Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘politics’

THIS EDITION: close

———

Quoted In The Grove:
In Japan we have the phrase, “Shoshin,” which means “beginner’s mind.” Our “original mind” includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.
~Shunryu Suzuki

Small thoughts fit easily into a closed mind, but big thoughts require an open one.
~Roy H Williams

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.
~Joseph Roth

EndQuote:
This alone is to be feared ‒ the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.
~Winifred Holtby

~ ~

Next Exercise Prompt: late

~ ~

Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.
~Alexis Carrel

Faith, joy, optimism. But not the folly of closing your eyes to reality.
~Josemaria Escriva

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.
~Leonardo da Vinci

~

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
~Victor Hugo

To find a friend one must close one eye ‒ to keep him, two.
~Norman Douglas

If you see a whole thing ‒ it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
~Ursula K Le Guin

~

Maybe I’m just farsighted. The further away something is, the better I can see it but once it gets close, I lose sight of it.
~Ai Yazawa

I met Peter Brook, the theater director… I admire him tremendously… and what he said was this: “In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can’t be moved, and without the distance, you can’t be amazed.” Isn’t that extraordinary?
~Paul Auster

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
~Henri Nouwen

~

We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We’re meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it’s a long way from the morning to the evening.
~Rod McKuen

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us ‒ a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don’t close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.
~Pema Chodron

The development of a kind heart, or feeling of closeness for all human beings, does not involve any of the kind of religiosity we normally associate with it…It is for everyone…
~Dalai Lama

~

Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.
~Caspar David Friedrich

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.
~Grandma Moses

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
~Pablo Picasso

~

In life sometimes, in the universe, you have to close some doors to have others open.
~Gene Ween

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.
~Alexander Graham Bell

Don’t be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.
~Lily Tomlin

~

Public transportation is like a magnifying glass that shows you civilization up close.
~Chris Gethard

Mark how the above author’s notions of mingled humanity, and his name, dovetail. A view of life ordained by fate, a matter of choice, mere serendipity, or a bad joke?
~Ed Note

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.
~Thomas Huxley

~

Clowning is a trick to get love close. I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact if I’m in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you’ve had, you can still love yourself.
~Patch Adams

Ju jitsu is very Buddhist. All that we fear we hold close to ourselves to survive. So if you’re drowning and you see a corpse floating by, hang on to it because it will rescue you.
~Tom Hardy

We’re always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who’ve closed down. And there are times in one’s life when one has to close down just to regroup.
~Leonard Cohen

~

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
~George Eliot

All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
~Tom Stoppard

It’s too easy to forget bad things. By keeping the reminders close, it’s the reminder of not just who you are, but how you became what you are.
~Gareth Thomas

~

We are at the edge of an abyss and we’re close to being irrevocably lost.
~David R Brower

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
~Kurt Vonnegut

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
~Joan Didion

~

I really hope it engenders a lot of conversation because I believe there are a lot of people who put on faces. We all do it, every time we walk out the door. And there are a lot of people who have to hide who they are. And I think this story speaks to that.
~Glenn Close

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
~Cesare Pavese

What’s so fascinating about people is what they don’t show. People are masters at it; usually actors show too much.
~Glenn Close

~

A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.
~author unknown

In my travels, I have found two peoples, the Tibetans and the Fijians, who don’t seem to have this problem. Their closeness with their environment, their religions, and their relationships with each other and nature make them feel part of everything.
~Frederick Lenz

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
~Mark Twain

~

If one stays too long with friends They will soon tire of him; Living in such closeness leads to dislike and hate. It is but human to expect and demand too much When one dwells too long in companionship.
~Milarepa

The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.
~Gabrielle Zevin

~

A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.
~Chuck Close

It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.
~Glenn Close

It’s not about the journey. It’s about the people you meet.
~Del Close

~ ~

Posted From The Grove

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
~Ronald Reagan

It’s not as if I’ve ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I’ve got is knowing people who have been in jail ‒ after all, I was a member of Parliament ‒ and visiting them there during their sentence.
~Michael Portillo

~

I barely need to reiterate what you already know: the close links that exist between our people and the people of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, the promoter of the Bolivarian Revolution and the United Socialist Party he founded.
~Fidel Castro

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
~John Berger

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
~Desmond Tutu

~

Marseille has a big Muslim community. The good thing is it is a melting point: all nationalities in there. Everyone is fine with each other. It is really close to North Africa, to Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, so a lot of them come from there.
~Samir Nasri

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.
~Francois Mitterrand

~

Let’s close all the Islamist mosques.
~Marine Le Pen

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.
~George Carlin

I’m so close to Heaven, this Hell cannot be mine.
~Melissa Etheridge (Nowhere To Go)

~

There are no military options for Iran. Attack them, and they will destroy the Gulf States oil industries, rain hundreds of missiles onto Israel, close the Arabian Gulf, and shoot oil prices to $300 per barrel, which could cause our own economic downfall.
~Malcolm Nance

Politics can be likened to driving at night over unfamiliar hills and mountains. Close attention must be paid to what the beam can reach and the next bend.
~David Trimble

~

The closeness between the United States and Mexico is more than just a relationship between two governments.
~Enrique Pena Nieto

We live in a big world, and it is important for us to be aware of culture other than our own. Learn something new, whether you think you’re interested in it or not. That’s the opposite of having a closed mind or a closed door.
~Donald Trump

~

When you’re a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You’re a foreigner here, you’re a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you’re able to hold close.
~Ash Sarkar

We can’t close ourselves off. We have to connect with the rest of the world.
~Jim Harbaugh

~

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.
~Dwayne Johnson

We have come dangerously close to accepting the homeless situation as a problem that we just can’t solve.
~Linda Lingle

In Illinois, community, migrant, homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year.
~Jan Schakowsky

As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs.
~Greg Boyle

—

In the city that the wolf enters, enemies will be close by. An alien force will sack a great country. Allies will cross the mountains and the borders.
~Nostradamus

Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote for.
~Margo Jefferson

The two great aims of industrialism ‒ replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy ‒ seem close to fulfillment.
~Wendell Berry

~

Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.
~Sun Tzu

A good undercover agent stays as close to the truth as possible, as close to your own personality and your own values as possible. This is the way you stay in character ‒ you try to be yourself.
~Joseph D Pistone

Keep your friends close, your enemies even closer.
~Sun Tzu

Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states.
~Demosthenes

That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.
~Aung San Suu Kyi

~

If you’re not comfortable with public speaking ‒ and nobody starts out comfortable; you have to learn how to be comfortable ‒ practice. I cannot overstate the importance of practicing. Get some close friends or family members to help evaluate you, or somebody at work that you trust.
~Hillary Clinton

Nothing changes until people decide to do the things they must, in order to bring about peace.
~Shannon L Alder

~

Elections are about choosing sides, but inaugurations are about closing ranks.
~Ted Kulongoski

Closeness to power heightens the dignity of all men.
~Theodore White

~

We Conservatives believe not in big, interventionist, centralized government. But in small and limited government, government as close to the people as possible.
~Maxime Bernier

~

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.
~Alcuin

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.
~Todd Gitlin

The West hasn’t reached its universal state as yet, although its close to it, but it certainly has evolved out of its warring state phase, which it was in for a couple of centuries.
~Samuel P Huntington

Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.
~Ronald Reagan

~

We must accept the fact that transport and communications will bring the world in close relations and the youth of the world should have standards and ideals in common.
~Juliette Gordon Low (Girl Scouts)

Democracy can only spring from practising it early, and democratic action was not to be expected from young people brought up under a close authoritarian system.
~Dora Russell

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don’t think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
~Kurt Vonnegut

~

I’ve seen terrorism close up, but I don’t live in a state of terror at all. I’m comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.
~Douglas Brunt

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts ‒ we have learned only recently how close we were to war ‒ but I knew enough to make me tremble.
~Joseph Rotblat

~

Sources say the Obama administration is in the ‘final stages’ of planning the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The way it’s gonna work is, they’re going to put a Radio Shack sign out front and let nature take its course.
~Jimmy Fallon

~

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.
~Dan Quayle

I am heartily rejoiced that my term is so near its close. I will soon cease to be a servant and will become a sovereign.
~James K Polk

~

But among them now were a large number of Communists in positions of great power within the new union movement, some of them actually moving close to the center of power. This was the crack in the wall through which they entered. Their power was to grow and prosper.
~John T Flynn

Well, we are very glad that Russia is so close with NATO.
~Aleksander Kwasniewski (ex-Pres Poland, 1995-2005))

The ideals of the party were close to me, and I have tried to adhere to those principles all my life. In essence, they are the same as in the Ten Commandments in the Bible. I will never change my convictions.
~Valentina Tereshkova (Soviet cosmonaut)

~

Don’t accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a ‘closed mind’ or being ‘blind to possibilities’. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.
~Charlie Brooker

It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
~Milan Kundera

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky

~

The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. To carry out that mission, we’re entrusted with a lot of authority, so our actions are subject to close oversight ‒ from the courts, from our elected leaders, and from independent entities like the inspector general.
~Christopher A Wray

~

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.
~Sherlock Holmes

Blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
~David Foster

Running toward danger is foolhardy. … But so is closing your eyes to it. Many perils become less dangerous once you understand their potential hazards.
~Brandon Mull

—

This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
~Toni Morrison

I don’t differentiate between black and Latino actors. We’re in the same struggle to be represented in a way that’s even close to honest. And I can tell you that the amount of Latino characters I can point at and say, ‘That’s what my life experience looks like’ ‒ I can’t think of any off the top of my head besides Jimmy Smits in ‘Mi Familia.’
~Lin-Manuel Miranda

I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.
~William Julius Wilson (American sociologist)

~

You close the door on me and tell me I can’t, I’m gonna find a way to get in.
~Tyler Perry

Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.
~Stokely Carmichael

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
~Audre Lorde

—

I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.
~Henry R Luce

If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.
~James Reston

~ ~

~Larry Dors: Same Line Different Films — Close Your Eyes (2:53)

~

~Invisible Threads: Carl Jung • 8 Hidden Signs Someone Close to You Secretly Hates You (18:50) for the fearful, the paranoid, those easily offended, or…

~

~Comic Stanza: Richard Pryor • I’m god. I’m here to pick up my son (1:23) it could have been irreverent, but…

~ ~

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
~Neil deGrasse Tyson

We sunk everything into it. It came close to going under several times.
~Heston Blumenthal (tv chef)

The good news is, we’re not bankrupt. The bad news is, we’re close.
~Richard J Codey (ex-gov, NJ)

~

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
~John C Maxwell

The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.
~Vince Lombardi

The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people ‒ their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself.
~Jocko Willink

~

If you’re early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It’s not even close. And don’t even think about leaving that mentor until your learning curve peaks.
~Stanley Druckenmiller

~

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.
~Richard Bach

During the 1950s, Aristotle Onassis and I formed what grew to be a close friendship and association in several business ventures.
~J Paul Getty

However successful you are, there is no substitute for a close relationship. We all need them.
~Francesca Annis

The importance of discretion increases with closeness to the top of a hierarchical organization.
~Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I always have to dream up there against the stars. If I don’t dream I will make it, I won’t even get close.
~Henry J Kaiser (industrialist)

~

It’s particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There’s always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you.
~Catharine MacKinnon (feminist law)

~

The five separate fingers are five independent units. Close them and the fist multiplies strength. This is organization.
~James Cash Penney

In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.
~Lou Holtz

~

What you will be looking for is a day that closes above the prior day’s high and most likely ‘breaks’ out to the upside to close above a trading range. This is the twitching worm that causes the public to leap before they look.
~Larry Williams

The next time you see an outside day with a down close lower than the previous day, don’t get scared, get ready to buy!
~Larry Williams

~

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
~Warren Buffett

The beauty of diversification is it’s about as close as you can get to a free lunch in investing.
~Barry Ritholtz

~

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
~Dale Carnegie

~

It took us three years to even come close to catching up with the demand a little bit.
~Ruth Handler (Barbie Dolls)

Actually, we got paid because the name Fortinet is so close to Fortnite, so I’m fine with their name being close to ours.
~Ken Xie

~

The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren’t, it simply can’t continue to work.
~Alan Greenspan

I deeply believe in pluralism. I believe in the close proximity of multiple systems or agnostic systems.
~Ben Nicholson (Chief Growth Officer @…)

—

If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.
~Edward Bellamy

~

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
~Babe Ruth

Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades.
~Frank Robinson

Two hours is about as long as any American can wait for the close of a baseball game, or anything else for that matter.
~Al Spalding

~

Our favorite teams bring people together, keep family members close, bond people from different generations. Some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams. Some of the best relationships I ever had were with Boston athletes that I never even met.
~Bill Simmons

I have been relegated [demoted] as a player, and I have suffered the feeling of failure. It is awful, and when you are part of an international outfit that gets so close, and you don’t do it, it is not a good feeling. I don’t want that again. I want to be part of a team that does something no one else has done.
~Chris Coleman (Welsh soccer coach)

