Quotes About If Things Are Meant To Be

“It was a million tiny things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together ... and I knew it.”

— Tom Hanks

“You don't invade. You're one of us." He said softly. "I meant what I said earlier. I know things are still uncertain, but please know there's a place for you. Here in Harmony's Echo, and here." Jameson put a hand over his heart.”

— Nikki Lynn Barrett

“Because some things are never meant to be anything more than a moment. And that was one of them.”

— Kevin Brooks

“The sharper your knife, the less you cry ... for me, it also means cutting those things that get in the way of your passion and living your life the way it is meant to be lived.”

— Kathleen Flinn

“Do you need help with anything?" he asked with a wicked arched brow. "Maybe with cookies for Santa."
Scowling because no one was here but us, I said, "You're a bit late for that. Santa already came."
He hadn't moved, but I knew better than to think he would. Flynn was a pro at filling the bubble air space that was meant to be private and personal. "And were you a good girl?" he asked.
Awkwardly folding my arms over my chest, I said, "Not sure, I haven't checked. But you needn't look. We all know you are all bad."
Laughing, he said, "Yeah, well, there are other things worth unwrapping."
Grinding my teeth, I asked, "What, you didn't get your Ho, Ho, Ho, last night?"
Tossing back another full belly laugh, he said, "You know you're kind of funny when you want to be.”

— Shannon Dermott

“There are some things in life that just are. They are meant to be, and to fight against them is to ensure your own loss.”

— Theresa Smith

“But Christian illiteracy is only the first part of the crisis. Even more seriously, even for those who think they speak "Christian" fluently, the faith itself is often misunderstood and distorted by many to whom it is seemingly very familiar. They think they are speaking the language as it has always been understood, but what they mean by the words and concepts is so different from what these things have meant historically, that they would have trouble communicating with the very authors of the past they honor.”

— Marcus J. Borg

“-Let us celebrate the joy and sorrow, Sidip suddenly recited, -the wonder and mystery of all we see, so that we might live and learn as we were meant to. They say of stardust we are formed, that the ocean flows through our veins, and our thoughts are of quantum particles strung together by slender threads of charged ions. Therefore all things are connected, all things have spirit, you, me, the animals, plants, rocks, the oceans, planets, stars and the whole universe, these quantum particles are forming webs of awareness focusing at the centre where dwells the collective unconsciousness of all that has and ever will exist.”

— Andrew James Pritchard

“I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.”

— Maurice Blanchot

“Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.”

— Robert James Waller

“You can't know what difference you'll make, but you are part of something. I think so. We all have things we're meant to do. People we're meant to care about. We're all meant to matter.”

— Doug Wilhelm

“Recognize that there's something AMAZING about you. Everyone has something that comes very natural for them - natural gifts and talents. That gift/talent is that thing or things that comes easy for you, but hard for most. The greatness that is stored within was given to you, because it was meant to be used. Whether you've been running from it or haven't discovered it yet, it's there. It's your job to discover and master it. It wasn't given to you in vain, it's part of your purpose.”

— Yvonne Pierre

“The things that are meant to be are the things we can't control, the things we don't cause, the things that happen regardless of who or what we are. Like sunsets and snow-fall and natural disasters. I've never believed hardship or suffering was meant to be.”

— Amy Harmon

“He saw clearly how plain and simple - how narrow, even - it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”

— Kenneth Grahame

“He whistled, and Mrs. O'Leary bounded after him to the far end of the grove. Leneus huffed indignantly and brushed the twigs off his shirt. "Now, as I was trying to explain, young lady, your boyfriend has not sent any reports since we voted him into exile." "You tried to vote him into exile," I corrected. "Chiron and Dionysus stopped you." "Bah! They are honorary Council members. It wasn't a proper vote." "I'll tell Dionysus you said that." Leneus paled. "I only meant ... Now see here, Jackson. This is none of your business." "Grover's my friend," I said. "He wasn't lying to you about Pan's death. I saw it myself. You were just too scared to accept the truth." Leneus's lips quivered. "No! Grover's a liar and good riddance. We're better off without him." I pointed at the withered thrones. "If things are going so well, where are your friends? Looks like your Council hasn't been meeting lately.”

— Rick Riordan

“His own exclamation: "Women should be free-as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore-in the heat of argument-the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”

— Edith Wharton

“When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.”

