c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You have a long history," he said, when Lanya indicated her story was finished. "Ah, Harrier, were I to tell you a long story, we should be here for a sennight, perhaps more. Long stories are best saved for deep winter, when the days are short and time grows heavy." Lanya glanced at the sky.
— Mercedes Lackey, The Phoenix Endangered
You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.
— Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death
I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
...not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.
— Mike Carey, The Unwritten, Vol. 5: On to Genesis
I must have been chosen because I know it all from beginning to end. I am certainly not the story itself. I am only the grass that tattles on the wind.
— Alfredo Véa, Gods Go Begging
Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.
— Khaled Hosseini
We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.
— Daniel Taylor
I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
— Chris Cleave, Little Bee
A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.
— Daniel Taylor
A book is simply a snap shot of the full story.
— Erica Goros
All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.
— Ramsey Isler
The stories, though, they were all mine.
— Wendy Jean, Unstolen
What are stories for if we don't learn from them?
— Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
— Kamila Shamsie
I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?
— Charles de Lint, Spirits in the Wires
No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
There's always more to the story, Catriona," She replied. "That's the wonderful thing about stories.
— Heather Vogel Frederick, Once Upon a Toad
God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh?
— Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters
Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?
— Terry Moore
There's more to stories than it seems at first looking," she said. "Two sides to most stories. Folks better be thinking about that for once.
— Augusta Scattergood, Glory Be
Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.
— Barry López, About This Life
Have I heard all the stories I need to hear?" she asked, stupidly. But he answered as if it were a good question."No, you haven't. But you don't have time to hear any more from me. So listen for stories wherever you go. It won't always be someone telling them; sometimes they come in other ways. And Summer, when you tell yourself stories, make them true. And make them surprising. That's how you will know they might be true.
— Katherine Catmull, Summer and Bird
He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.
— Stant Litore, Strangers in the Land
It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.
— Melville Davisson Post, Uncle Abner: The Doomdorf Mystery
Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.
— Leslie Ford
Maybe like the never-ending stories within stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, life is dream within dream all the way through?
— H.M. Forester, Game of Aeons
Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans.
— Scott Westerfeld
We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.
— Mani S. Sivasubramanian, How To Focus - Stop Procrastinating, Improve Your Concentration & Get Things Done - Easily!
I have stories. But stories are not facts.''I like stories. Love them, actually. Most of the time they're better than facts.
— Morgan Rhodes, Falling Kingdoms
And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is 	astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered 	before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a 	train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, 	painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls 	up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
— Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free
We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive.
— Alexis M. Smith, Glaciers
History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While
I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts.  It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.
— Catherynne M. Valente, What the Dragon Said: A Love Story
Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
— Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic
Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.
— Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions and Eternity
The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.
— Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling
Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.
— Zadie Smith
He. Does there have to be a he? It seems weak and unoriginal doesn’t it, for stories told by girls to always have a he?
— Rinsai Rossetti
Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
— Lisa Cron, Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.
— Elizabeth Hernandez
Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.
— Nora Raleigh Baskin, All We Know of Love
Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.
— Habeeb Akande
People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Small and Simple Things
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
— Anaïs Nin
Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.
— Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley, Small and Simple Things
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
— Graham Swift, Waterland
But bad luck makes good stories.
— Bernard Evslin
Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.
— Robert Moss
This is not the way these tales end," Calliope said firmly."This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales," Amatus said, "but since ours is not yet told, we cannot count on it. There were a hundred dead princes on the thorns outside Sleeping Beauty's castle, and I'm sure many of them were splendid fellows.
— John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory
And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.
— Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Uses for Boys
When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows.
— Cathy Ostlere, Karma
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.
— Stephen King
I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.
— Herbert Rosendorfer, The Architect of Ruins
The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.
— Shandy L. Kurth
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
You can never know enough about your characters
— W. Somerset Maugham
...the making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
— William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky: A Memoir
All Stories are True.
— John Edgar Wideman
It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.
— Robert Michael Pyle
At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.
— Dennis Covington
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
— Margaret Thatcher
This is a bad story.”“Sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”“No, you should,” I say.“But—”“I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
— Emma Donoghue, Room
Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.
