Edition

“Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.”
― Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

“I review my three boyfriends, the three men I slept with in my twenties, searching for a common thread. Nothing. No consistent features, coloring, stature, personality. But one theme does emerge: they all picked me. And then dumped me. I played the passive role. Waiting for Hunter and then settling for Joey. Waiting to feel more for Nate. Then waiting to feel less. Waiting for Alec to go away and leave me in peace. And now Dex. My number four. And I am still waiting. For all of this to blow over. For his September wedding. For someone who gives me that tingly feeling as I watch him sleeping in...”
― Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed

“It’s my belief that animals can help a human being travel to the wounds of childhood. The best part is, once you go there, you can fix things. Get on with life.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“The perfect human being is uninteresting. — Joseph Campbell”
― Laura Greenwald, Eye of the Beholder: True Stories of People with Facial Differences

“over his own dark Cealdish beard. “Nothing like your marvelous facebear,”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …”
― Janet Evanovich, Hot Six

“I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive.”
― ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

“followed a step behind. My thoughts churned as my emotions seesawed”
― Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass

“A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn’t predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried.”
― Cathy Lamb, Such a Pretty Face

“It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.”
― Bill Bryson

“Stop doing stuff that doesn’t help you reach your goals. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s a shame almost no one does it. The most common way we work more and do less is by working on the wrong stuff. We spend our time doing, doing, doing, even if the doing has nothing to do with our goals, business, or life.”
― Stever Robbins, Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More

“A child’s stories are simpler to understand because the language has not been developed to the point of high abstraction. An adult tells stories far more obtuse in nature.”
― John S. Savage, Listening and Caring Skills in Ministry: A Guide for Groups and Leaders

“I fell, as they say. Into love. I practiced saying it, first to myself, in my head. I believed in it. I did. I thought love and I bought it completely. I was excited by my belief but was careful not to let this excitement influence or manipulate the belief in any way. The belief had to be pure. So I said it to her, I love you, and she said it back. And this was our contract. We treated the words seriously and respected that they came with implications.”
― Kyle Beachy, The Slide