c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you choose to not deal with an issue,then you give up your right of control over the issue and it will select the path of least resistance.
— Susan Del Gatto
What kind of tea do you want?""There´s more than one kind of tea?...What do you have?""Let´s see... Blueberry, Raspberry, Ginseng, Sleepytime, Green Tea, Green Tea with Lemon, Green Tea with Lemon and Honey, Liver Disaster, Ginger with Honey, Ginger Without Honey, Vanilla Almond, White Truffle Coconut, Chamomile, Blueberry Chamomile, Decaf Vanilla Walnut, Constant Comment and Earl Grey."-"I.. Uh...What are you having?... Did you make some of those up?
— Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life
Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional.
— Roger Crawford
What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.
— Bodie Thoene
Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.
— Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide
Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.
— Brodi Ashton, Everneath
The hardest choices in life aren't between what's right and what's wrong but between what's right and what's best.
— Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's over to shoot guns in the field.'Why you crying, girl?' Constantine asked me in the kitchen.I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.'Well? Is you?'I blinked, paused my crying. 'Is I what?''Now you look a here, Egenia'-because constantien was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. 'Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?''I don't know. I don't think so,' I sobbed.Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.'Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.' Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. 'You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?'She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
— Kathryn Stockett, The Help
If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options.You can climb it and cross to the other side.You can go around it.You can dig under it.You can fly over it.You can blow it up.You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there.You can turn around and go back the way you came.Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung.
— Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings
I want you to take note, Commander, that turning in my badge would be like cutting off my arm. But if it comes down to a choice between the job and my marriage, then I lose the arm.
— J.D. Robb, Vengeance in Death
People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
— Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers
I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead...
— Og Mandino, The Greatest Miracle in World
And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference...
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?
— Charles Bukowski
Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?
— James Hilton, Random Harvest
Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier.
— Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope
You have two choices in life...Choice one is to be the same and be like everyone else...Choice two is to be yourself and be a difference-maker.
— Jazlyn Roehl
We spend so much time defending our choice to do this that it becomes hard to show any vulnerability at all. There's only so many times you can handle someone asking about your fall back for when things don't work before you start thinking that maybe the fall back should just be your plan.
— Cora Carmack, Losing It
We stand at the crossroads, each minute, each hour, each day, making choices. We choose the thoughts we allow ourselves to think, the passions we allow ourselves to feel, and the actions we allow ourselves to perform. Each choice is made in the context of whatever value system we have selected to govern our lives. In selecting that value system, we are, in a very real way, making the most important choice we will ever make.Those who believe there is one God who made all things and who governs the world by this providence will make many choices different from those who do not. Those who hold in reverence that being who gave them life and worship Him through adoration, prayer, and thanksgiving will make choices different from those who do not. Those who believe that mankind are all of a family and that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man will make many choices different from those who do not. Those who believe in a future state in which all that is wrong here will be made right will make many choices different from those who do not. Those who subscribe to the morals of Jesus will make many choices different from those who do not.Since the foundation of all happiness is thinking rightly, and since correct action is dependent on correct opinion, we cannot be too careful in choosing the value system we allow to govern our thoughts and actions.And to know that God governs in the affairs of men, that He hears and answers prayers, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, is, indeed, a powerful regulator of human conduct.
— Benjamin Franklin, the Art of Virtue: His Formula for Successful Living
North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.
— Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
We are free to choose our paths, but we can't choose the consequences that come with them.
— Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide
She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path.Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now.‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none.Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic dissappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.
— Paulo Coelho, Brida
People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist real
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Choices made, whether bad or good, follow you forever and affect everyone in their path one way or another.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, An Unforgivable Secret
The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've gotresponsibilities.
— Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Everybody's got the potential for great good and great wrong in them, but it's thechoices we make that define who we really are.
— Charles de Lint
Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
It's coming, a battle between Starclan and The Dark Forest and every warrior will be called upon to fight.
— Erin Hunter
Our lives are made up of choices. Big ones, small ones, strung together by the thin air of good intentions; a line of dominoes, ready to fall. Which shirt to wear on a cold winter's morning, what crappy junk food to eat for lunch. It starts out so innocently, you don't even notice: go to this party or that movie, listen to this song, or read that book, and then, somehow, you've chosen your college and career; your boyfriend or wife.