~

If you had a robot out here calculating all the variables, I think you could potentially get really close to perfection, but from a human perspective, there’s no way to understand all the wind. The wind is the biggest variable, and the grass length is the second biggest variable that we just don’t have control over and never will.
~Bryson DeChambeau

You can’t completely control the sport ‒ Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature’s own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.
~Robert Redford (Legend of Bagger Vance)

I always loved hitting a low fade to a back-right pin with the wind howling from the right. Not many guys could get it close in that situation, because they kept it low by just putting the ball back in their stance. You see, playing the ball back turns you into a one-trick pony ‒ you can only hit hooks.
~Lee Trevino

Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.
~Ben Hogan

I don’t have a life, I really don’t. I’m as close to a nun as you can be without the little hat. I’m a golf nun.
~Gabrielle Reece

~

Basketball is a simple game. Your goal is penetration, get the ball close to the basket, and there are three ways to do that. Pass, dribble and offensive rebound.
~Phil Jackson

A closing team is so important in the NBA. The last seven minutes is what you are always coaching to get to. Now you have your team set, you have the match-ups you want, you have your time-outs, your chance to finish the game, and that’s my job, to get us to that position during the course of the game.
~Doug Collins

~

I do close to 30 minutes in cardio at a very high rate. I raise the level of intensity. I do a level 18 on the elliptical at four miles an hour for 20 minutes. That’s 360 calories. I want to see someone else try that. The resistance factor at 18 is brutal. No one goes to 20.
~Ric Flair (wrestling)

I got the stamina. I can close.
~Michael Phelps (bigfoot, swimming legend)

There is nothing in this world that I love more than my family. To be able to share the joy of running with them at the Runner’s World Half Marathon and Running Festival where we can all participate together is as close as you can get to a perfect weekend.
~Summer Sanders

I couldn’t have come close without my teammates’ help because the Knicks didn’t want me to make 100.
~Wilt Chamberlain

I think it’s time for me to get out, because at the moment I’m only thinking about fishing 21 hours a day, and they’re the waking moments. And even when I close my eyes I’m thinking about it.
~Rex Hunt

The door can never be closed for good to any player.
~Zinedine Zidane (soccer)

The greatest competitor was Bob Gibson [pitcher]. He worked so fast out there and he always had the hood up. He always wanted to close his own deal. He never talked to you because he was battling so hard. I sure as hell don’t miss batting against him, but I miss him in the game.
~Pete Rose

There are coaches to whom winning or losing means something close to life or death. If they lose, then their life has somehow been diminished. I’m not that way, and it keeps me steady.
~Tom Landry

~

When I stepped into the box, I felt the at-bat belonged to me. Everybody else was there for my convenience. The pitcher was there to throw me a ball to hit. The catcher was there to throw it back to him if he didn’t give me what I wanted the first time. And the umpire was lucky that he was close enough to watch.
~Reggie Jackson

Whenever you have a tight situation and there’s a close pitch, the umpire gets a squawk no matter how he calls it.
~Red Barber

Let’s face it. Umpiring is not an easy or happy way to make a living. In the abuse they suffer, and the pay they get for it, you see an imbalance that can only be explained by their need to stay close to a game they can’t resist.
~Bob Uecker

Umpires got power, man. You ever notice if you go to a ballpark and there’s a close play on first base, they will not run the replay at the ballpark? I’ve seen umpires go underneath and call up and say if you run one more of those replays, we’re gonna forfeit the game. That’s how strong their union is.
~Pete Rose

~ ~

§ VIDEO:

I did a film called ‘Floating’ early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn’t just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form.
~Norman Reedus

Acting, to me, is about the incredible adventure of examining the landscape of human heart and soul. That’s basically what we do.
~Glenn Close

~

I’ve always felt that an independent film is a film that almost doesn’t get made.
~Glenn Close

It’s gotten out of control. It’s taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won’t get made at all.
~Glenn Close

~

I have the belief that truly evil people, it’s a genetic evil. I only have the experience of exploring the landscape of some of the characters I’ve played that people have labeled as evil; I don’t think they’re evil.
~Glenn Close

Because as an actor, I really feel you cannot judge a character. You have to totally commit to that character. And for me to totally commit to the character, I have to find those places where I understand the sequence of behavior.
~Glenn Close

You have to love the characters you play, even if no one else does.
~Glenn Close

We have to be vulnerable as actors, but we have to protect ourselves.
~Glenn Close

~

The absolute worst thing you can do in a scene is be apathetic.
~Del Close

~

I love the chemistry that can be created onstage between the actors and the audience. It’s molecular even, the energies that can go back and forth. I started in theater and when I first went into movies I felt that my energy was going to blow out the camera.
~Glenn Close

Good live theater disturbs molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between you and the audience. Anybody who sees live theater should come out a little rearranged.
~Glenn Close

~

So I’m always inspired by my fellow actors. And that’s kind of a constant for me. I have huge respect for our profession and our craft. And I seek in my work to create connections, first for me with the character and then the character with the other actors, and then ultimately, all of us together connecting with the audience in a way that sometimes is subliminal, even.
~Glenn Close

~

The word diva has a negative connotation… I think the diva is kind of a cliche. My definition of a diva is somebody whose talent does not match what they’re trying to play, so all this temperament comes out.
~Glenn Close

I don’t have the body or the face for romantic comedies, so I’ve never been offered those. The challenge is that a lot of people see you only as your last character, so you’re constantly competing with whatever your last movie was.
~Glenn Close

Good roles are hard to find no matter what age.
~Glenn Close

~

Listening is the key to total concentration. You listen as the character would listen, closing the door on everything else. Then you are ready to respond.
~Jean Stapleton

~

I had a great time on The Shield. From working on it I have a totally different view of law enforcement.
~Glenn Close

I just ‒ I love my job. I love doing it. It’s a passionate endeavor. And sometimes you can get close to something that you believe is the truth. The truth of something. Not all the time, but sometimes.
~Donald Sutherland

~

And I find it very easy to memorize the scripts, which are so close to conversations my husband and I have.
~Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond)

Hermione is so close to who I am as a person that I’ve never really had to research a role. I’m literally rediscovering what it means to be an actress.
~Emma Watson

~

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.
~Michael Haneke

Cinema is an art form that is designed to go across borders. And as a filmmaker, the only way I can direct a movie is when I feel close to my culture.
~Denis Villeneuve

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
~Michael Haneke

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.
~Glenn Close

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
~Frank Herbert

~

Amanda Bynes and I have become close since filming ‘Hairspray.’ It’s so weird because I grew up watching her.
~Zac Efron

Well, Rhoda was, I think, the last actress that we saw. There had been so many wonderful actresses who were close, really close. But there was no magical epiphany.
~Mary Tyler Moore

I know of no manner of speaking so offensive as that of giving praise, and closing it with an exception.
~Richard Steele

~

There is the danger of over preparation, of loss of spontaneity; over rehearsal is the most terrible thing you can imagine. We do have a very close association between costume and set designer, though.
~Terence Fisher

I think when you’re dealing with very tenuous scenes and difficult and heavy subject matter, it’s important to be close intimately with your cast as friends, and be able to diffuse a lot of that tension and trust each other with the work.
~Jack Falahee

It’s nice to play a character that has a soulful, dependent, close relationship. It must mean my character is interesting in some way.
~Jeff Goldblum

—

I’m always open. I try not to have a closed mind. In fact the only reason why I’m able to continue to make films since 1986 is I have been adaptable. If I weren’t flexible I sure wouldn’t be making films this many years as I’ve been doing it. I’ve been making a film a year almost since 1986 and that’s hard. That ain’t easy.
~Spike Lee

Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good — suggestive of more than just what it is — it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.
~Robert Adams

~

When they tested Fatal Attraction, the audiences were so upset by her behavior, they literally demanded her blood.
~Glenn Close

I think Cruella is evil, because she’s the devil. But all the other characters, I was able to find a common humanity with them somewhere, knowing where they’re most fragile, where they’re most vulnerable, knowing some of the things that happened to them that might have formed this kind of behavior.
~Glenn Close

~

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you. Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I’ve ever had grew out of work itself. Sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don’t have to invent the wheel everyday. Today you will do what you did yesterday, tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually, you will get somewhere… Personally the best inspiration is a deadline.
~Chuck Close

The danger of having too close deadlines. It could lead you to just accept an avenue that’s not quite good enough.
~Judith Weir

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.
~Chuck Close

~

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.
~Colin Firth

‘M Train‘ [memoir] is as close to knowing what I’m like as anything. I don’t know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.
~Patti Smith

~

I had seen movies before that that had made me laugh, but I had never seen anything even remotely close to as funny as Richard Pryor was, just standing there talking.
~Joe Rogan

I don’t think anybody comes close to The Beatles, including Oasis.
~Brian May

—

There are some actresses who cannot function on the set without having a close relationship with their directors. Their way of communicating with the director is through intimacy. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with any physical act; it has more to do with achieving a closeness that they find very valuable.
~Peter Stone

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man.
~Glenn Close

James Ivory comes close to the actors for the first rehearsal. He more or less lets you direct yourself and then will only correct you if he finds it incorrect.
~Leslie Caron

I love Ron Howard, he’s a wonderful director, incredibly prepared. But I have to criticize my performance in that movie. It all took place in one day. My character was having a bad day, so she’s having a bad day throughout the whole movie. But this was a comedy, and I think I was too serious, too dense. Yes, I think that describes my failure there.
~Glenn Close

It’s not good to be in a situation where people don’t want to direct you or don’t want to question something.
~Glenn Close

~

My happiest times in the theater are when I do ensemble pieces. I really got into theater because of that closeness.
~Faith Prince

There is a great feeling in a small venue, with the closeness of the people and the intimacy.
~Mavis Staples

We always play clubs. It’s not something that I feel above. Those are my favorite shows because they’re intimate, they’re tight, their sweaty, they’re hot. You’re close to the people. Those are my favorites.
~Joan Jett

~

When the theater is gothic it matches the sensibility of the show. It’s also very intimate. The audience is very close to the performers. The show is scary and the scary stuff always works best with an intimacy with the audience. And the show is erotic, and I think erotic always works best when its close to the audience, as well.
~Frank Wildhorn

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.
~Henry Adams

~

No, I tell you what I like is having the play close after a decent run and looking back on it and saying, yes, I did that, and wasn’t it wonderful? Because while you’re doing it, it is really tough. It is so hard.
~Mary Tyler Moore

When I’m up there, and I know the show’s coming to a close, in my head I’m saying to myself, Oh man, you gotta get off and be a normal person again. That’s what I don’t like so much.
~Adam Sandler

~

When I used to do musical theatre, my dad refused to come backstage. He never wanted to see the props up close or the sets up close. He didn’t want to see the magic.
~Nia Vardalos

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton’s story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.
~Lin-Manuel Miranda

—

As far as the difference for me between television and movies, I really thrill to the pace of television. As exhausting as it can be ‒ there was actually one day when we never went to bed.
~Glenn Close

And when you’re with a great crew like we had, it becomes a thrilling, again, collaboration, which is to me one of the great aspects of the process that you go through. I find myself at this point in my career, getting potentially, incredibly bored if I stand around a lot, so that’s why I really like the pace of television.
~Glenn Close

I also have always felt that television has a huge potential for the kinds of audiences that some films would never dream or ever be able to have. So that potential is very exciting to me.
~Glenn Close

~

There used to be a huge snobbism between the film industry and the television industry. I produced and acted in my first ‒ well way back ‒ but the first thing that I produced and acted in was Sarah, Plain and Tall. And the only place to go at the time for really quality television was Hallmark Hall of Fame. And think how much television has changed since then.
~Glenn Close

I come from a TV background, so for me this is more like doing a freeing theatre piece because we’d go into a room and do the scene, instead of doing it as a wide shot, medium shot, and close up with only the odd line of dialogue.
~Jennifer Sky

~

I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for ‘SNL‘ when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I’m going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you’re getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.
~Jake Johnson

~ ~

~Omeleto: How To Disappear (20:08) fantasy, interesting portrayal of love

~

~locustgarden: Close Your Eyes (3:44) too-short/not-short-enough horror piece

~

~neonscreeen2: Close Your Eyes • Ghostly (4:58) Death and child getting to know each other

~ ~

When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free. In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within
~Pipilotti Rist

I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow.
~Jake Gyllenhaal

~

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
~Gustave Flaubert

I only have so much time and energy and money, and I’m going to put it into my work.
~Chuck Close

~

If the whole is to be Art, the parts must not try to be.
~Del Close

~

Inspiration is for amateurs ‒ the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will ‒ through work ‒ bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great “art idea.”
~Chuck Close

Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.
~Germaine Greer

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.
~Chuck Close

~

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.
~Chuck Close

There are things about signing on to a process over the long term that protect you from the buffeting winds of change.
~Chuck Close

~

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by, But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it.
~Hesiod

Success is different for everyone; everybody defines it in their own way, and that’s part of what we do in ‘Close Up‘, finding what it was each person wanted to achieve and what their willingness to sacrifice for that was.
~William Shatner