— Erin Morgenstern
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
— Ben Okri
We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply...
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.
— Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile
The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.
— Theodora Goss
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
What day is it?"It's today," squeaked Piglet.My favorite day," said Pooh.
— A.A. Milne
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds
—  and the pessimist fears this is true.
I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
— Eugene O'Neill
Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.
— Dalai Lama XIV
Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
— Helen Keller
The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.
— Stephen King, Different Seasons
Things are always better in the morning.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
— Virginia Woolf
Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
— Voltaire, Candide
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much
—  if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
— Henry Rollins
One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.
— Lucille Ball
No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)
— Jeffrey R. Holland
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
— Voltaire, Candide
But hey, what's life without a little adversity?"That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it'd mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us.
— Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
Expect the best, prepare for the worst.
— Muhammad Ali Jinnah
When I look at the future, it's so bright it burns my eyes!
— Oprah Winfrey
Joy, not sorrow.Laughter, not tears.Life, not death.Love, not blame.
— Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me
Thou hast seen nothing yet.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
I'm no optimist", she said as she opened the cabinet door. " I'm just a realist who smiles too much.
— Tiffany Reisz, The Siren
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
— Voltaire
I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.
— Tamar Myers, As the World Churns
Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something is not to your liking, change your liking.
— Rick Steves
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else.Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.
— Stephen Colbert
It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.
— John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
— Alain de Botton
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
— Louis D. Brandeis
Well, you can go on looking forward," said Gandalf. "There may be many unexpected feasts ahead of you.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Nobody knows how things will turn out, that's why they go ahead and play the game...You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen, but it's hardly ever what you expect.
— Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
— Dorothy Parker
A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that's as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.
— Eoin Colfer, Airman
Always something new, always something I didn't expect, and sometimes it isn't horrible.
— Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt
Perpetual Optimism is a Force Multiplier.
— Colin Powell
You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?
— Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty
The closed mind is a disease. You need to have an open mind
—  otherwise life will just pass you by.
I was saying yes because when you're in love, the world is full of possibilities, and when you're in love, you want to take every single one of them.
— Danny Wallace
The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience.
— Orson F. Whitney
You may exist inthis world--but I exist tooand I will not yield
— Matthew Quick, Sorta Like a Rock Star
And you? Did you find the doorknob?”Hadrian picked up a jug and downed several swallows, drinking so quickly some of the water dripped down his chin. He poured some in his palm and rinsed his face, running his fingers through his hair.“I didn’t even get close enough to see a door.”“Well, look on the bright side”—Hadrian smiled—“at least you weren’t captured and condemned to death this time.”“That’s the bright side?”“What can I say? I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.
— Michael J. Sullivan, Theft of Swords
The optimist lives on the peninsula of infinite possibilities
—  the pessimist is stranded on the island of perpetual indecision.
Remember, you see in any situation what you expect to see.
— David J. Schwartz
What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.
— Voltaire, Candide
A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as aclimb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finall yreach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the "real" top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, "Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?" Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. "Because it's there." Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known. Paradocically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heighs of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.
— Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
— Edna Ferber
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
— Carl Sandburg
What's wrong with you? I asked myself. You are a happy person. You are an upbeat sort of person. Men smile at you on the subway, women ask you what shampoo you use. Cheer up for Christ's sake, I told myself, relax, you're fine, be happy, Girl. When I talk to myself I call myself Girl.
— Jennifer Belle, Going Down
Pessimistic" is a word for "realistic" that optimists use to make themselves feel better (about their unrealisticness).
— Claire
He'd never been an optimist. He saw the world as it was, or he tried to. That was a problem, though, when the truth he saw was so terrible.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push - a smile. A word of optimism and hope, a 'you can do it!' when things are tough
— Richard M DeVos
The only good thing about being frightened half to death, she thought, is that it makes me forget all about being seasick.
— Alison Croggon, The Riddle
And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
A cold word from a cold man sends shivers throughout my body but my heart remains warm
— Sonya Watson, The Tide Breaker
Pessimism never won any battle.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
— Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
...if you live feeling likeYour glass is half empty, well,It may as well be empty all the way.