— Abigail Haas, Dangerous Boys
You can enjoy anything if you make up your mind to.
— Joyce Meyer
Not even I can see all ends, but I have been in this world long enough to know that a choice is not choice and breeds slow ills, even were it done for the highest reasons.
— Alison Croggon, The Riddle
I don't regret any of the decisions I've made in my life because with every choice I make, I learn something new.
— Siva Kaneswaren
Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do because it's the right choice. But occasionally we have to put ourselves first.
— Katherine Allred, What Price Paradise
Just because you can make a choice, doesn’t mean you should. Some things are better left alone.
— Laura Burks, Altered
There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth
—  that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.
It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.
— Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil.
— Boyd K. Packer
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile
Your future can be changed by one decision. One good thing can offset a mountain of bad. But you need to choose.
— Jennifer Probst, The Marriage Merger
I know what it is to be pushed in a direction you don't want to go, or one you're not ready for. People say they know what's best for you. Maybe sometimes it's true. But it doesn't matter if they keep pushing until they take your choices away.
— Nora Roberts, Heaven and Earth
Your choice is to be active or passive in your responses.
— Deborah Day
Some things you sentence yourself to life for.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Harry, life isn't simple. There is such a thing as black and white. Right and wrong. But when you're in the thick of things, sometimes it's hard for us to tell. You didn't do what you did for your own benefit. You did it so that you could protect others. That doesn't make it right - but it doesn't make you a monster, either. You still have free will. You still get to choose what you will do and what you will be and what you will become.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
It's not about making the right choice. It's about making a choice and making it right.
— J.R. Rim, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
I am sorry my decisions do not meet with your approval, but nevertheless, they are mine, and the consequences are also mine.
— Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance
Yes no yes no yes no?Red blue?Yes red, no blue?No red, yes no?In out, up down?Do don't, can can't?Choices sit on the shelf lifeNew shoes in a shoe shop.If the in crowd are squeezing into a must-have shoeAnd the one pair left are too tiny for youDon't feel compelled into choosing themIf you're really a size 9, buy that size.While everyone elseHobbles round with sore feetYour choices should feel comfortableOr they aren't your choices at all.Why limp when you can sprint?
— David Baird, Fiesta of Happiness: Be True to Yourself
We don’t drift in good directions. We discipline and prioritize ourselves there.
— Andy Stanley, The Principle of the Path: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
People say that it's the big decisions that are important... that these are the type of issues worthy of prolonged consideration. But no one ever explains how it's the little choices that send your life careening in another direction.
— Julie Gittus, Saltwater Moons
The look in his eyes turned a little wild. "That's the only reason I'm letting you go. If I had any choice--""You do," she said "Wed can all sit here and let him die. Or you can let Eve go on her wild-ass rescue mission and get herself killed. Or you can let sweet, calm, reasonable Claire go do some talking."He shook his head. His long, elegant hands, which looked so at home wrapped around a guitar, closed into fists. "Guess that means there's no choice.""Not really," Claire agreed. "I was kind of lying about that choice thing.
— Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance
The bottom line is that you have to choose who you are going to commit to-- that's the foundation of true love, not the lack of other options
— Stephenie Meyer
People always say in the end you only regret the choices you didn't make but I really think you also regret the choices you were foolish enough to make.
— Melizena
...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.
— Robin McKinley, Sunshine
Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world. You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a leopard. You chose to get a witch’s Spoon back, and to make friends with a wyvern. You chose to trade your shadow for a child’s life. You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friend--you chose to smash her cages! You chose to face your own Death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in. And twice now you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends. You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you--you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime’s worth of novels. But you didn’t. You chose. You chose it all. Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
— John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and this be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.
