Over It All Quotes

“Wait a second," Andy said, snapping his fingers. "You're Vietnamese." "Don't say it," Sun warned. But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn't resist. "You're a Vietnam vet." Sun's face became even harder, something Andy hadn't thought possible. "Never heard that one before. Open the pen there." Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door. "I've visited Viet Nam twice," Andy said. "Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it's actually very tranquil, don't you think?" "I wouldn't know. I've never been there. I'm an American.”

— Lee Goldberg

“He called her'daughter of Abraham,' which likely sent a shock wave through the room; it was the first time the phrase had ever been spoken. People had only ever heard 'sons of Abraham'
never daughters. But at the sound of Jesus' words daughter of Abraham, he gave her a place to stand alongside the sons, especially the ones snarling with their sense of ownership and exclusivity over it all, watching.”

— Sarah Bessey

“There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one's very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself.”

— Jean Bethke Elshtain

“People fall in and out of love all the time, and sometimes people have numerous loves throughout their lives. But you have two epic loves and no matter who you were with, I don't think you'd ever get over or forget the other.”

— Molly McAdams

“Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.”

— Erin Bow

“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”

— Bruce Sterling

“The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”

— John Steinbeck

“There were letters on the bottom, letters he'd seen before, on the ship that had carried him from London, the ship that had broken up on the reef that guarded the island. The letters said: NEVER LAND.
Peter looked at it. And then he looked around him
at the lagoon; at the rock where the mermaids (Mermaids!) lounged; at the palm-fringed beach; at the tinkling fairy flitting over his head; at his new friends the Mollusks; at the jungle-covered, pirate-infested mountains looming over it all.
Then he looked at the board again, and he laughed out loud.
'That's exactly where I am,' he said.”

— Dave Barry

“One has to discover everything for oneself. And get over it all alone.”

— Tove Jansson

“Maybe we were all destined to just keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, never really learning a single thing.”

— Sarah Dessen

“... Or he could choose life. At that pivotal moment, it occurred to him that with all his
schooling in theology he had, perhaps, missed the entire point of his studies, the very
crux of the gospel he had professed to believe. That the measure of a person's heart, the
barometer of good or evil, was nothing more than the extent of their willingness to
choose life over death. That the path of God was, simply, the path of life, abundant and
eternal. And this is where he failed, for to choose life is to choose sorrow as well as joy,
pain as well as pleasure. When Hunter had buried Rachel, he buried along with her his
heart, lest it might heal and feel and grow again. And in so doing he had chosen more
than death, he had chosen damnation itself, for damnation is nothing more than to stop
a thing in its eternal progression. In that first flight from West Chester he had run not
only from the horror and pain of death but from life itself.
”

— Richard Paul Evans

“In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is "unequivocal," sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we "will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate." However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.”

— Diane Ackerman

“According to the Cato Institute, in 1997 alone, the Pentagon handed over more than 1.2 million pieces of military equipment to local police departments.36 Similarly, the National Journal reported that between January 1997 and October 1999, the agency handled 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from over eleven thousand domestic police agencies in all fifty states.”

— Michelle Alexander

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”

— Nelson Algren

“And over it all, the butterflies swarmed, like a million yellow-pettalled flowers dancing on swirling winds.”

— Steven Erikson

“Your real self - the 'I am I' - is master of this land, the ruler of this empire. You rightfully have power and dominion over it, all its inhabitants, and all contained in its realm.”

— Robert Collier

“It doesn't help to just get women's opinions and then turn them over to an all-white-male engineering team.”

— Anita Borg

“I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned to the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible-even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness-to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child's vision.”

— Hermann Hesse

“Grandmere says she can't get over the change in me. She says I seem taller. And you know maybe I am. She thinks it's because I'm wearing another one of Sebastiano's original creations, designed just for me,just like the dress that was supposed to make Michael see me as more than just his little sister's best friend ... except that it turned out he already did. But I know that's not it. And it isn't love, either. Well, not entirely. I'll tell you what it is: self-actualization. That and the fact that it turns out I'm really a princess, after all. I must be, because guess what? I'm living happily ever after.”

— Meg Cabot

“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“After we left the hospital this afternoon, Mum and I went over to Alice's place to meet Ben and the kids. We all had pizza for dinner. (Thankfully Roger had a Rotary meeting; I was not in the mood for Roger. I can't think of anyone ever being in the mood for Roger, except for Mum, presumably, and Roger, of course.) We didn't tell the children that Alice had lost her memory. We just said she'd hit her head at the gym but she was going to be fine.”