— Terry Eagleton

“Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
"What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"
"All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.
...
"Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.
"What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“Love was full of secrets. Love masked so many evils. Love controlled people, it liked to them, it made them believe things that weren't true and it hid the truth from them. People said love was blind, but what they meant was that love blinded them. It made them more vulnerable than anything else could.
And it felt so fucking good.”

— Stacia Kane

“I was getting tired about what the preacher called Christian. Anything he did was Christian, and the people in his church believed it, too. If he stole some book he didn't like from the library, or made the radio station play only part of the day on Sunday, or took somebody off to the state poor home, he called it Christian. I never had much religious training, and I never went to Sunday school because we didn't belong to the church when I was old enough to go, but I thought I knew what believing in Christ meant, and it wasn't half the things the preacher did.”

— John Kennedy Toole

“In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of 'becoming as a little child.' Little children don't think they know what things mean, in fact, they know they don't know. They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them. We're like children who don't know but think we do. We're meant to shine. Look at small children. They're all so unique before they start trying to be, because they demonstrate the power of genuine humility. This is also the explanation of 'beginner's luck.' When we go into a situation not knowing the rules, we don't pretend to know how to figure anything out, and we don't know yet what there is to be afraid of. This releases the mind to create from its own higher power.”

— Marianne Williamson

“One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.”

— Amanda Palmer

“Ironically, the very fact that democracy has such a lengthy history has actually contributed to confusion and disagreement, for 'democracy' has meant different things to different people at different times and places.”

— Robert A. Dahl

“I look at things as 'Everything is meant to be.'”

— Lil' Wayne

“It's drama, it's a lot of things, but you know it's always about every movie or every TV project ever made is meant to be watched. If people like it and support it, that's what it is all about, really it's sort of the important part about it.”

— Will Estes

“Well, I thought a lot of things. But mostly, I thought that your being sad was much more important to me than Craig not being your boyfriend anymore. And if it meant that I would never get to think of you that way, as long as you were happy, it was okay. That's when I realized that I really loved you.”

— Stephen Chbosky

“She loved one of them most of all.
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren't special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant forever.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“I believe things are meant to be. It's the only way I can explain it because I had auditioned before to get on 'The X Factor' and 'Britain's Got Talent,' and I didn't get through - it was literally, 'No!'”

— Rebecca Ferguson

“The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to "liberate" humanity from the tasks-making things, learning things, remembering things-that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“We went from an era when rock 'n' roll meant wearing a bustier as a woman and these spandex things and guys trying to portray someone that wasn't realistic. We are trying to make it seem real ... relate to our lives.”

— Eddie Vedder

“He could hope for many things, though he had stopped doing so long ago. If one didn't hope, then disappointment didn't visit. Hoping meant you had somehting to live for, and living for something or someone else was asking for pain. -Nik”

— Lora Leigh

“Make them do as you want them to," she said.
"I can't," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“As he walked, he moved with more determination. If only because he knew there were things in the world he didn't understand-and that meant, perhaps, there were possibilities he didn't see. Possibilities for survival.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties
or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.”

— Julian Barnes

“She was almost at the top of the steps, and Shane was right behind her, when she heard Myrnin say, in a quiet voice that was like the old Myrnin, the one she actually liked,
I'm sorry, Claire.
I never meant - I'm sorry. Sometimes I don't know ... I don't know what I am thinking. I wish ... I wish things could be like they were before.”

— Rachel Caine

“I was sorting through my mother's things. All the letters from friends had to go. I don't know why she kept them, and now they meant nothing to anybody alive. Each generation flushes the toilet for the last.”

— Lucy Ellmann

“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals ... It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale.”

— Mary Blakely

“I had been at the director's workshop for women at the AFI, which at the time was a great thing to do. I had always meant to direct, and for a variety of reasons that are hard to explain, I never did. I produced many things - there'll be people who tell you I directed through them - and of course I wrote. It took a divorce, a move back to New York and a kind of "now I can do anything" to say, "I really want to do this."”

— Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal

“I don't really push myself upon people. I don't have that. When it meets and things fall in line, it's meant to happen. It's happened that way. I just try to do my best and do my work, and then it falls in line.”

— Jason Momoa

“It seems to me that references to bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin meant more to me a year ago and all those old things are totally losing importance.”

— Billy Corgan