— Javier Marías
Can't it be stopped?" said Lina. She shifted around under her blanket, trying to find a place to sit where rocks weren't digging into her.Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning," Maddy said. "If someone sees what's happening and is brave enough to reverse the direction."Reverse the direction?"Yes, turn it around."How would you do that?"You'd do something good," said Maddy. "Or at least you'd keep yourself from doing something bad."But how could you?" said Lina. "When people have been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?"You wouldn't want to," said Maddy. "That's what makes it hard. you do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.
— Jeanne DuPrau, The People of Sparks
Every single world we've visited isn't just random—it's the result of countless choices, all of them combining to create a new reality. You and I have been given an infinity of chances, and that's so much more than mot people will ever get—but in the end we get to live in only one world, and that's the world we make. I want us to create that world together.
— Claudia Gray, A Million Worlds with You
I don’t even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, and she hadn’t, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you’re swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive. (83)
— Ron Rash, Serena
I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
You are creating through your choices, even now. Choose wisely.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Curious creatures we mortals are-how we do not know what we want, or how to get it if we do.
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
There is no easy way out of our circumstances...Sometimes you stick it out even when you want to give up because you know that on the other side is either a better situation or a better you." -Watercrossing (Phantom Island Book 3)
— Krissi Dallas
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
— José Saramago, The Cave
You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.
— Ron Rash, Serena
The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass............Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended, and the train took you away to another...
— Justin Cronin, The Passage
So many roads. So many detours. So many choices. So many mistakes.
— Sarah Jessica Parker
What we do,our choices, that's what defines us.
— Carrie Jones, Entice
Misperceiving that there is one correct choice is a common mistake. Coming to understand that there are usually a few good choices--and then there's the one you pick, commit to, and make great--is the best way to make flexible, optimal, good decisions in life.
— Katie Couric
You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It's just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.
— Ben H. Winters, Countdown City
There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been.
— Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust
We all want to be seen not for the choices we made ten years ago, but for who we are today.
— Elaina Marie, Happiness is Overrated - Live the Inspired Life Instead
The truth is that this was something over which I had no control and the question is not why but what. What am I going to do with this? What am I going to make of it?
— Vicki Forman, This Lovely Life
You will make better decisions once you begin thinking long-term rather than short-term.
— Adam Kirk Smith
Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
fruit of passive-aggressive people. These people resist demands by indirect tactics. They will not take responsibility for their own choices; instead, they turn around and blame someone else for making them do it. Or they will agree to do things that they don’t really want to do, and then gripe about the person behind her back.
— Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal: How to Understand the Past to Ensure a Healthier Future
But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.
— Judah Smith, Jesus Is: Find a New Way to Be Human
Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
What you must remember is that the magic itself is neither good nor bad, no more so than this ship might be used for right or wrong. It might be used by a fisherman to feed a village, for example. Or, the same vessel might be sailed by pirates to murder and pillage...the lumber, rope, nails, cotton, and everything that goes into it-is created by the True One. Humans decide how it is to be put together and how it is used.
— Derek Donais, MetalMagic: Talisman
Most people, faced with two difficult choices, prefer not to choose at all.
— Kenneth Eade, Predatory Kill
The future is never just one choice. It's a thousand. And they never stop. You will choose your future every day of your life. And should you wake up one day to find that you regret the choice you made the day before, then make a new one. Don't worry about whether you might be wrong someday. Worry about whether you're right now. Tomorrow can wait.
— Cora Carmack, All Played Out
It’s funny how when you say “yes” to something (like the man of your dreams), you don’t think about the fact that you are also saying “no” to something else.
— Amy E. Spiegel, Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity
You already made the choice, you are simply here to walk it.
— L.J. Vanier
The easiest thing is to say no. What's not so easy is telling yourself to stop.
— Alix
People don't need a reason to make a bad decision
—  they just need an opportunity.
Life often presents you with difficult choices. But who made up the rules? Why choose at all?
— Ulysses Brave, The Wit and Wisdom of Cats and Kittens
Part of making a good decision is just making a decision. You can't always sit and weigh the pros and cons. There just isn't time for that. Making a good decision means sticking with your choice and dealing with what comes with it. Being able to deal with the consequences—that's making a good decision.
— J.X. Burros
Whether we're on the path toward victory or defeat is determined by the very next choice we make. Not the choices from yesterday. Not the choices five minutes ago.