— Liane Moriarty

“I feel, first of all, very privileged that these people think enough of me that they made me commissioner. And it's almost like, as Yogi Berra said, 'deja vu all over again.'”

— Bobby Hull

“It was like hitting the snooze button on your alarm-your sleep in that window is never very good, since you know it's borrowed time, and that it will be over all too soon.”

— Morgan Matson

“In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean bearing cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, scattering over it all kinds of animals; in the courses of the winds, and in the clouds pressed into service between earth and sky, there are indeed signs for people who use their reason.”

— Anonymous.

“Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.”

— Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

“In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.”

— Nina Fedoroff

“It might have looked beautiful, had she not known what corruption and filth dwelt within it. And what monstrosity ruled over it all.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.”

— Don DeLillo

“She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said-it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness-this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really-tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too-the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys.”

— Wally Lamb

“He wanted her hands on him, he wanted her mouth on him, he wanted to take her from behind, leaning over the bunk, he wanted her to go down on him, he wanted everything he could possibly think of and more. He wanted it hard and nasty, gentle and sweet. But most of all he wanted it now.”

— Anne Stuart

“The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side.”

— Rick Perlstein

“I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.”

— Sara Gruen

“In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.”

— Christine Lagarde

“After all of this is over and Tuck and Becca leave for their wedding night at the hotel, I don't want to be the sister of the bride or the maid of honor or anything else with responsibilities attached to it. I want to forget about everything and just have fun. Be. Feel. Live in the moment. And God, it's been so long since I've had sex." She stopped and looked up at his face. "Did I scare you yet?"
Scared, no. Speechless, yes, but only because all the blood in his body had rushed to his penis. Logan shook his head. "Nope, I'm definitely not scared. You, uh, have any candidates in mind for this night of reckless abandon?”

— Cat Johnson

“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”

— George S. Patton Jr.

“I looked him over for a second and suddenly it clicked. "Still want me to be mean to you?"
His eyes widened. "Yeah?"
"Well, come on then."
A minute later I had an oversized T-shirt that worked as a dress, a belt to shove my weapons into and a too-large leather jacket to toss over it all. I slammed out into the hall, leaving the guy tied to the desk chair by his underwear. Judging by his expression, he'd just leaned a valuable lesson about screwing with strange women.”

— Karen Chance

“Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“You Call This One And It's All Over, Baby!”

— Scotty Nguyen

“When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.”

— Ha Jin

“For some people, the beginning is a time of complete chaos. You see bits and pieces of what is before you. You have a sense of what it is you must set out to do. But nothing will form yet. When you sit down to write or paint or form movement, it's like stepping over a cliff or into a dense fog. All you can do is trust that this impending masterpiece is going to somehow manifest itself as you work. But you do know that there is something specific ahead, and you feel the excitement of that.”

— Vinita Hampton Wright

“The real tragedy is that we're all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one's dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?”

— Yusuf Idris

“Obviously over the years, it's been America, it's been Europe. It's all been very kind of divided between those two continents. It's nice to kind of see that Asia is starting - and especially China - starting to get recognized in this sport, too.”

— Kim Clijsters

“There are so many people who don't want her to succeed, and they've been doing everything to deny her what is literally her entitlement. And she has still triumphed over it all, the biggest crack in the glass ceiling ever, and it's Mrs. Hillary Clinton.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“I would say you might encounter many defeats but you must never be defeated, ever. In fact, it might even be necessary to confront defeat. It might be necessary, to get over it, all the way through it, and go on. I would teach her to laugh a lot. Laugh a lot at the - and the silliest things and be very, very serious. I'd teach her to love life, I can bet you that.”

— Maya Angelou

“I'm recording our history now on the bedroom wall, and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all.”

— Ani DiFranco

“I suspect that when the truth ceases to be heartbreakingly funny, we will be in a better place and a happier society over all.”

— John Hodgman

“It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House ... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.”

— John Leguizamo

“The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.”

— Paul Samuelson

“In Reformed theology, if God is not sovereign over the entire created order, then he is not sovereign at all. The term sovereignty too easily becomes a chimera. If God is not sovereign, then he is not God.”

— R.C. Sproul