— Mattie J.T. Stepanek, Journey Through Heartsongs
Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.
— Richard Matheson, A Stir of Echoes
Being an idealist is not being a simpleton
—  without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.
Alongside the practical thought something else struggled and, like an escaped butterfly, took wing: the assurance of something wonderful awaiting her. Just around the corner......
— Norah Lofts
Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
— Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Lighten up.” I yawned, pointing across the street to the diner. “If I got upset every time someone beat me, or chased me, or tried to rape me, I’d be crying in my cereal every morning. No one likes a whiner.
— Mary Calmes, Change of Heart
You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead and Gone
We're living among infinite possibilities. And the prevalent philosophies of post-modernist pessimism that come out of the universities are really a major tragedy. The opportunities for progress and change… are absolutely tremendous. Anybody who tells you that we're running out of resources or in a terrible mess--they are idiots. We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. To say we are running out of resources is like saying we are running out of brain cells.
— Robert Anton Wilson
I think I am going to have to supercharge my optimism to arm myself for the battle ahead. Trust me, it is going to be a battle.
— Rebecca Bloom, Girl Anatomy: A Novel
It isn't all over
—  everything has not been invented
Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nihilism reminds us that we are not gods, and that despite all of the accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they possess only a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies.
— John Marmysz, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism
I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.
— Carlos Fuentes
Make every misadventure an adventure.
— Alana Siegel
And suddenly, as if her head had cleared, she was quite sure that wonderful things did indeed exist. Even if they’re only in my own mind, she thought, they’re there and worth fighting for. I mustn’t give in.
— Diana Wynne Jones, Hexwood
You always look on the dark side of life. I believe in capturing the moment...Joy is so fleeting. You never know when it might be snatched away.
— Susan Wiggs, At the King's Command
You could be the ugliest, nastiest most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you'd turn into a diamond after a million years.
— Conrad Williams, One
An optimist is a braver cynic.
— Colum McCann, TransAtlantic
I might walk vast expansesof earth and always be beginningand I love beginningor could learnto love it.
— S. Jane Sloat
I know, but if I feel this bad for Gramps, how am I going to feel when it’s Dad?” Tyler told me. “You’ll feel even worse, of course, but you’ll carry on, because happiness has a way of creeping in again. It really does,” I said.
— Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Now I'll Tell You Everything
Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.
— Hyman G. Rickover
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
— Aldous Huxley
Sure my rose-colored glasses don't let me see the world for what it is NOW but what they allow is the chance to see what the world would look like if people cared enough to plant more roses
— Matthew Goldfinger
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
— Ellen Willis
Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Up ahead stands the fun house, which you enter through a clown’s smiling mouth.“I would kill myself if I was prisoner here,” Shelby says.“No, you wouldn’t, just out of courtesy,” I say, “because your body would be trapped in there after you die, and your friends would have to watch your corpse rot.”“Hmm,” Shelby says. “Smell it too.”“Well, now we’re looking on the bright side,” Packard says.
— Carolyn Crane, Head Rush
They will also tell you how far along we are along the depletion curve; the optimists among them will even claim that there is nothing to worry about, because we have two or three decades of production left at the current level. It is to be expected that we will run out of fossil fuels before we run out of optimists, who are, along with fools and madmen, a renewable resource.
— Dmitry Orlov
Your glass seems like it will always be half full even it falls down and shatters to pieces
— Kevin Jared Hosein, Together We Are Spiders
I wish there were strict laws to stop people from corrupting other people's mind with their negativity thus influencing them to form biased opinion of someone, some situation or overall way of living.
— Arti Honrao
The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING.
— Lucy Ellmann, Dot in the Universe
Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.
— Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
For you the cup isn't half full or half empty, you're always topping it up.
— Rowena Cory Daniells, The King's Bastard
When you shift conversations and explore the greatness of your team members, you're likely to be a person who creates opportunities for their strength to show up on the job.
— John Yokoyama, When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market
If optimism is the highest form of courage -- as I am beginning to believe it is -- then these students are all heroes.
— Paula Huntley, The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo
We all have our alloted portions of black and white paint
—  how we lay it on is a question of temperament.