— Lysa TerKeurst, Made to Crave Video Study: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, Not Food
The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.
— Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Life presents many challenges...Temptation is one of them.. And free will govern us all. We have the power to choose.
— Lee Monroe
I swallowed hard. It was my life. And it was my choice how I decided to live it.
— Heather Brewer, The Cemetery Boys
Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.
— Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
Go far from home and yo will have a long way back.
— Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Keeper: A Novel
To make or not to make a choice is still considered you made a choice as it was choice to choose or not to choose to make a choice.
— Auliq Ice
As beliefs, energies, and acceptance can change, so can choices. Don’t feel that because you have made a choice, it has to last forever. If it is time to change a choice, change it!
— Kim Ha Campbell, Inner Peace Outer Abundance
Heaven and Hell are within you. Choose wisely or to hell with you!
— Tapan Ghosh, Faceless The Only Way Out
Figure out how to balance Oliver with a career you’ve wanted your whole life,” he tells me. “Because you’ll end up with neither if you think you have to choose.
— Christina Lauren, Dirty Rowdy Thing
The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.
— Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art
And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.
— Don DeLillo, Running Dog
You get only two or three important choices in life. What job you do, whom you marry. Those are big decisions. If you’re right about those two decisions, you’ll probably be happy.
— Jeff Bauman, Stronger
Make up your mind!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
...he wondered how a person as bright and deserving as Rob Peace could have made the choices, beginning on the night of that banquet, that had resulted in this. And he figured that the choices hadn't necessarily begun on that night. Most likely, they'd begun on the night he was born, and not all of them had been his to make.
— Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
Your life. Your choices. People will give you endless opinions on how you should live your life and who you should be. Don't allow them. Don't listen. This is your life.
— Akiroq Brost
But I like my big Afro. I also liked when my hair was longer and relaxed. I’m happy to have choices. They’re mine to make
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
It'll always be dark until you decide to turn on the light, you can and you will, it's your choice!
— Nourhan Mamdouh
A lot can be determined by the choices we make, even if the action is initiated by self-preservation. Many ... no, most ... of our choices are driven by fear: fear of death, fear of humiliation, fear of loneliness. But it's how we respond to fear that matters. It's what defines us. What makes us who we are. So maybe in your mind you acted selfishly, but I'm alive because of the choice you made. So I'll remember it as an act of kindness and yes, even bravery.
— Michael J. Sullivan, Age of Swords
The ability to make wise choices is the most valuable skill a person can develop.
— Abhishek Ratna, No Parking. No Halt. Success Non Stop!
Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You're stuck in a cave with three other people - all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw - and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must be biologically compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust.
— Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary
Replace a bad habit with a better one. Instead of trying to "break out of a habit", try to use the trigger or cue to initiate a different action. Find something better, healthier, to replace the habit. This will be a lot easier than trying to force yourself to do nothing when you feel very compelled to do something. Left unchecked this is why we often see one bad habit turning into another bad habit. Take charge by deciding ahead of time what you will replace with what. Keep track. Celebrate your victories. Strengthen and empower yourself. By repeatedly doing this over and over again you will weaken the association between the trigger/cue and the old habit. At the same time you will strengthen the association between the trigger/cue and the new habit. This is very important. Some people believe the solution is to try to avoid the trigger/cue, but avoidance does nothing to prepare you in the event you fall into that scenario accidentally. It's like preparing for the worst, not by being pessimistic, but by being proactive. The first step to change is believing it could be possible. The second is action. Inaction leads to chaos. It pays to be prepared. Believe you are strong! You are bigger than your problems and your fears.
— Akiroq Brost
For the day we accept that we have chosen to choose our choices is the day we cast off the shackles of victimhood and are set free to pursue the lives we were born to live.
— Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose
When you get to the junction of choices, ponder!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?
— Joan Didion, Run River
Winning is not just a moment of glory, it’s a journey of peaks and valleys.Perseverance Matters!Winning is a habit.Small wins matter!Winning is an attitude.Mindset Matters!Winning is a choice.Hard work matters!Winning is your responsibility.Winning matters!