~

A museum is a spiritual place. People lower their voices when they get close to art.
~Mario Botta

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

The art world is molting ‒some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.
~Jerry Saltz

I love making art… It’s largely how I see myself. I’m an artist; therefore I have to make art.
~Chuck Close

~

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.
~Sarah Vowell

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell’s notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we’re close to that.
~Robert Redford

‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘ is a movie that really impressed me as a teenager. And also ‘Blade Runner.’ And ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind‘ is also one of my favorites. I’m always looking for sci-fi material, and it’s difficult to find original and strong material that’s not just about weaponry.
~Denis Villeneuve

—

I never got into this business thinking I’d be like a movie star.
~Glenn Close

I don’t like public venues. I never know what to wear.
~Glenn Close

I don’t think the tabloids find me very interesting.
~Glenn Close

~

I welcome every chance I get to interact with fans. I’ve made some very close friendships amongst fans, and I look forward to seeing them.
~Jim Beaver (Planet Comicon)

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I’ve always had a very close relationship with them.
~Anne Rice

The thrill of autograph collecting is getting close to a world you’re not part of.
~Matthew Bourne

~

People think they have a perfect idea of who you are from a four-second Snapchat video… and fake blogs, stories, magazine covers. In reality, that’s not the case. Nobody knows who I am except family and my close friends.
~Kylie Jenner

Don’t be so familiar and so much into the details. Keep people dreaming. Close the window, and make them wonder.
~Celine Dion

~

I think there are certain actors that have that kind of energy about them, that taking over a room energy.
~Glenn Close

At yoga you get some sense of spiritual space so that people don’t intrude. You can go there and close your eyes and no one will talk to you. People are too worried about not fainting to bother with some bloke who was on the telly.
~Bill Bailey

—

Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me its a form of sacrament.
~Sally Quinn

You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.
~Chuck Close

When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil you learn to respect them.
~Rene Redzepi

Every meal should end with something sweet. Maybe it’s jelly on toast at breakfast, or a small piece of chocolate at dinner ‒ but it always helps my brain bring a close to the meal.
~Robert Irvine

I love to go to the bar close by for a good espresso and have a chat with the bartender.
~Ludovico Einaudi

~ ~

§ MUSIC:

I would love to compose something for dance before I kick the bucket, and I’m not closed-minded about the dance, or the dance company.
~Tori Amos

We sing these songs for the everyday occasions of life, and they are very close to the hearts of our people.
~Kiri Te Kanawa (NZ opera)

I worry more about the marketing that’s taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s ‒ after World War II ‒ changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us.
~Wynton Marsalis

~

I know when I feel good when I play. There’s a closeness with musicians you only get from playing live, even in the studio it’s still playing live. For me, it’s what expands my soul.
~Ringo Starr

I listen to everything that sounds good with a story. I even listen to Adele. I listen to all kinds of music. Everything with a story that I can listen to and close my eyes and visualize it. I just love music.
~Rod Wave

~

One day my wife went and saw the accountant and said she’s pulling the plug. She said you guys are done. I said, how bad can it be? 10 grand? She said you’re not even close. It came out to almost $50,000 in alcohol for two months.
~Zakk Wylde (Ozzy Osbourne)

Without a doubt, Ozzy is the craziest person I’ve ever met. Son of Sam is a close second.
~Geezer Butler

~

Social topics may hit too close to home for people, but then again, if you pull a heartstring, then that’s what country music is. It’s not just songs about getting drunk and leaving your girl.
~Kenny Chesney

We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people’s lives and makes things a little easier. That’s what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don’t want to close the door on hope.
~Merle Haggard

~

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.
~Kurt Cobain

I don’t think there’s any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison’s ‘Beware of Darkness‘ that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He’s an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.
~Leon Russell

~

If you date a musician, you’re never, ever really gonna be first either. You’re gonna be right behind the music and maybe right close.
~Gary Allan

What people don’t realize is that the so called Seattle grunge scene grew out of several close knit gourmet supper clubs. We would only pick up guitars to pass the time while our dishes were simmering, baking, boiling, etc.
~Kurt Cobain

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that ‒ of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.
~Taylor Swift

~

I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time.
~Syd Barrett

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.
~Lionel Hampton

~

When people start asking you to do the same thing over and over again, that’s when you know you’re way too close to something that you don’t want to be near.
~Neil Young

Journalism is my first love. But music comes in a close second. What’s important for me is that whatever you do, whatever your passion is, you should have another passion ‒ something in your life. And when I put on that musician hat and I put the bass in my hands, I’m not Lester Holt the TV guy anymore. I’m just Lester Holt who likes music.
~Lester Holt

~

As a musician, I have always strived for my albums and live performance to render a sound as close as possible to perfection.
~Jean-Michel Jarre

Good music is very close to primitive language.
~Denis Diderot

—

Close your eyes and I’ll close mine / Good night sleep tight / Now the sun turns out his light / Good night sleep tight / Dream sweet dreams for me / Dream sweet dreams for you.
~John Lennon, Paul McCartney (Good Night, vocals: Ringo Starr) )

I close my eyes, then I drift away, into the magic night I softly say. A silent prayer, like dreamers do, then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you.
~Roy Orbison (In Dreams)

And it’s a great day to be alive. I know the sun’s still shining. When I close my eyes.
~Travis Tritt (It’s A Great Day to Be Alive)

Cry Baby is very close to my heart. I feel like I am her in a lot of ways. I want to continue making music from her perspective.
~Melanie Martinez

When I did the video for ‘Holding Out For A Hero,’ we filmed that on top of the Grand Canyon, and that was quite frightening. I was close to the edge, and there was a helicopter hovering about, creating a lot of wind, and I was nervous I was going to fall off.
~Bonnie Tyler

—

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
~Chuck Close

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
~Chuck Close

Paintings can make you cry and it’s just colored dirt.
~Chuck Close

~

I build a painting by putting little marks together‒some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.
~Chuck Close

I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won’t be able to give much information about who it is.
~Chuck Close

I only use three primaries, so the nice thing is I can’t have favorite colors.
~Chuck Close

At the same time that I’m finding the color world I want, I’m also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.
~Chuck Close

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.
~Chuck Close

~

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.
~Chuck Close

The reason I don’t like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
~Chuck Close

It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
~Chuck Close

~

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.
~Norman McLaren

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
~Chuck Close

If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.
~Chuck Close

~

Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
~Chuck Close

When you come up in the art world, whatever’s in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting.
~Chuck Close

I can’t always reach the image in my mind… almost never, in fact… so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.
~Chuck Close

~

You know, the way art history is taught, often there’s nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
~Chuck Close

—

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.
~Robert Capa (photojournalist)

The camera is objective. When it records a face it can’t make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down.
~Chuck Close

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.
~Chuck Close

I’ve said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians… all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion‒ Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.
~Chuck Close

~

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter ‒ 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black‒and whites.
~Chuck Close

Once I started working with the Polaroid, I would take a shot and if that shot was good, then I’d move the model and change the lighting or whatever… slowly sneaking up on what I wanted rather than having to predetermine what it was.
~Chuck Close

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.
~Chuck Close

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.
~Chuck Close

~

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.
~Chuck Close

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
~Chuck Close

~

A photograph doesn’t gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It’s frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.
~Chuck Close

It’s like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you’ve gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I’d never seen before.
~Chuck Close

It always amazes me that just when I think there’s nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.
~Chuck Close

~

What difference does it make whether you’re looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
~Chuck Close

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.
~Chuck Close

~ ~

~Lisa Loeb: Close Your Eyes (2:54) in the way of a lullaby

~

~Close Your Eyes: Frame And Glass (3:56) rock ‘n roll

~

~Gracie Abrams: Close To You (3:42) friends in love

~

~Daryl Hall & John Oates: So Close (4:48) a classic

~

~Hetty Kate Trio: Close Your Eyes (3:44) local talent giving it a go

~

~Next: Too Close (4:39) the race to arrive at too-close

~

~Nick Jonas: Close, ft Tove Lo (3:57) love, and the fear of it

~

~Alex Clare: Too Close (4:20) when it comes time to leave

~

~Example: Close Enemies (3:54) friends close, enemies closer ‒ not just in politics

~

~Chainsmokers: Closer (4:21) love refusing to mature, stuck at teeny-bop

~

~XRP Live: The Carpenters • Close To You (3:25) classic

~

~RudyWade, LeGrand, Ethan Gander: Too Close (1:58) talents having fun, taking turns with a song

~

~Ellie Goulding, Diplo Swae Lee: Close To Me (3:02) feral lyrics, lyrical setting

~ ~

How can you fully open your heart to someone new, when in fact what you really need is a closure from your past.
~Mhargs Abuda

I think it’s important to have closure in any relationship that ends from a romantic relationship to a friendship. You should always have a sense of clarity at the end and know why it began and why it ended. You need that in your life to move cleanly into your next phase.
~Jennifer Aniston

Closure isn’t closure until someone’s ready to close the door.
~Jonathan Maberry

~

Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes,
But only death the jealous eyes can close.
~William Wycherley

Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.
~Leo Buscaglia

~

We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I’s into one worldview.
~Harriet Lerner

Conflict in close relationships is not only inevitable, it’s essential. Intimacy connects people who are inevitably different.
~Martha Beck

~

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.
~Pablo Neruda

Romantic love can be, and often is, irrational. When ‘in love’ we often close our eyes to the truth or carefully edit it before taking it in. We overlook obvious faults of personality.
~Berit Brogaard

Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can’t see anything wrong with each other.
~Rene Yasenek

~

when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it’s very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.
~Gloria Steinem

Closeness means you get hurt; closeness means letting down your defences and letting people see the tender skin under the carapace.
~Cathy Kelly

Ivan tells Anna: “I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman … as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing … [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can’t share with anyone else.
~Vasily Grossman

~

Neither of us seemed able to be close to anyone. Not even each other. Closeness meant the one you loved the most would cause you the most damage. How did you unlearn that? It was woven deep between every fiber and vessel. You couldn’t cut it out.
~Lisa Kleypas

~

Those whom we most love are often the most alien to us.
~Christopher Paolini

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
~Simone de Beauvoir

Missing someone gets easier every day because even though you get one day further from the last time you saw them, you are one day closer to the next time you will see them.
~Mark Ebert

Being close is the first and last desire of lovers, but being far and loving each other without an inch’s difference is the characteristic of real love.
~Señora Roy

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.
~Jodi Picoult

~

Hugging closes the door to hate. Kissing opens the door to love.
~Tony Davis

If it’s the first kiss, it’s important for the eyes to be closed so you know it’s real. It’s almost like a Disney movie!
~Joe Jonas

~

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
~Chuck Palahniuk

Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other.
~Isabel Allende

The heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close.
~Thomas Moore

~

I grew up in a family where many of our close friends were gay couples. As well as that, every man goes through a period of thinking they’re attracted to another guy.
~Jake Gyllenhaal

With women, I’ve got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can’t get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.
~Marlon Brando

I know what men want. Men want to be really, really close to someone who will leave them alone.
~Elayne Boosler

Don’t get too close, it hurts.
~Graham Kennedy

Sometimes it is good to fly close to the flame, see and experience the heat, but then fly away again, to survive, more wise in the art of heat.
~Robert Black

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
~Dorothy Day

~

We’re not getting married right now. We’re very, very focused on our respective careers. Marriage is a long way away. Yes, I’m very close to Vikram Bhatt.
~Amisha Patel (actress)

On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.
~Emma Goldman

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.
~J Robert Oppenheimer (pyschiatrist, @ge 29)

Robin [Williams, @ge 63] was a world treasure. As we mourn his tragic death, we must remember him for the great waves of laughter that he was able to illicit from us, how his humor and insights ‒ though they came from a place of pain and uncertainty ‒ connected us and reminded us of how flawed and fragile…how human we are. How we are capable of moments of inspired transcendence and others of unspeakable despair.
~Glenn Close

~

To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

—

The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don’t know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That’s an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in I mean, we’re a socially evolved primate.
~Bill McKibben

I haven’t any close friends. Friendship needs time to interact, sit down, gossip. I don’t have that time.
~Khushwant Singh

~

It sucks being judged by the world instead of your close friends or family. I try to just realise that the only people who matter are my family and friends.
~Kylie Jenner

The one thing I’ve always said: Let your family and close friends be the judge of who you are as a person. Don’t worry about being judged by others who don’t know you, because your family and close friends know what you’re all about, good and bad.
~Rick Pitino

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.
~Jeanette Winterson

~

Stop giving energy to the things you don’t want.
~Wayne Dyer

~

The people you choose to have around you make all the difference. My family and close friends keep me grounded.
~Virat Kohli

Anchors are those people in your life who remind you of who you are ‒ your values, aspirations, and worth ‒ even when you forget. Keep them close and always let them know how much they mean to you.
~Vivek Murthy

~

What is it about the human touch, holding a loved one close, and feeling their warmth, their heartbeat? I mean this is the army and frequently our loved ones are far away but their warmth doesn’t have to be.
~Katherine Fugate