Edwin is prepared to believe that a glass exists. And further, that this glass holds liquid.
— Patrick E. McLean, How to Succeed in Evil
I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?
— Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us.
— Javier Marías, Fever and Spear
Optimists think badly, but live well.
— Marty Rubin
...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists.""I find that hard to believe""Of course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic. "That seems like a sad way to govern your life.""It's a safe way to govern your life.
— Susin Nielsen, Optimists Die First
My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism.
— Robert  Stone, Helping
No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.
— Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery
I wish I was more Moomin-minded.
— Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 2
That challenge you have right now...it’s not a wall
—  it’s a door. It's meant to be opened. Get a handle on the situation and open it.
During the course of your temporary hurdles, keep searching for a tad of optimism
— Charmaine J Forde
Because I took the sun for granted it shone on me.
— Marty Rubin
Leaps of faith tend to favour those with long legs.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
...I do not believe that the law of God permits a better man to be harmed by a worse. No doubt my accuser might put me to death or have me banished or deprived of civic rights; but even if he thinks, as he probably does (and others to, I dare say), that these are great calamities, I do not think so... For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable. This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree, and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. But I do know that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether God or man, is wicked and dishonourable; and so I shall never feel more fear or aversion for something which, for all I know, may really be a blessing, than for those evils which I know to be evils.
— Socrates, Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
— Michael   Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
— Michael   Lewis
We choose the prism that we use to view life. Life can be a mystical tour or an outright bummer. We can live our life with the taint of aftermath or look forward to embracing each beguiling day with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
So many powerful, inspirational, insightful, hopeful and connected speeches today. It's been a joy to feel the energy of the women's marches all over the country and world. Feeling optimistic and energized.
— Scott Stabile
Nothing wrong with believing good things will happen.And if it doesn't, there's always whiskey.
— P.T. Patrick
Endure, my heart; yea, a baser thing thou once didst bear
— Homer, The Odyssey
Think better than bitter
—  you are far better than bitter!
Until we’re pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything’s coming up roses — for me and for you.
— Gina Barreca
Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.
— C. JoyBell C.
Why say no when you could say yes!
— The Paper Doll
She would put her “naïve American optimism” toward making herself indispensable to him, and she’d win him. Because naïve American optimism beat out English cynicism any day.
— Sabrina Jeffries, Married to the Viscount
It is our non negotiable responsibility to always stay positive, no matter what! The only thing that can make you negative is the thing you allow to make you negative! Think well and stay positive!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Witnessing the moonrise each month, a person cannot resist noting a modest sense of optimism tugging at his or her enclosed capsule of bodily fluids.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Everyone tries to be an optimist. But being an optimist is a bit boring and not honest. Losers are more interesting than winners.
— Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Some people see the liquid and thing half full. Others only see the air and think half empty. Sometimes I get the sense Chatham sees it all, which is kind of terrifying. I don't know if I want him to see me--the real me.
— McCall Hoyle, The Thing with Feathers
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
— James Baldwin
if someone always finds our mistakes then we must be happy to know that there, in the world, is at-least someone who is concentrating his mind and spending his time to make us flawless or perfect.
— Sandy Raman
Come, my men! never say die while there's a shot in the locker.
— Frederick Marryat, The Pirate
We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Always let your heart sing
—  no musical talent needed.
He was incapable of anticipating to-morrow's griefs.
— Trollope Anthony 1815-1882
The pessimist may call the optimist a fool; but who is more foolish, the happy individual who expects more happiness or the one who fills his life with bitterness and has only more despair to look forward to?
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
It is really surprising how many and what pleasant things happen to me
—  perhaps it is because I am always ready to meet an agreeable situation a little more than halfway.
It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.
— John Gardner, Grendel
You will never forget what has happened to you. You cannot. And I will never replace your mother. I cannot. But you must believe that this is a beautiful world. People are basically kind and loving. You are going to live a wonderful life. You must take these memories and bury them deep in a corner of your soul. Don't live them on your skin. Tomorrow you will wake up for the first time in your new home, here with us. You will not wake up a tortured little girl. You will wake up a citizen of the world, deserving of a happy and meaningful life.
— Diana Nyad, Find a Way