Very Good Quotes

“Maria looked at the TARDIS ... 'Is that really your carriage?' She asked. 'It is not very good, monsieur. It has no wheels.'
'It doesn't need them,' laughed Amy. 'It's an English carriage. They don't have wheels.
'Does Monsieur Rory push it?'
'When necessary,' laughed Amy.”

— James Goss

“Once you commit to something, you just manage through each moment. And nothing truly awful happened. The voyage over was uneventful. I found work right away, just not very good work. The worst thing wasn't something terrible, it was the lack of anything wonderful.”

— Jaclyn Dolamore

“And when you're alone there's a very good chance
you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.”

— Dr. Seuss

“I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.'
'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aware that it didn't necessarily sound like a compliment.
'Well, I've had years of practice.”

— Kate Atkinson

“We-we spread out," he said. "Yes. We spread out. That's what we do."
They moved carefully through the bracken. The sergeant crouched behind a handy log, and said, "Right. Very good. You've got the general idea. Now let's spread out again, and this time we spread out separately.”

— Terry Pratchett

“As I've said repeatedly, Republicans are very good at describing things in black and white; Democrats are very good at describing the 11 shades of gray.”

— Joseph C. Wilson

“I get enough sleep. I take very good care of myself. Growing up as a dancer, you know your body so well, you know what to do to overcome something.”

— Elizabeth Berkley

“The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices.”

— Eric Schlosser

“I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.”

— Anita Loos

“I ought to be groovy and be able to say the enemy is this and the enemy is that ... but I've never been very good at ... I don't want to have to answer questions I don't know the answer to properly. I have an opinion.”

— Rik Mayall

“I bare my soul and you are suspicious! No, Scarlett, this is a bona fide honorable declaration. I admit that it's not in the best of taste, coming at this time, but I have a very good excuse for my lack of breeding. I'm going away tomorrow for a long time and I fear that if I wait till I return you'll have married some one else with a little money. So I thought, why not me and my money? Really, Scarlett, I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.”

— Margaret Mitchell

“It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says "Yes" to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts
the thought of suicide
in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear "Om" again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [ ... ] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it.”

— Hermann Hesse

“Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.”

— Fanny Brice

“When I do things that aren't very good, I'm worse as an actor. I don't know what I pick up - but it's something not very nice.”

— Sophie Okonedo

“I didn't have time for my children much. I wasn't a very good parent; I had a pretty unhappy home life.”

— Carroll Shelby

“People in America and Hollywood are very good at pronouncing my name, to begin with. Socially, they're very adept at listening to somebody's name and repeating it, cleverly in the first couple of sentences so the name sticks to begin with.”

— Ioan Gruffudd

“I don't think I like her very much. She is very good looking, but I sometimes think she is like one of those beautiful pears one gets-they have a rosy flush and a rather waxen appearance-" He shook his head.
"And they're bad inside?" said Lydia. "How funny you should say that, Alfred!"
"Why funny?"
She answered:
"Because-usually-you are such a gentle soul. You hardly ever say an unkind thing about anyone. I get annoyed with you sometimes because yo're not sufficiently, oh, what shall I say?-sufficiently suspicious-not worldly enough!”

— Agatha Christie

“I was very good in all the maths and sciences.”

— Tamara Tunie

“I've been on some very good horses which have died, and that's very tough to take. But as much as we love the horses, and care for them, human life is obviously more important. Some good friends of mine have died or been paralysed while doing a job we all love.”

— Tony McCoy

“So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.”

— David Carson

“My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends.”