Some people can be so close to you even if physically far, they walk with you and stay near in every moment of your life.
~Señora Roy

~

Boys used to call me Soda in school days. Soda means ‘serving officers daughters association.’ I miss those days when I had a very protected life: one could get close and bond with other army people that they gradually would become your extended family.
~Anushka Sharma

—

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.
~Vietnamese Proverb

Sibling relationships…outlast marriages, survive the death of parents, resurface after quarrels that would sink any friendship. They flourish in a thousand incarnations of closeness and distance, warmth, loyalty and distrust.
~Erica E Goode

No matter how many years passed or how much responsibility each assumed, they still managed to bicker like bitchy teenagers on a regular basis. In some way, though, each found it comforting; it reminded them how close they really were: Acquaintances were always on their best behavior, but sisters loved each other enough to say anything.
~Lauren Weisberger

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
~Charles Dickens

Siblings are branches of a tree
some stay close
some go in different directions
they fruit, grow bigger
till they die and fall.
~The Omani Shed

~

Certainly it is a blessing to have three beautiful kids who are all healthy. God put them here for me to nurture and bring them up and try to keep as close to right as I can. So it’s a blessing. It’s a big responsibility, but at the same time it’s an honor.
~Faith Evans

I’m a proud strict mom and, you know, I’m really proud of the two daughters I’ve raised. And I’m especially proud of my relationship with them. We’re very close. I think we’re good friends.
~Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)

You can’t prevent a possible future closeness between your upcoming child and one or more of their grandparents.
~Mallory Ortberg

~

My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn’t have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always.
~Taylor Swift

My mother was there every day of the production. You know what? My mother and I are so close, she really understands the fact that I am 18 and I am maturing. I guess I am not your average 18 year-old.
~Michelle Trachtenberg

~

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.
~Pope John Paul II

~

All the riches in the world do not come close to the happiness of having children and being a mother.
~Jocelyn Wildenstein

I ended up going to NYU for film school ‒ close to Pennsylvania ‒ but we talked about what if I went to UCLA or USC, and my mom’s whole world was caving in.
~Adam F Goldberg

~

I had a real bad attitude after my dad passed of liver cancer. I was 9, and we were really close.
~John Wall

My dad and I had been close ‒ he called me Tuyet Bang, Vietnamese for ‘avalanche,’ because of my nonstop energy. I took a lot from him, like being a risk taker, and I know how much he loved my mother.
~Michelle Phan

I wasn’t close to my father, but I wanted to be all my life. He had a funny sense of humor, and he laughed all the time ‒ good and loud, like I do. He was a gay Irish gentleman and very good-looking. And he wanted to be close to me, too, but we never had much time together.
~Judy Garland

I just love the feeling a close family gives you and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
~Barry Gibb

~

I am not a father, and the only children that I get close to are my nieces.
~Greg Davies

Abortion does not just hurt women. Abortion hurts a family, and it has a domino effect of hurting those related and close to those families through the grief and reality of losing a child to abortion.
~Abby Johnson

My second husband, Eric Villency, is the father of my beautiful boy Ronan Anthony. Even though we’re divorced, I’m still very close with his family.
~Kimberly Guilfoyle

My brother and Lauren are very close with me and they are in Sun Valley, so sometimes I need to go there and feel their presence. And there are times I need to see my bro’ alone.
~Picabo Street

We are a big family; we are all very close, and we always want to talk about what is going on with each other.
~Javier Hernandez

If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then, I believe, we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what ‘good’ parenting means.
~Fred Rogers

~

My parents are divorced, but they have and always are there for me. They’ve never missed a ball game or anything else I’ve done, and we’ve always been so close.
~Eric Winter

Nah, I’ve always had a great relationship with my two brothers, I have always had their support in my football and in everything. They’ve been very close to me and we have a great relationship.
~Lionel Messi

My small circle is really just my family. They’re really close and dear to my heart and it’s always great to have them watching my games, critiquing my games and making sure I’m alright at all times.
~Bradley Beal

~

I am the youngest of four siblings, and we’re all so close. I don’t know where I would be without my brothers and sister. I secretly believe that my parents love me the most!
~Marissa Jaret Winokur (Hairspray)

~

Pedigree collapse is caused by cousins marrying cousins– intentional mating between close cousins and random mating between distant ones who don’t even know they’re related.
~Alex Shoumatoff

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.
~Robert Benton

—

Johnny [Carson] once described our relationship by saying we were as close as two people could be without being married.
~Ed McMahon

As soon as you try to describe a close friendship, it loses something.
~Dean Smith

~

I can’t betray anyone. I don’t know what it’s like to really betray someone. I’m very loyal to my circle, my family, and those I hold close to me.
~Anuel AA

You come across lots of people all the time but you only make very few friends and you have to be true to them otherwise what’s the point in life?
~Shah Rukh Khan

My inner strength comes from my friends. I have a very close group of friends and family, and we all help each other through our dark times.
~Kathy Bates

~

What are friends? Some people are nice. Some people aren’t. There are some I’m fairly close with… we talk.
~Jack Kevorkian

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.
~John C Maxwell

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.
~Emil Ludwig

~

I never had a huge circle of friends, so I really just tried to cherish and not take for granted the close friends I did have, who were really supportive and understanding.
~Lili Reinhart

I’ve been an important star and lived a full life, yet I only have three close friends. I guess that’s all anyone can expect.
~Hedy Lamarr

~

Trust is a fragile thing once earned, it affords us tremendous freedom but once trust is lost, it can be impossible to recover of course the truth is, we never know who we can trust. Those we’re closest to can betray us.
~Mary Alice Young

Backstabbing, especially from close friends and family, is extremely devastating.
~Mikki C Zimmerman

The hatred of relatives is the most violent. The hatred of those closest to us is the most bitter.
~Jon R Stone

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us when we cross into the shade.
~Christian Nevell Bovee

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
~Andy Warhol

—

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.
~Anne Lamott

A woman is more beautiful than the world in which I live; and so I close my eyes.
~Paul Eluard

~

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
~Stendhal

It is very difficult for girls. They’re told to look one way, but to act another way.
~Glenn Close

~

When you’re playing a man, you can look tired and horrible and you still look okay. As a woman, if you’re tired, it’s terrible. It was such a luxury not having to worry about that.
~Glenn Close

I never wanted to be a man. I feel sorry for them.
~Glenn Close

~

She had said she didn’t feel fear, but it was a lie; this was her fear: being left alone. Because of one thing she was certain, and it was that she could never love, not like that. Trust a stranger with her flesh? The closeness, the quiet. She couldn’t imagine it. Breathing someone else’s breath as they breathed yours, touching someone, opening for them? The vulnerability of it made her flush. It would mean submission, letting down her guard, and she wouldn’t. Ever. Just the thought made her feel small and weak as a child.
~Laini Taylor

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes ‒ that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
~Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What you want is to have women at the same pace as men doing tech immersion. It’s not that every woman has to do it, but to close the gap, you need to have them do it at the same pace as men.
~Julie Sweet

It’s in everyone’s best interest to help close the gender gap in the sciences.
~Sarah Brightman

~

Women don’t take enough risks. Men are just ‘foot on the gas pedal.’ We’re not going to close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.
~Sheryl Sandberg

When you’re on the set, and sometimes, because it’s been so complex and the writers have been really writing, sometimes up until the last minute… And you kind of sit back; you separate yourself from your brain, and you say, let me see if you can do this. And that’s the kind of challenge I like.
~Glenn Close

I believe in taking chances and living your life. Sometimes doors open and others close and you have to figure out which one you’re going to take. I’m always for the one that’s challenging.
~Gisele Bundchen

I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand… Adventure is a state of mind ‒ and spirit.
~Jacqueline Cochran

~

The girls and women of our race must not be afraid to take hold of business endeavor and, by patient industry, close economy, determined effort and close application to business, wring success out of a number of business opportunities that lie at their very doors.
~Madam C J Walker

I am totally against the idea that a Muslim woman should not have the same opportunities as a Muslim man to learn, to open up, to work, help shape the future. To close Islam down to a sexist approach is totally intolerable and ridiculous. It’s not Islam.
~Hussein of Jordan

It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind.
~Clara Barton (American Red Cross)

Studies demonstrate that as gaps are being closed between men and women ‒ in access to education, in health, even in economic participation ‒ the most difficult gap to close is in political participation. Somehow that sharing of raw power, political power, remains very illusive.
~Melanne Verveer

With the hugely talented women I’ve worked with or observed, it’s not a question about temperament or ego; it’s a question about getting it right. If they’ve got a reputation for being difficult it’s usually because they just don’t suffer fools.
~Glenn Close

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.
~Lyndon B Johnson

~ ~

~ ~

Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
~Dick Cavett

~

The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.
~Yogi Berra

On the red carpet, I saw all these great stories, and I also got to see the plastic surgery up close.
~Steven Cojocaru

Been thinking about having a baby. But if I want to do it, I’d have to do it soon ’cause it’s getting near closing time. The clock is ticking. My gynecologist said, if I wanted to have a baby, I would have to do it ‒ the latest by the ended of this show.
~Carol Leifer

I keep everything that is most important to me close to me: my family, my bible, my X-Box ‒ just kidding.
~Brian Littrell

Like I said on my bio on my webpage, I was born at an early age, I was close to my mother.
~Peter Jurasik

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
~George Burns

I have a lot of very close girlfriends and sisters ‒ I’m from an all female family. My father often quips that even the cat was neutered!
~Shirley Manson

I’ve been close to Bette Davis for thirty-eight years ‒ and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.
~Henry Fonda

—

Tony Benn and I were very close, very close friends for 30, 40 years. We talked to each other a great deal, and we were great friends. And I was with him shortly before he died, talking about prospects of the world and prospects for peace. And I’m very sad that he’s gone.
~Jeremy Corbyn

Saying goodbye to close ones is always the hardest.
~Edin Dzeko

When a close friend unexpectedly leaves us, a piece of our heart is forever broken.
~Chris Lumpkin

It’s never nice to lose someone close to you; unfortunately, life goes on, and we have to make peace with it and move on.
~Francois Hougaard

~

Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of a busy life—serene, placid, and mild,‒with the impress of the great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.
~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
~Glück

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
~John Ruskin

The longest way must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.
~Harriet Beecher Stowe

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
~Anthony Doerr

~

Depression is close to me, but suicide hasn’t been.
~Claire Forlani

Having come so close to death, I now value just how precious life truly is and want to ride what God gave me until the wheels fall off.
~Shaun King

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
~Roger Scruton

~

Your friend dies, and people always say, ‘Oh, he lives through me,’ or whatever. But it’s just sad that they’re not living. If a person dies that’s close to them, then they say, ‘I lost this person.’ It always tripped me out because I would always be like, ‘Yeah, but that person lost their life.’
~Lil Tracy

In Mexico, you’re close to death all the time.
~Guillermo del Toro

~

I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them ‒ you don’t even have to talk. You don’t have to do anything but really be there with them.
~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

No one’s death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.
~Hermann Broch

—

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that’s the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.
~Jesse Andrews

For survivors, the word closure often connotes that the bereaved are underachievers who flunked a grief course.
~Earl A Grollman

Closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light.
~Meg Wolitzer

Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure.
~David Deida

~

Closure is an American lie used to justify revenge. Healing is getting used to the pain, learning to be damaged.
~Tim Morrison

Forgiving people isn’t always about giving them another chance. It’s for closure so you can move on.
~Sonya Parker

~

There’s never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.
~Paul Pearsall

What was closure if not a clock? Not an end as everyone imagined, but a beginning.
~Celeste Chaney

—

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
~Anne Sexton

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape ‒ I remember it all.
~Issey Miyake (perfumer, of Hiroshima)

I do not have PTSD, but if I watch part of a movie like ‘The Hurt Locker,’ or when I spend time around Blackhawk helicopters, I will close my eyes that night and live an entire day in Iraq, flying my missions. I remember the smell and the feel and the heat and everything about it. Then I wake up in Illinois, and I’m exhausted.
~Tammy Duckworth (Senator)

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
~Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.
~Stephen Vizinczey

~

My grandfather was a voodoo priest. A lot of my life dealt with spirituality. I can close my eyes and remember where I come from.
~Wyclef Jean

I still close my eyes and go home ‒ I can always draw from that.
~Dolly Parton

~

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.
~Anne Lamott

Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?
~Marilyn vos Savant

You want that pizza to taste better? Close your eyes.
~author unknown

I close my eyes when I sing so I can feel the song better.
~Mahalia Jackson

Why watch someone kissing when people really close their eyes when they kiss?
~John Hughes

80% of sensory perception is taken up with visual input. Closing your eyes frees up a lot of RAM.
~Ed Note

~

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.
~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When people around me are getting rattled, I may just close my eyes and do a breathing exercise.
~Carla Hall

~ ~

~ ~

I’d tell myself to listen to my heart. Listen to that little voice that says, ‘Mmm, I don’t think so.’ Because when you override that, you basically override who you are.
~Glenn Close