— Farshad Asl
We are a product of the choices we make, not the circumstances that we face.
— _Roger Crawford
And one day, as she was buried deep in her thoughts, she heard a still small voice ask her"If you could go back in life,what would you have done differently?"And without missing a beat she answered, "I would have chosen me"And finally, she made the choice...
— Henna Sohail
A man makes choices,” Tal said.“True, but what choices a man makes depends on what choices he is offered.
— Raymond E. Feist, King of Foxes
And one day, as she was buried deep in her thoughts,she heard a still small voice ask her"If you could go back in life,what would you have done differently?"And without missing a beatshe answered, "I would have chosen me"And finally, she made the choice..
— Henna Sohail
You are free to choose, But you are not exempted from the consequences of your choices.
— Napz Cherub Pellazo
There comes a time in everyone's life when they must decide if they will serve God or serve Satan. There are only two choices in life that will matter for eternity, and that is the question, "Who will you serve?
— Robin Bertram, No Regrets: How Loving Deeply and Living Passionately Can Impact Your Legacy Forever
You made the choices that brought you to this place in life. But the thing about choices is that you can always make new ones. Choose to change your life.
— Avina Celeste
We choose to remain angry. Someone else may have initiated the anger but we choose whether we remain in this state or not.
— Avina Celeste
Self-care is a deliberate choice to gift ourself with people, places, things, events, and opportunities that recharge our personal battery and promote whole health—body, mind, and spirit.
— Laurie Buchanan, PhD
When you start exercising choices, as against embracing opportunities, you become your own God, leaving precious little in the hands of Almighty!
— Sandeep Sahajpal
Some choices are awful even when they're the right ones.
— Sarah Moriarty, North Haven
Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.
— Anita Shreve, The Stars Are Fire
Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control?
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
The reason we have choices in life, is so we don't blame anyone for the consequences of our decisions.
— Gift Gugu Mona
Why choose when you can have everything?
— Ahmed Mostafa
My results show you what I'm up to
— Jennifer Ho-Dougatz
You are only in control of your choices.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Every decision is easy once you make it. The important thing is to think carefully, make your decision, and then work to make your choice the right one. That is the secret to a happy life. There are very few wrong decisions in life, but very few people who are willing to make the effort it takes to make their decisions the right ones.
— John   Kramer
Nearly everyday life leans over and says, ‘Come on down!’ But standing at the bottom looking up, it’s finally dawned on me that it’s not these invitations that have dug this hole. Rather, it’s the fact that I accepted them.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
My Life is bad because of my mother and father... choices..., they made the wrong choices.
— Deyth Banger, The Life Of One Kid
Your life is determined by the sum of the choices that YOU make.
— Frank Sonnenberg, BookSmart: Hundreds of real-world lessons for success and happiness
But one day, you will be faced with a choice, as we all are. One day you will have to choose between your own desires, your own darkest impulses, and what you know to be right . . . and it will harden you. You will understand that all of us are devils in the skins of men.
— Samantha Shannon
The resolute look on life closes plenty of doors.
— Andy Harglesis
In life you have always the choice to leave the shadowy places and head towards the illuminated locations!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Your choices say a lot about who you are and much more about who you are becoming.
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
When people fuck with you, you gotta choice. You can fuck back or swallow down. Swallow down enough times and you start to choke. Or you can learn to accept. Let go. Breathe easy.
— Kit de Waal, My Name is Leon
Oftentimes, the most important decisions are the most difficult to make - for, your future, and the future of the generations that come after you, hinges on the outcome of those decisions.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, Englisch on Purpose
The constant clamor of the booths and barkers served as an exhausting reminder that he had to choose a fate, and that no matter which fate he chose he could be certain that it would not be the best, that in other timelines rendered inaccessible with each spent coin, other versions of himself would be having more fun, or winning golden ribbons, or becoming taller. The thought was unbearable.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
We fail to open the right doors because we fail to pick the right keys!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Be savagely thankful, and continuously in awe of the power you possess. You are alive. Inside of an endless cosmos with the freedom that shines brightest in the dark.. Choices. Your choices belong to you so intimately, that they will never leave you. They, unlike the changing nature of love, where the failing machinery of our bodies will never abandon you to time. Good or bad, they will stay always. An antique that shows the future who you were and what you stood for. So know that what you choose to stand for, is what will inform you of what you've chosen to stand against, so stand. Let each foot crash land into what you believe, and plant them they're firmly so they may take root in your convictions. And stand.