— Wendi Deng Murdoch

“Don't let that young giant come near me, he worries me worse than mosquitoes," whispered the old lady to Amy, as the rooms filled and Laurie's black head towered above the rest.
"He has promised to be very good today, and he can be perfectly elegant if he likes," returned Amy, gliding away to war Hergules to beware of the dragon, which warning cased him to haunt the old lady with a devotion that nearly distracted her.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“She had been to her Great-Aunt Willoughby's before, and she knew exactly what to expect. She would be asked about her lessons, and how many marks she had, and whether she had been a good girl. I can't think why grownup people don't see how impertinent these questions are. Suppose you were to answer:
"I'm the top of my class, auntie, thank you, and I am very good. And now let us have a little talk about you, aunt, dear. How much money have you got, and have you been scolding the servants again, or have you tried to be good and patient, as a properly brought up aunt should be, eh, dear?"
Try this method with one of your aunts next time she begins asking you questions, and write and tell me what she says.”

— E. Nesbit

“I think that there are some teachers that do a very good job of incorporating culture and history. And there are some teachers who could use a little more help in that area.”

— Anne Sullivan

“Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.”

— Alex Pareene

“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think-" (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) "-yes, that's about the right distance-but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)”

— Lewis Carroll

“I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.”

— Peter Shaffer

“If you have failed more than others, there is a very good chance you are living more completely than others.”

— Robin S. Sharma

“I started culinary school at a very young age, and really I wanted to be out working, cooking, more than I wanted to be in a classroom. You could say I wasn't a very good student - I wanted to be a student of life and experience.”

— Jose Andres

“Any good world would allow for us to have free will, yes?" he continued. "Can we agree to this point? But once human beings have free will, they also have the ability to make choices - and commit evil. Thus, this very good thing, free will, allows the possibility of evil into our fine world.”

— Libba Bray

“I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.”

— David Bowie

“I have four kids. They are two years apart, and contraception has been very, very good to me.”

— Foster Friess

“We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them.”

— Peter Watts

“The young minister was a very good young man, and tried to do his duty; but he was dreadfully afraid of meeting old Mr. Scott, because he had been told that the old minister was very angry at being set aside, and would likely give him a sound drubbing, if he ever met him. One day the young minister was visiting the Crawfords in Markdale, when they suddenly heard old Mr. Scott's voice in the kitchen. The young minister turned pale as the dead, and implored Mrs. Crawford to hide him. But she couldn't get him out of the room, and all she could do was to hide him in the china closet. The young minister slipped into the china closet, and old Mr. Scott came into the room. He talked very nicely, and read, and prayed. They made very long prayers in those days, you know; and at the end of his prayer he said. 'Oh Lord, bless the poor young man hiding in the closet. Give him courage not to fear the face of man. Make him a burning and a shining light to this sadly abused congregation.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“God is very good to those who trust in Him, and often surprises them with unlooked for blessings. Little do we know what may happen to us to-morrow. Chance is banished from the faith of Christians, for they see the hand of God in everything.”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It didn't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.”

— Margaret Kennedy

“A friend of mine gave me a very good piece of advice, which is if you don't think your kids are going to want it, don't take it.”

— Roz Chast

“I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.”

— Garry Marshall

“The United States does not have a very good record in the Middle East. I think they have the best of intentions but I think the problem is that it's very difficult from Washington, or from Iowa or Nebraska to understand what is happening in this crazy part of the world. In some cases US diplomacy has been somewhat naive.”

— Moshe Arens

“I don't know if I am a very good politician ... I'm not a good hater.”

— Nick Xenophon

“I write music, and I want people to listen to it and care about it and have it make some difference in their lives. When I'm fortunate for that to happen, then of course I feel very, very good about it.”

— Steve Reich

“If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.”

— Steven Galloway

“When my mind is operating at its peak, it should depress me to think that this is the best I can do, because it's not very good at all. When my mind is operating normally, I should be even more depressed.”

— John S. Hall

“A man ... must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow.”

— Jane Austen

“The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.”

— Freeman Dyson

“It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary and not only necessary but urgent to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.”

— Paul Valery

“I think the main figure that matters to all of us, including people in the media, is: How does GDP per capita grow? And those figures have been very good. There is a huge flux both up and down, so it isn't like we're all static in status. What's important is that pie grows.”

— Charlie Munger

“I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a very good place ... . It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world-it's the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world ... and while you don't get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on”

— Richard P. Feynman

“If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees.”

— Robert Motherwell