I get bored talking about myself, but I can talk about the work.
~Glenn Close

It’s always a pleasure to talk about someone else’s work.
~Chuck Close

~

What makes me angry is closed mindedness, prejudice against those who are different from you, reveling in one’s own ignorance.
~Jinkx Monsoon

I can’t understand it when people are closed-minded. I mean, boy, have I made mistakes and been very wrong.
~Daphne Guinness

—

I’m plagued with indecision in my life. I can’t figure out what to order in a restaurant.
~Chuck Close

I am extremely shy. I am not happy in crowds of people.
~Glenn Close

I remember to breathe throughout the day. I remind myself that I can choose peace, no matter what is going on around me. Whenever I desire, I can retreat to that quiet place within simply by closing my eyes.
~Doreen Virtue

I don’t seem to require a lot of sleep. I just ‒ if I get four, five good hours, I’m fine. But sleeping is sort of dull. There’s a lot of other good stuff that you can do without just lying down and closing your eyes.
~Betty White

Having a routine, knowing what to do, gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It’s calming.
~Chuck Close

I pick up other people’s trash. I’m sort of obsessed.
~Eric Close

I’m an actor, that’s my contribution.
~Glenn Close

Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.
~Agnes Repplier

—

Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they’re very narrow.
~Chuck Close

~

A good undercover agent stays as close to the truth as possible, as close to your own personality and your own values as possible. This is the way you stay in character ‒ you try to be yourself.
~Joseph D Pistone

~

Try this experiment, closing your eyes and navigating with your ears. It’s eerie because walls, you can actually hear your footstep maybe bounce off of or you can feel the vibration of your voice and help that… use that to navigate.
~DJ Spooky

~

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort ‒ the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing ‒ the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
~Andy Rooney

~

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
~Khalil Gibran

Your brain sends out vibrations all the time, and your thoughts affect your life and other people’s. They pick up these thoughts and get changed by them. That’s why, say, a pacifist gets caught up in a riot situation. It’s a field of vibrations ‒ you can ‘feel’ someone else’s thoughts when close to them.
~Bruce Lipton

~

One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.
~Winston Churchill

~

A clever, imaginative, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds.
~Percy Ross

~

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
~EM Forster

~

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
~Chuck Palahniuk

~

Barbarian –A Code of Conduct honored by all true barbarian warriors, requiring excellent coordination with weapons, closeness to nature, awkwardness with women, common sense, and completion of the mission.
~Piers Anthony

~

See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to participate in ‘problem creation’… You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome ‒ which I think is a more interesting place to be.
~Chuck Close

—

One thing about being a painter is that if you have a dog you are naturally going to spend a lot of time with him or her. It has always amazed me the closeness of that relationship even though a word was never spoken, intellect not any part of it.
~Ken Gillespie

A dog can’t get struck by lightning. You know why? Because he’s, he’s too close to the ground. See, lightning strikes tall things. Now, now if they was giraffes out there in that field, well then we’d be in trouble.
~Sheldon Leonard

The giraffe and its close relative the okapi are now the only living representatives of the Giraffidae family.
~Edgar Williams

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group.
~Peter Singer

I have taxidermy pets that are very close to me. I have a little lizard with a head that comes on and off that I call Nicolas Cage because his face is long. And I have a big diamondback rattlesnake called Rufus, and I have some rats in jars and stuff.
~Mackenzie Davis

What the meat industry figured out is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable… Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying…We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.
~Jonathan Safran Foer

—

No one can feel more gratefully the charm of noble scenery, or the refreshment of escape into the unspoiled solitudes of nature, than the laborer at some close in-door employment.
~Lucy Larcom

One learns more from listening than speaking. And both the wind and the people who continue to live close to nature still have much to tell us which we cannot hear within university walls.
~Thor Heyerdahl

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
~John Muir

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
~Frank Lloyd Wright

I also became close to nature, and am now able to appreciate the beauty with which this world is endowed.
~James Dean

Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
~Diane Ackerman

~

The violet flower gives the impression of shyness, growing as it does close to the protective ground and often beneath other plants, shrubs, and trees.
~Steven D Price

~

I can’t do with mountains at close quarters ‒ they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.
~D H Lawrence

The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.
~Norman Foster

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?
~David Attenborough

I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves‒we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other’s destiny.
~Mary Oliver

~

Any time you’re near a kangaroo, it’s a close call.
~Jerry O’Connell

A sea setting us upon the ice has brought us close to danger.
~Henry Hudson

To truly rid the oceans of plastic, what we need to do is two things: One, we need to clean up the legacy pollution, the stuff that has been accumulating for decades and doesn’t go away by itself. But, two, we need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.
~Boyan Slat

~

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
~Elizabeth Bowen

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.
~Anne Lamott

I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests.
~Wangari Maathai

Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
~Diane Ackerman

—

Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they’re very narrow.
~Chuck Close

A good undercover agent stays as close to the truth as possible, as close to your own personality and your own values as possible. This is the way you stay in character ‒ you try to be yourself.
~Joseph D Pistone

Try this experiment, closing your eyes and navigating with your ears. It’s eerie because walls, you can actually hear your footstep maybe bounce off of or you can feel the vibration of your voice and help that… use that to navigate.
~DJ Spooky

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort ‒ the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing ‒ the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
~Andy Rooney

A huge part of real love is constant forgiveness.
~Glenn Close

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
~Khalil Gibran

Taking power away from a man is a dangerous thing. Someone always pays.
~Glenn Close

Your brain sends out vibrations all the time, and your thoughts affect your life and other people’s. They pick up these thoughts and get changed by them. That’s why, say, a pacifist gets caught up in a riot situation. It’s a field of vibrations ‒ you can ‘feel’ someone else’s thoughts when close to them.
~Bruce Lipton

One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.
~Winston Churchill

I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.
~Rex Stout

A clever, imaginative, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds.
~Percy Ross

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
~EM Forster

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
~Chuck Palahniuk

Barbarian –A Code of Conduct honored by all true barbarian warriors, requiring excellent coordination with weapons, closeness to nature, awkwardness with women, common sense, and completion of the mission.
~Piers Anthony

See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to participate in ‘problem creation’… You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome ‒ which I think is a more interesting place to be.
~Chuck Close

~ ~

@Writers Platform:
Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I’m proud of that.
~Glenn Close (*vengeful woman spurned by love)

And those moments that I find mind busting. Meaning like there’s a word that I find in a weird place. I love the process of going to the writer and working that out, because that’s just basic communication.
~Glenn Close

A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
~John Irving

So you have the challenge of just learning the lines, period, and not only learning them, but learning them to the extent that you assimilate them, so that you’re not worried about what the next word is coming out of your mouth when it comes to doing a scene. And you’re also in the trenches with the writers, just in the wonderful kind of back and forth of how is it best to say something, even if it involves four or five words. I love that kind of thing.
~Glenn Close

As an actor, I go where the good writing is. That’s the bottom line.
~Glenn Close

~

I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don’t really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.
~Asghar Farhadi

When I’m stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.
~David Bowie

~

I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
~Zadie Smith

There’s probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, ‘I think that might have been about me,’ or, ‘I know it’s about me.’ I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don’t think I’m ever gonna write a song and drop somebody’s name in it.
~Chris Young

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
~Diana Wynne Jones (Howl’s Moving Castle)

~

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
~Babette Deutsch

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
~Carl Sandburg

Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people’s lives–their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.
~Chaim Potok

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I’m walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
~J Courtney Sullivan

I became, and remain, my characters’ close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
~Elizabeth Bowen (Irish author)

~

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
~Isaac Asimov

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
~Moliere

~

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
~Toni Morrison

*X And now may the blessing of God rest upon all men. I have told unto them the Epic of Kings, and the Epic of Kings is come to a close, and the tale of their deeds is ended.
~Ferdowsi (Persion poet)

—

He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.
~Antonio Porchia

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place.
~George Saunders

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
~Reinhold Niebuhr

What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.
~Elie Wiesel

—

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature ‒ this is very unique to Japan.
~Tadao Ando

My Miyoshi studio in Japan is located in the northern part of Saitama, which puts it in quite close proximity to Fukushima. As such, we can feel the effects of radiation.
~Takashi Murakami

~

Being from Miami, you’re used to the fact that your home is a vacation spot. But that’s what makes Miami one of the best places in the world. We’re so rich in different cultures, being so close to Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and then you’ve got people who travel from all over the world just to come visit.
~Flo Rida

You don’t necessarily have to go to some exotic location halfway around the world. You can find that other world very close to where you live.
~Jeremy Wade

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
~Robert Pinsky

Louisiana was as close to South Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches, and a corrupt government.
~Sal Khan

You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.
~Carrie Fisher

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.
~Marilyn Monroe

Any artist who goes to Las Vegas is an idiot as far as I am concerned. Whoever goes to Las Vegas can stay in Las Vegas.
~Chuck Close

~

I really can’t believe what a state the Pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they are just giant boulders balanced on top of each other, like a massive game of Jenga that has got out of hand.
~Karl Pilkington

When I’m in London I do have the convenience of being close to St James Park which is also good for me because it gives me an excuse to get out and get some much needed exercise!
~David Blunkett

In ‘Roma,’ I wanted to get across the idea that underneath Rome today is ancient Rome. So close. I am always conscious of that, and it thrills me. Imagine being in a traffic jam at the Coliseum! Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world… As was the case with many of my film ideas, it was inspired by a dream.
~Federico Fellini

—

Happiness, for me, has to be real ‒ life that is made of real conversations, of spending quality time with close friends, walks in nature and woods, praying, feeling real gratitude, reading good books, being able to be in the moment and hearing the sounds of nature.
~Bhumika Chawla

Family and close friends who are supportive of you should be integrated into your schedule regularly, to nourish and nurture your overall well being.
~Ace McCloud

But my world fell apart, and all they could do, the whole universe, was to silently move on.
~Khadija Rupa

~

I’ve read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don’t think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time.
~Kate Bush

I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.
~Prince Harry

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.
~Gerard Way

The reason so many intelligent and creative people suffer from depression is that when you take the risk of being fully conscious, you open Pandora’s box, and you can’t close it again.
~Michael Redhill

~

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone ‒ or even close to everyone.
~Malcolm Gladwell

Sexual performance problems, such as impotence and frigidity, are 70 to 90 percent changeable. But a homosexual who wants to be a heterosexual ‒ that’s close to unchangeable. And a transsexual ‒ say a man who believes he’s really a woman in a man’s body ‒ is completely unchangeable; you’d have to change the body to conform to the psyche.
~Martin Seligman

Honestly, being a doctor could make you more close minded than regular people.
~Alex Chiu

The best way to lose weight is to close your mouth ‒ something very difficult for a politician. Or watch your food ‒ just watch it, don’t eat it.
~Ed Koch

I live close to Hampstead Heath, so when I do have spare time, I like to raise my white blood cell count with a swim in the men’s pond. It’s an ambition of mine to swim in the ponds on every day of the year.
~Bertie Carvel (actor/director)

~ ~

Prewritten Prompt: close

~ ~

Although I am not Jewish, I have been to many Friday night Shabbats at my friends houses, and I absolutely love it. It’s a great and inspiring tradition to keep the family close.
~Yolanda Hadid

My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they’d read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.
~Ann Voskamp

I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
~Henri Matisse

Ritual consists of the external practices of spirituality that help us become more receptive and aware of the closeness of our lives to the sacred. Ritual is the act of sanctifying action ‒ even ordinary action ‒ so that it has meaning. I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need.
~Christina Baldwin

~

The gate of death is the gate of exit; the gate of Heaven is the gate of entrance; but these two are so close together that as the one shuts, the other opens.
~James Campbell

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

~

Bishops are like umpires. You have to have them to call the close decisions.
~Frank Butler

Our decision to close on Sunday was our way of honoring God and of directing our attention to things that mattered more than our business.
~S Truett Cathy

~

We are not called upon to enter into controversy with those who hold false theories. Controversy is unprofitable. Christ never entered into it. ‘It is written’ is the weapon used by the world’s Redeemer. Let us keep close to the Word.
~Ellen G White

I would say it simply: No one can give that which he doesn’t personally possess, which means we cannot transmit the Holy Spirit in an effective way, render the Spirit perceptible, if we ourselves aren’t close to the Spirit.
~Pope Benedict XVI

The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.
~Gabriel Marcel

~

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.
~Khalil Gibran

Jesus didn’t hold people accountable; He just held them close ‒ because it works better.
~Bob Goff

~

What cursed spirit of falsehood moveth priests to close themselves within stone walls for all their life, since Christ commanded all his apostles and priests to go into all the world, and to preach the Gospel?
~John Wycliffe

No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets.
~George Washington Carver

~

God operates by different rules of time and space. And God’s infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.
~Philip Yancey

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something ‒ or Someone ‒ beyond itself.
~Eric Metaxas

—

When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.
~Francis Collins

Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is “At Hand.”
~Gilbert K Chesterton