— Shane L. Koyczan
Perhaps Choices spring up when history makes way for them. Perhaps they will grow, like legends upon dead conquerors.
— Roshani Chokshi, The Vishakanya's Choice
We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.
— Fay Weldon, Female Friends
Life every day is a room full of doors.
— James W. Harper
Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday's shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip's insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents never met. The machine's obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
When we do what's right, regardless of circumstances or consequences, we set the table for God to turn the tables. All we need to do is stand up, step in, or step out.
— Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
Decisive is definite.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When the universe compels me toward the best path to take, it never leaves me with "maybe," "should I," or even "perhaps." I always know for sure when it's telling me to proceed - because everything inside me rises up to reverberate "YES!
— Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure
If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
— Margaret Mead
Sometimes the choices others make take ours from us. Do you understand?
— Mary Calmes, Trusted Bond
If you take my right hand, you can start over. You will be reborn as a different character; your personality will develop along a different path. Your story will be irretrievably altered. And this time, there will be no mistakes. You will live, love, and die, blissfully unaware.
— Dylan Randall Wong En Lai, this is how you walk on the moon: an anthology of anti-realist fiction
You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did.
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal to Noise
We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixtags: black, choices, harry-potter, inside-us, light, sirius, sirius-black
— J.K. Rowling
No matter how far you have come... No matter how you survived your checkered past... Sometimes, you simply have to make a choice.
— Kaleb Kilton
My life is a series of invitations accepted and invitations rejected, and the place I now find myself is often a result of accepting the wrong invitations and rejecting the right ones.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It's very simple
—  just look at your life to see where you're heading. You're always in a momentum of something.
More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
— Aldous Huxley
People who live in the luxury of a steady paycheck and food in their bellies get too caught up in right and wrong, moral and immoral, good and bad, heroes and villains, even truth and lies. As if we're all either one or the other. As if we all have a choice. As if I have a choice. But I don't believe in choices. I believe in survival.
— Katie McGarry, Chasing Impossible
To make a choice not to sacrifice is to decide that I am better off allowing a life to perish than release the resources I possess that might allow it to thrive. And because of choices such as these, the life that I am really allowing to perish is mine.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Following intuition allows decision and action to be made in the same instant.
— Maria Erving
More times than I’m willing to admit I am my own worst enemy, which suggests that more times than I’m willing to admit I should allow God to be my own best friend.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s always another option.There’s always another one.It’s never only 'this' or 'that,'The moon or else the sun.Don’t sigh and choose the greaterOr lesser of two plights.But look to see the stars beyondFor options vast and bright.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Don't try to give me a limited amount of choices. I make my own.
— Maria Noor
What you shouldn't be must not be allowed to stand on the way of whom you can become.
— Bamigboye Olurotimi
Some things is easy do, when you have no choice in the world but to do them. Like shiteing into bedpan, in front of a nurse.
— Donal Ryan, The Thing About December
We got where we are because our choices mapped the route and paved the road.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
We want to 'write in' our plan and 'write out' the consequence. When we do that, we're headed 'right back' to what we foolishly thought we could 'write out.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I’m wrong, or I’m right, either you bring us back, or you don’t, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they’re not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.
— Lee Child, Never Go Back
Taking the path with the least resistance does NOT mean take any opportunity that comes to you. Some opportunities are traps!
— TemitOpe Ibrahim
We are intelligent and compassionate creatures and we can make choices. We can fortify our hearts in goodness and do the right things. Or we can turn our heads the other way and pretend again that bad things are not happening. That they will disappear because they have nothing to do with us, because we are not accountable. Well, this is also our choice. But in that case, I am afraid, this world will be lost for us.
— Bernard Jan