~

Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science.
~William Jennings Bryan

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they’re never really certainties.
~Murray Gell-Mann

~

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It’s the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise.
~Neil deGrasse Tyson

To my surprise, I found that geology demanded a type of whole-brain thinking I hadn’t encountered before. It creatively appropriated ideas from physics and chemistry for the investigation of unruly volcanoes and oceans and ice sheets, It applied scholarly habits one associates with the study of literature and the arts ‒ the practice of close reading, sensitivity to allusion and analogy, capacity for spatial visualization ‒ to the examination of rocks. Its particular form of inferential logic demanded mental versatility and a vigorous but disciplined imagination. And its explanatory power was vast; it was nothing less than the etymology of the world.
~Marcia Bjornerud

I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.
~Ada Lovelace (programming pioneer)

~

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‘Oh, I forgot that bit,’ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!
~Richard P Feynman

Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do ‒ we’re as close to realizing science fiction as it gets.
~Jensen Huang

~

Some astronauts sleep in sort of beds ‒ compartments that you can open up and crawl into and then close up, almost like a little bedroom.
~Sally Ride

It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It’s an interesting place to be. I recommend it.
~Neil Armstrong

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it’s not the same ‒ it’s not even close to the same.
~Sally Ride

~

Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world ‒ but our internal soundtrack doesn’t turn off. We’re also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars.
~Elif Batuman

~

In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
~Michael Shermer

Science progresses not because scientists as a whole are passionately open-minded but because different scientists are passionately closed-minded about different things.
~Henry H Bauer

~

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most.
~Joshua Foer

I absolutely hate technology, and I’m computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I’m not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.
~Chuck Close

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
~Ken Thompson

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
~Bill Gates

—

The ideal of an all-sided education for youth had always been close to my heart. I saw clearly the arid results of ordinary instruction, aimed only at the development of body and intellect.
~Paramahansa Yogananda

To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
~John Buchan

~

That’s the fun of going to a high school reunion: it’s seeing the people who you were close to all those years ago, and re-exploring the relationships of the past.
~Jon Hurwitz

~

I’m open for possibilities. I’m open for choices. I always welcome new ideas. I’m always eager to learn. I’m never going to close my mind from learning.
~Cesar Millan

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.
~Eric Allin Cornell

~

If you close your door to the world of books, the gates of the world of ignorance automatically opens and quickly pulls you inside!
~Mehmet Murat Ildan

Everybody has a way to get to college. You study in high school, you do your work. There are always grants or loans that can be available. I guarantee you ‒ if you want it, you can get it. Don’t close the door on yourself.
~Muggsy Bogues

Handloom is a legacy, a craft which involves close to four million weavers in the country. They have to decide how they would like to position their wares in the domestic and global markets. We in the government will support their vision to the best of our abilities.
~Smriti Irani (India)

Art saved my life in two ways. It made me feel special, because I could do things my friends couldn’t, but it also gave me a way to demonstrate to my teacher that, despite the fact that I couldn’t write a paper or do math, I was paying attention.
~Chuck Close

~ ~

§ The Exercise:

roundabout

criticized censor
censored the critic
one opened windows
the other closing doors
same to close the sluice gates
while some chose the healthy pour
some press for less news
some stress the need for more
silence, the submissive state
suggests a slow death, same before

~

geriatrics

salt and pepper grey
defaults to pepper spray
insulting and assaulting those
exploring life, world gone astray

blend of foes, famous names
need for fame, forced acclaim
begs applause of empty room
plays with flames framing games

~

observations #21

iniquitous nudes
soul wrenching blues
abused and confused
hard times’ faithful muse

ubiquitous awareness
revels in spareness
vs duplicitous crews
manufacturing news

transcendentally embraced
vs edges and corners
limiting learners
boxed in by squareness

mortally cornered
mortality rendered
bad attitude censored
potentially squandered

need turned to greed
the poor left to plead
the last to be first
the rich to know thirst

lacking love means
growing careless
of cosmic wisdom
as karmic fairness

~

5s ‘n 7s

soft intelligence of touch
genius sensitivity
standard near to ubiquity
choice: love or serenity
the call to maternity
hard-won, worn-crown: deity
close reach to eternity

~

closer than my skin
not love, but something akin
closer yet, my friend

_______

The following are political in nature, and don’t belong with the august thoughts and quotes normally found in this newsletter. There being no time to set them aside on a separate page, the reader’s tolerance is asked for. Future issues will have avenues of response provided the reader.

___

welcome to the outhouse

life’s perfectly impenetrable maze
blind road fogged in fathomless ways
dazed by the news daily strenuous views
merchandising the office, coffers open to offers
beatitude platitudes, forgetting the needy
feeding the greedy hungry orifice lovers
hard to believe what’s left to conceive
harlots for profit as predicted by prophets
poisonous symptoms reflecting conditions
manifest difference: to bend, or be bent
to opt for the dark side this close to the end
welcome to the outhouse, formerly white
former benevolence now ruled out of spite

~

towers of power
sweet spot turning sour
proud amateur hour
less science more guess
tame unruly press
embracing the mess
closed minds at their best

~

chastised for caring
crippled by this love
close to the heart of…
like the golden rule
as if gospel true

~ ~

The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes


The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
~Henry Miller

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.
~David Augsburger

~

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
~James Fenimore Cooper

Indecision, doubt and fear. The members of this unholy trio are closely related; where one is found, the other two are close at hand.
~Napoleon Hill

~

Being blind is as simple as closing your eyes. The blind don’t act any different than you or I. You never see a blind person going around saying, ‘I’m blind.’ So if you want to play blind just close your eyes and keep them closed and fare thee well.
~Morgan Freeman

Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.
~Erich Fromm

~

You’re the only one who’s closing your eyes at night. There’s no one else who can do it for you.
~James Caan

I’ve come up with my own cure for a closed mind: try it once, and see.
~Georges St-Pierre

~

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.
~Lao Tzu

Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.
~Zig Ziglar

~

I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren’t closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.
~Vincent Price

We did major work at the White House. But what people often don’t understand is that when you do a historic restoration, you can’t just do whatever you want. You work alongside the fine-arts commission and are obliged to create a replica of the past, as close as humanly possible. It’s a historic institution, not a showhouse.
~Iris Apfel

~

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
~Willa Cather

~

Close scrutiny will show that most ‘crisis situations’ are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.
~Maxwell Maltz

Whenever I hear, ‘It can’t be done,’ I know I’m close to success.
~Michael Flatley (choreographer)

~

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
~Francis Bacon

You shouldn’t get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.
~Bob Newhart

~

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
~Douglas MacArthur

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.
~Voltaire

~

The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze.
~Uzodinma Iweala

When I think about that sunrise that I woke up to that morning, I just feel like I got as close to nowhere as I could get, and found out that it was more of a place than anywhere I’ve been in a long time.
~Hank Green

~

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
~Germaine Greer

It’s odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don’t quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.
~Lady Bird Johnson

~

Nothing purchased can come close to the renewed sense of gratitude for having family and friends.
~Courtland Milloy

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

~

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.
~Ray Dalio

A closed mind is a dying mind.
~Edna Ferber

~

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
~Anna Quindlen

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
~Richard Dawkins

~

Keep your best wishes and your biggest goals close to your heart and dedicate time to them every day. If you truly care about what you do and you work diligently at it, there’s almost nothing you cant accomplish.
~Melchor Lim (media mogul)

Ah, mastery… what a profoundly satisfying feeling when one finally gets on top of a new set of skills… and then sees the light under the new door those skills can open, even as another door is closing.
~Gail Sheehy

~

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.
~Federico Fellini

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.
~George Burns

~

I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine… Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.
~Chuck Close

If you’re overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.
~Chuck Close

~

Celebrity is death ‒ celebrity ‒ that’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor… It puts you in a kind of a strange situation where everybody is looking at every little thing you do.
~Glenn Close

I’ve often been mistaken for Meryl Streep, although never on Oscar night.
~Glenn Close

~

The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.
~Mikhail Baryshnikov

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.
~Erich Maria Remarque

~

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
~J M Coetzee

To understand somebody else as a human being, I think, is about as close to real forgiveness as one can get.
~David Small

_______

I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless.
~Christopher McCandless

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes to see with the other eye.
~Rumi

The above was saved until last to serve as an invitation to visit the source world for Wordgrove, and the Post & Review. There.com was the first 3D world online, and it is a dying world… but someone outside took an interest, visited for 30 days, and made a video of it. It may be my prejudice, but I found it fun viewing. Consider it an introduction to your invitation.
~BarTalk, of Wordgrove

~Globert: Globatron and There.com • I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game

~ ~

The Olio’s Quote Harvest
https://azquotes.com, https://brainyquote.com, https://dailypnut.com, https://wisesayings.com

~

Fun Tarts: https://gocomics.com

~

The Salmagundi Video Harvest
https://venmo.com, https://vevo.com, https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

_______

Donate Button
It would help

~. .~

Read Full Post »

THIS EDITION: choice

_____________

Quoted In The Grove:
We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.
~Thornton Wilder

With awareness come responsibility and choice.
~Amanda Lindhout

By choosing we learn to be responsible. By paying the price of our choices we learn to make better choices.
~Marsha Sinetar

EndQuote:
My mother told me when I was a kid that each time we get to what feels like the edge of a cliff, we have two choices: to turn around and run, or to jump. I have learned over time to jump ‒ and though it is scary, I know somewhere inside me that I will be caught.
~Maria Bello

~ ~

Next Exercise Prompt: find

~ ~

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
~Robert Fritz

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.
~Hugh Mackay

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.
~Dag Hammarskjold

~

When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.
~Niall Williams

Talent allows people to stand out, but their wrong choices make them sit down.
~John C Maxwell

The key choices you make‒apart from the natural talent you already have‒will set you apart from others who have talent alone.
~John C Maxwell

~

If I have the choice between experience and talent, I’m taking talent every time.
~John Calipari

When you have to make a choice between capacity and capability, I would go with capability.
~Joseph Dunford

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
~Peggy Noonan

~

Each choice we make causes a ripple effect in our lives. When things happen to us, it is the reaction we choose that can create the difference between the sorrows of our past and the joy in our future.
~Chelle Thompson

sorrow must not be cultivated: it is a poor lifestyle choice.
~Tarun J Tejpal

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~Khalil Gibran

~

The power of choice. You have it. But you forfeit it when you imagine that you can choose for others. You can’t.
~Harry Browne

Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.
~Madeleine L’Engle

Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give.
~David O McKay

~

Compassion does not just happen. Pity does, but compassion is not pity. It’s not a feeling. Compassion is a viewpoint, a way of life, a perspective, a habit that becomes a discipline ‒ and more than anything else, compassion is a choice we make that love is more important than comfort or convenience.
~Glennon Doyle Melton

To nourish the soul means to become kinder, more compassionate, wiser, and more loving, often through the making of difficult choices that foster growth rather than safety. The nourishment and growth of the soul is the very reason for human life.
~Joan Z Borysenko

The only things standing between you and the compassionate, wise, and creative person you want to be are matters of choice. Your choice. No one can occupy your generosity except you.
~Gary Zukav

~

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.
~Nadia Boulanger

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.
~Stephen Covey

The 3 C’s of Life: Choices, Chances and Changes. You must make a choice to take a chance or you will never change.
~Zig Ziglar

~

Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.
~Richard Bach

Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
~Paolo Giordano

Sometimes it is a good choice not to choose at all.
~Michel de Montaigne

~

You have to make difficult choices in your life, and you just have to be happy with them.
~Lori Loughlin

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.
~Samuel Johnson

What happens if your choice is misguided,
You must try to correct it.
But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t?
Then you must find a way to live with it.
~Libba Bray

~

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
~John Dewey

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

Good or bad, everything we do is our best choice at that moment.
~William Glasser

~

I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.
~Corliss Lamont

People of poor character tend to blame their choices on circumstances. Ethical people make good choices regardless of circumstances.
~John C Maxwell

It’s hard to regret making the choice that you think is right.
~Porter Robinson

~

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
~Dr Seuss

Choices, the greatest power we have,
Choices, the path which is destiny,
Choices, the result which is you…
~Joshua Fernandez

Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.
~Anne Frank

~

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices
~Amin Maalouf

Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones. You just have to choose which wrong choices feels the least wrong.
~Colleen Hoover

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.
~George MacDonald

~

But difficult situations and wrong choices conspire to trap us in hopelessness.
~Judah Smith

Hope is a moral choice.
~Jim Yong Kim

No matter what, we always have the power to choose hope over despair, engagement over apathy, kindness over indifference, love over hate.
~Cory Booker

~

Choices can change our lives profoundly. The choice to mend a broken relationship, to say “yes” to a difficult assignment, to lay aside some important work to play with a child, to visit some forgotten person–these small choices may affect many lives eternally.
~Gloria Gaither

You don’t choose because if you choose you might make the wrong choice, based upon ego or illusion. Instead, you let eternity make all the choices for you.
~Frederick Lenz

Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.
~Thomas Carlyle

~

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
~John Kenneth Galbraith

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it’s always interesting how many people toss the facts.
~Rebecca Solnit

Eighty percent of all choices are based on fear. Most people don’t choose what they want; they choose what they think is safe.
~Dr Phil McGraw

~

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.
~Stephen R Covey

Choice of attention ‒ to pay attention to this and ignore that ‒ is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
~W H Auden

The difficulty in life is the choice.
~George Moore

~ ~

Posted From The Grove

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
~James Madison

Today’s political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun, in the name of the IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the DEA, the EPA, or a multitude of other ABCs of government authority.
~Mark Skousen

Greed, as law of the land, unaccountable without oversight, is more without conscience than lust.
~author unknown

~

Before the boat docked, however, he confessed because he was contemplating running for president, he couldn’t separate from his wife. I believed him when he told me he faced a difficult choice between pursuing personal happiness and his political destiny.
~Donna Rice Hughes

I had to make a choice ‒ recede into the academic world, or wade into politics.
~Elizabeth Warren

~

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.
~Ronald Reagan

A truly moral nation enacts policies that encourage personal responsibility and discourage self-destructive behavior by not subsidizing people who live irresponsibly and make poor choices.
~Benjamin Carson

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
~George McGovern

~

No one will be forced to take the public option. The word option means choice.
~Valerie Jarrett

There is no such thing as freedom of choice unless there is freedom to refuse.
~David Hume

~

A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embrace the discarded policies of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement.
~Trent Lott

I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words.
~Harry Reid

I am very sorry if I have caused any offence. It was a poor choice of costume.
~Prince Harry

~

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.
~Frantz Fanon

I have several times made a poor choice by avoiding a necessary confrontation.
~John Cleese

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.
~William James

~

Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give.
~David O McKay

Under the big political umbrella, a man is just like a leaf in the ocean, with no control of his destiny and does not have any choice.
~Zhang Yimou

On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us ‒ ah! what a dream, to live in that! ‒ the other stifles us at the first breath.
~Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

~

Choice is a national instinct. This capitalist bedrock of our prosperity and security is threatened by a Labour Party that wants to overthrow the whole system.
~Liz Truss

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.
~Tony Blair

~

America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don’t tell the story of the people who don’t come out so successful, and we don’t tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.
~Lecrae

It was a very difficult choice ‒ to say, “We’re not going to hold senior officials to account with the same laws that every other citizen in the country is held to,” or “This is a nation that believes in the rule of law.”
~Edward Snowden

Our world is at the crossroads. We have a choice, right and wrong.
~LL Cool J

—

There’s a difference between being ignorant and being stupid… For me, an ignorant person is someone who makes the wrong decision or a bad choice because he or she does not have the proper facts. If you give that person the facts and the proper information you have alleviated that ignorance, and they make the right decision.
~Daryl Davis

~

Patriotism is voluntary. It is a feeling of loyalty and allegiance that is the result of knowledge and belief. A patriot shows their their patriotism through their actions, by their choice.
~Jesse Ventura

~

When certain causes become prairie fires, politicians make difficult choices, and often at the expense of someone like Jeremiah Wright and Walter Jenkins. That’s the cruel nature of American politics, where the end becomes the consummate objective, and sometimes the means to get there come at a great price.
~Bill Moyers

~

When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.
~Mary Ruwart

~

Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.
~Anita Roddick

~

In the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy as a prisoner’s chains.
~Dwight D Eisenhower

—

If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.
~Robert Mugabe

Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, whose parents choose Canada, I’m jealous. Because I think being able to choose it, rather than being Canadian by default, is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada.
~Justin Trudeau

My parents didn’t feel that they had any choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. They did, however, choose to become Americans, and they lived American values every day.
~Tom Perez (ex-Sec/Labor)

I am an American. I adore Britain and have a strong English half, but my roots are here in the U.S. ‒ it is not a matter of choice; it is simply fact.
~Jennifer Ehle

Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn’t have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I’m a pure American ‒ even more than people who are born here ‒ because I did it by choice as an adult.
~Jacques Pepin

Be ready to protect me because I have chosen to obey your laws.
~Psalm 119:173

As a global community, we face a choice. Do we want migration to be a source of prosperity and international solidarity, or a byword for inhumanity and social friction?
~Antonio Guterres

~

Isolated decisions, however well-founded they might seem to the individual, and national go-it-alone moves must belong to the past. They should not be the 21st-century method of choice, particularly because the consequences of the European community’s actions must often be carried collectively.
~Helmut Kohl

The dynamic of globalisation in financial and economic terms, but also in geopolitical terms, confronts Europeans with a stark choice: live together, share a common destiny and count in the world; or face the prospect of disunity and decline.
~Jose Manuel Barroso

—

We’re always going to argue about abortion. It’s a hard choice and it’s controversial, and that’s why I’m pro-choice, because I want people to make their own choices.
~Hillary Clinton

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.
~Barbara Bush

I’m against abortion. On the other hand, I believe in a woman’s choice.
~Nancy Reagan

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
~Garrett Hardin

However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalize a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice.
~Tony Blair

~

It’s not your body, it’s not your choice, because you got that from God. He gave that to you.
~Norma McCorvey

There are young people having babies every day that cannot possibly take care of them, and, as people who believe that every life is beautiful, we need to make them aware of another choice ‒ to give that beautiful life up for adoption.
~John Schneider

The option to freeze one’s eggs is just about the most empowering choice a single woman who knows she wants to be a mother can make.
~Faith Salie

If a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support… autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice.
~Karen DeCrow

—

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
~George Eliot

As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the fence.
~Chuck Schumer

When you deprive people of their right to live in dignity, to hope for a better future, to have control over their lives, when you deprive them of that choice, then you expect them to fight for these rights.
~Queen Rania of Jordan

The time comes in the life of any nation when there remains only two choices ‒ submit or fight.
~Nelson Mandela

I remember the day Ukraine became independent. I was 20; now I am over 40… I know better than anyone: no fight, no win.
~Vitali Klitschko

I demolish my bridges behind me ‒ then there is no choice but forward.
~Fridtjof Nansen

Here is no choice but either do or die.
~William Wallace (Braveheart of Scotland)

~

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.
~Theodore Bikel

Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.
~Stone Gossard

—

There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must.
~Tony Blair

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.
~Charles Krauthammer

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
~William James

Experience shows that the reliance on illegal, immoral, and inhumane interrogation techniques is universally a very poor choice.
~Peter Maurer

Anyone who thinks that the vice-president can take a position independent of the president of his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.
~Hubert H Humphrey

~

Obama is making a choice now that will lead to the deaths of many thousands of civilians in Afghanistan by American hands. By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man. But those standards aren’t good enough. He’s in a position either to kill or not to kill, and he’s made the decision to kill.
~Daniel Ellsberg

The conduct of President Bush’s war of choice has been plagued with incompetent civilian leadership decisions that have cost many lives and rendered the war on and occupation of Iraq a strategic policy disaster for the United States.
~John Olver

In responding to a terrorist attack, there are only two choices ‒ take the fight to the enemy or wait until they hit you again. In my estimation, America chose the first.
~Kay Granger

~

Drones can be a highly effective way of dealing with high-priority targets, but they should not become the drug of choice for an administration that is afraid to use successful, legal and safe tactics of the past.
~Jose Rodriguez

Responsible statesmen have only one choice ‒ to do everything possible to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Any other position is short-sighted; more so, it is suicidal.
~Yuri Andropov

A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
~Oscar Wilde

~

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education… no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
~Abraham Flexner

It’s not a choice between war and peace. It’s a choice between war and endless war. It’s not appeasement. I think it’s better even to call it American self-interest.
~Michael Scheuer

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.
~Lester B Pearson

—

It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.
~Kim Philby

It’s sad. Marxism didn’t work. Communism didn’t work. Capitalism doesn’t work. Nothing works. Even democracy doesn’t work. Democracy-the greatest form of government and we have two choices for who’s our leader. In fascism you only have one choice. That’s great. We have one more choice than the worst form of government.
~Colin Quinn

~

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
~Peter Ustinov

The thing about American politics, as I’ve learned, is there is no choice.
~Rob Walton

I will offer a choice, not an echo.
~Barry Goldwater

~

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.
~Ralph Nader

I’m an independent. I’m a centrist. A new generation is arriving that has grown up with a multiplicity of choice in every aspect of their lives, and yet politics is the last place that they are told that they should be satisfied with a choice between brand A and brand B. It doesn’t fit the way they think. It doesn’t fit the way they live.
~John Avlon

I hate politics. It’s slimy. Any job where people pander for votes, I don’t like. The country has gotten so partisan that if you’re not on my side, you’re the enemy. The only thing I ever try to support is a third party… We need more parties and more choice.
~Mark Cuban

Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those are the… that is the choice we have on the party ballot.
~Gloria Steinem

~

Ranked Choice Voting is simple, empowers voters, and rewards candidates who broaden support beyond their base.
~Dean Phillips

With ranked choice voting, every vote matters more than ever before, and it matters to every single candidate.
~Ritchie Torres

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
~Herbert Marcuse

—

To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.
~Thomas Paine

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.
~Margaret Thatcher

~

When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.
~Adam Grant

Choice is strength. Having choice is also freedom.
~Coulter Watt

The entire world depends upon our individual choices.
~Duane Elgin

We had our chance, we made our choice, but history hasn’t voted yet.
~author unknown

~

I trust Canadians to be able to look at the different parties, the different leaders, the plans, the teams, and make a responsible choice. And I’m very, very confident that’s exactly what Canadians are going to do.
~Justin Trudeau

Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
~Tony Blair

~

I don’t believe in good human beings, but I believe you can have structures that make it easier to make the right choice or the wrong choice.
~Justin Welby

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.
~Stephen Covey

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
~Robert Anton Wilson

~

Now you have a choice: we can give more tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that open new plants and train new workers and create new jobs here, in the United States of America.
~Barack Obama

Smart people make good choices. They dig science and say ‘no’ to the invasion of sovereign nations for the pleasure of corporations.
~Henry Rollins

~

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.
~Margaret Atwood

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman’s truncheon over the anarchist’s bomb.
~Spiro T Agnew

~

So, I think even in Saudi Arabia there is movement. And we have to remember that over the years they’ve stabilized the oil price and that is tremendously important for the economies of the world. I think we have no choice but to work with the government of Saudi Arabia.
~Frank Carlucci

If we want Saudi Arabia to progress, we have no choice but to embrace change.
~Lubna Olayan

~

Every day the choice between good and evil is presented to us in simple ways.
~William Edwyn Robert Sangster

The choice must always be made, if not one of the lesser evil, at least of the greater, not the perfect good.
~James Madison

~

There are two primary choices in life; to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.
~Denis Waitley

Knowing that you’re choosing all your actions brings clarity, responsibility, and accountability to your life.
~Madonna Gauding

Inaction is also a decision, a policy with consequence. The wish to keep out of it all is entirely understandable, but it is every bit as much a decision as acting.
~Tony Blair

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by their choice—their choice.
~Dwight Eisenhower

~

It’s choice‒not chance‒that determines your destiny.
~Jean Nidetch

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
~William Jennings Bryan

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfill our destiny, but our fate is sealed.
~Paulo Coelho

Every choice you make has an end result.
~Zig Ziglar

~

The problem is neutrality ends in poverty, neutrality ends in choices that hurt people’s lives. This administration is deliberately telling organizations that are there to help young girls make good choices, not to tell them what the good choice is. That is absolutely unconscionable.
~Rick Santorum

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.
~Richard Dawkins

As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.
~Joyce Meyer

I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government’s business.
~Jesse Ventura

If you believe in equality, if you believe in standing up for the rights of all, especially for people most affected by bigotry and discrimination, then you have no choice but to be present and accounted for when it comes to standing up for gays and lesbians in our society.
~Michael Moore

If you want to believe that the government’s coming for our guns or that being gay is a choice and a sin or that ObamaCare signals the end of civilization or that cutting taxes for rich people is the path to a better America, that’s your choice. I’m never going to believe in any of that.
~James Carville

~

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.
~John Adams

In this country, we believe in personal choice and individual liberty.
~Bill Hagerty

~

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose.
~C Wright Mills

I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
~George McGovern

~

If you were given only one choice: To choose or not to choose, which would you choose
~Dr Shad Helmstetter

~ ~

~Vimeo‒Staff Pick: Choice (3:43) in praise of…

~

~Darlene Mohekey : Choice CNZ (2:55) 3 minutes daft, unpredictable silliness, live onstage

~

~Life Eternal: Alan Watts • Choice (3:26) a realization unfolding


~ ~

Economics is a choice between alternatives all the time. Those are the trade-offs.
~Paul Samuelson

You have to do things right to stay in business, and that’s not easy, and that’s a choice on a daily basis, the choices you make in how to run your business and how to have a point of differentiation and how to be true to your brand, how to offer something that people want and to offer something that you love.
~Venus Williams

Success is ultimately realized by people who make more good choices and recover quickly from their bad choices. Our personal and professional success depends on repeating good choices, day in and day out, and avoiding repetition of bad choices.
~David Cottrell

~

Leadership is a choice, not a position.
~Stephen Covey

Unfortunately, to succeed in business, organizations need to make difficult choices all the time‒what to do and, more important, what not to do. The truth of the matter is that whenever we make a difficult choice, some people will win and some will lose. The winners will be happy and the losers unhappy. It’s impossible to make everybody happy all the time. If everybody in your organization is happy, that may be because you’re failing to lead them.
~Constantinos C Markides

Mostly, the best way to be the next Mark Zuckerberg is to make difficult choices.
~Seth Godin

~

The difference between management and administration (which is what bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.
~Robert Heller

~

Every Morning You Have Two Choices: Continue To Sleep With Your Dreams, Or Wake Up and Chase Them.
~Carmelo Anthony

I think the American Dream used to be achieving one’s goals in your field of choice ‒ and from that, all other things would follow. Now, I think the dream has morphed into the pursuit of money: Accumulate enough of it, and the rest will follow.
~Buzz Aldrin

That is where the power, opportunity, and choice come from‒when you have money. Money equals opportunity. There is no question.
~Billie Jean King

~

Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants as long as it’s black.
~Henry Ford

White shall not neutralize the black nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life’s business being just the terrible choice.
~Robert Browning

~

If you stop where you are,
you’ll die where you stand
Those choices you make
—to forever command.
~Kurt Philip Behm

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.
~Alan Greenspan

~

The amount of money currently in your bank account is a fact. The amount you spend today is a choice. And the way you reconcile both is through clarity.
~Sarah Ban Breathnach

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
~Theodor W Adorno

~

For an investment banker, the a payment that doubles with every square on the chessboard and one that doubles with every other square is more important than any other part of the contract. Who cares whether the payment is in pennies, pounds, or pesos?
~Paul Romer

The power of conscious choice is your profit-earning capital
Pay attention! Watch over that moment of power.
~Jalaluddin Rumi

~

You have two choices: You can make a living, or you can design a life.
~Jim Rohn

The minute you decide to do what you love to do, you have made a life plan for yourself and a career choice.
~Huda Kattan

If you’re early on in your career and they give you a a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It’s not even close. And don’t even think about leaving that mentor until your learning curve peaks.
~Stanley Druckenmiller

~

Work ethic is important because, unlike intelligence, athleticism, charisma, or any other natural attribute, it’s a choice.
~Mike Rowe

~

Some of our important choices have a time line. If we delay a decision, the opportunity is gone forever. Sometimes our doubts keep us from making a choice that involves change. Thus an opportunity may be missed.
~James E Faust

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
~Viktor E Frankl

Don’t look too far into the future, just look at tomorrow. One day at a time. Can you win tomorrow? Can you make progress? The answer is yes, you have a choice and tomorrow you’re going to win.
~Joe Wicks

~

To me, success is choice and opportunity.
~Harrison Ford

I left Goldman Sachs. I was thinking about going to another Wall Street place. I didn’t want to do that. That was crazy. After you work on Wall Street, it’s a choice: would you rather work at McDonald’s or on the sell side? I would choose McDonald’s over the sell side.
~David Tepper

~

If you look across the economy, if you have multiple players in an industry, you have more customization, more innovation, greater choice for consumers. The more you have consolidation, the less likely you are to invest in innovation. It becomes all about driving down cost and mass production. And that’s not good for innovation in an industry.
~Ro Khanna

Right to Work laws give workers a choice. Choice creates competition and competition breeds success. Forced unionization creates a monopoly, which only leads to stagnation.
~Tommy Tuberville

~

Many kids turn to selling drugs. It’s not a good career choice, but they see it as a way to get money.
~Richard Harris

Bringing in innovation and youth is not a bad thing: it is a courageous choice.
~Paolo Maldini (Italian footballer/exec)

~

Often, farmers have difficulty finding secondary markets for their outgrades and have no choice but to leave fresh produce unharvested to rot in the field. Gleaning Network U.K. coordinates teams of volunteers with willing farmers across the U.K. to direct this fresh surplus produce to charities that redistribute it to people that need it most.
~Tristram Stuart

~

We have such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choice. Do you want to hike in the Alps? There are 300 pairs of shoes you can order within the next 10 minutes. You have your choice of everything.
~Nick Offerman

—

That was my major reason for believing his candidacy was a good thing. However, I don’t endorse candidates, given the type of work that I do. My job is to hold people accountable.
~Tavis Smiley

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.
~William Tecumseh Sherman

If people who cherish freedom, who know the importance of mutual respect and are aware of the imperative necessity to establish a constructive and critical debate, if these people are not ready to speak out, to be more committed and visible, then we can expect sad, painful tomorrows. The choice is ours.
~Tariq Ramadan

~

Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.
~Marie Colvin

Let bravery be thy choice, but not bravado.
~Menander

~

The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with ‒ or protect ‒ the privacy of their exchange.
~Ivan Illich

~

A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.
~Alexandra Kerry

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of ‘The Giver‘: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.
~Lois Lowry

—

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.
~Nelson Mandela

People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes ‒ whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.
~Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther)

There came a point when I wanted to do television, and I didn’t think the Afro was going to play, so I made a very difficult choice ‒ to straighten my hair.
~Jami Floyd (attorney/journalist)

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.
~Meghan Markle

Integration is a man’s ability to want to move in there by himself. If someone wants to live in a white neighborhood and he is black, that is his choice. It should be his rights. It is not because white people will not allow him.
~Stokely Carmichael

Black people are not a monolith. Black people have different thoughts. And sometimes people just need to hear the harsh truth ‒ even myself. But you can’t manufacture a hard truth and place it on somebody. When Kanye says slavery was a choice, that’s not a harsh truth.
~JPEGMAFIA

—

You have no choices about how you lose, but you do have a choice about how you come back and prepare to win again.
~Pat Riley (NBA coach)

We set up a situation and let you interact with it and see the consequences of your choice. That’s what gaming does.
~Warren Spector (game designer)

People just need to be open-minded enough to accept the game for what it is. If you don’t want to see it, then you’re never going to appreciate it, which is fine; it’s your choice.
~Millie Bright (soccer)

~

People who make the choice to study, work hard or do whatever they endeavor is to give it the max on themselves to reach to the top level. And you have the people who get envy and jealous, yet are not willing to put that work in, and they want to get the same praise.
~Evander Holyfield (WBA)

I’m as much of a human being as the rest of the world. But if I don’t train, I don’t win. If I don’t focus, I don’t win. So I don’t have a choice: I just have to run.
~Mo Farah (distance runner)

~

If you want someone to show up and help you if something bad happens, you’d better tell someone where you’re going. And of course I wanted someone to know ‒ but I’d made a choice and it was a choice I was going to have to live with.
~Aron Ralston (mountaineer)

We are a religious family. My mum still goes to church every Sunday. There was a time when I was younger when I started getting games on a Sunday, so it came down to a choice between going to church and playing football. I think my mum knew what I really loved, and she did not stop me from going to football.
~Danny Welbeck

~

Once you declare your loyalty to a team, every person who doesn’t support that team, it’s their job to ruin you, to tell you you’re an idiot and to tell you that you made the wrong choice.
~Mark Hoppus

If you’re a sports fan you realize that when you meet somebody, like a girlfriend, they kind of have to root for your team. They don’t have a choice.
~Jimmy Fallon

~

If you’d given me the choice of going out and beating four men and smashing a goal in from thirty yards against Liverpool or going to bed with Miss World, it would have been a difficult choice. Luckily, I had both.
~George Best

How do you want to live your life? How do you want to play the game? Do you want to play in the big leagues or in the little leagues, in the majors or the minors? Are you going to play big or play small? It’s your choice.
~T Harv Eker

~ ~

§ VIDEO:
For me, it was a choice between band and drama ‒ and I hated the band teacher.
~Lucy Deakins (actress/lawyer)

Being traditional is a choice for me. South Indian families bring up their children with a sense of freedom, self-respect and self-value. We do whatever we have to with earnestness and honesty, including being uninhibited. Yet we hold onto our roots.
~Vidya Balan (Hindi actress)

I was a very shy and quiet person growing up, so it was just really difficult getting up on a stage. It was a perverse career choice really.
~Ardal O’Hanlon

You know, young actors say all the time, ‘Should I use my own life experience?’ And my response is, ‘What choice do you have?’
~David Mamet

~

Every choice you make as an actor ends up being really influential on your life, because you’re spending a lot of time working on this project, and you want to make sure you’re making good choices and you’re not making them for the wrong reasons. I just want to be careful and not jump into anything.
~Michael Cera

I’ve seen many actors go awry by making the wrong choices early on.
~Rose McGowan

~

I generally play villains once every three or four years by choice because I get offered villainous roles a lot, because of the way I look and whatever. And I tend to avoid them because I think you can end up in a cul-de-sac of your own making if you’re cast in that.
~Kevin McKidd

When I first got to New York, all I did was musicals. After a few years I had to make a conscious choice to close the door on musicals, because I was getting pigeon-holed as a musical theater performer.
~Tamara Tunie

There are things that I would avoid, so I have the choice to say no, when I feel I’m repeating myself too much. But then there could be a reason to do that with a good director. So I think actors have to have a loose philosophy.
~Toby Jones

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is the best actor because his choice of roles are so diametrically opposite from each other, and he pulls it off almost every time so convincingly.
~Sushant Singh Rajput

~

I enjoy some physical stuff. But if I had a choice between playing a scene where it’s raining, it’s terribly cold, I’m wet and I’m being drowned and playing a scene with dinosaur eggs in a laboratory, I’d probably take the latter. It’s warmer and generally more comfortable!
~Sam Neill

~

If you had asked me back in grade school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said my first choice was an actor, but if I couldn’t be that, I’d want to be a superhero.
~Vin Diesel

It was not really a career choice that I had to make. It was something I knew right from the beginning. I had to be an actress… period.
~Christine Lahti

There I was as a kid: a closeted homosexual who wants to be an actress. I had no choice! Wanting to act was something I was wired with when I was born. I never thought I would have success or celebrity, although I did want that. But what I wanted more than anything was to work.
~Jane Lynch

~

When you receive a script and it leaps out at you and it’s breathing with its own heartbeat ‒ I suppose when you read something like that it’s not a choice of whether you do it or don’t. It feels like it chooses you, so you just do it.
~Sarah Lancashire

Acting is a mix of luck and choice. I got lucky.
~John Travolta

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
~Penelope Lively (British writer)

~

I always liked the visuals to be choice and at the same time minimalist. And, I love black boxes. After all, that’s what theatre is, it’s an empty space, and it’s both limited and unlimited because the space is the space, but what you can do with people’s imaginations is really endless.
~Harold Prince

Every television show you go on is a choice.
~Joan Rivers

—

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.
~Keanu Reeves

I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting…I quite like to be in that maze.
~Christopher Nolan

~

You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice.
~Frederick Wiseman

The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie.
~John Frankenheimer

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.
~Roger Deakins

Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices ‒ and in particular, difficult cuts.
~David Benioff

~

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it ‒ the grain, how it feels, the texture… I think ‒ I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be ‒ it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.
~Keanu Reeves

I’m very happy where 3-D is going, which is that it’s becoming a choice ‒ and thankfully, most people are still choosing 2-D.
~Christopher Nolan

~

When I’m doing a movie, I’m not doing anything else. It’s all about the movie. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a kid. Nothing can get in my way… I’ve made a choice, so far, to go on this road alone. Because this is my time. This is my time to make movies.
~Quentin Tarantino

The paranormal bad boy is usually a fiercely loyal partner for the heroine. Once his sights are set on her, he doesn’t notice other women, and he’s utterly unconcerned with what anyone else thinks of his choice.
~Jeaniene Frost

~

NC-17 means that you get it in like 3 theaters. They won’t run the spots on MTV, won’t run the advertising. It’s the kiss of death so there was really no other choice.
~Rob Zombie

You’ve got a movie where the pro-choice family gives their daughter no choice. The pro-life family murders. What seems to be the good mother, the kind of hippie painter, sweet and cute mother has no love for her daughter really.
~Ellen Barkin

I like the variety. But basically my choice of films is a small intimate film. Quiet film, no action, just people in relationships. That’s what I like the most.
~Jerry Goldsmith

~ ~

~Kate Enge: Choice Reaction (4:52) child custody choice, with tears

~

~Matthew Macar: Choice (6:10) androids: with choice, or not

~

~Omeleto: A Matter Of Choice (14:31) life, an option

~

Omeleto: Choices (17:28) abortion, it’s complicated

~

~,KIS KIS: Dilemma (10:02) a choice to be made

~ ~

What is portraiture? It’s choice. It’s the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
~Kehinde Wiley

Sepia in particular tends to make everything look a bit romantic and almost sentimental, hence the fact that it remains such a popular choice for wedding photographs.
~Martin Parr

Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. ‘Lying’ is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
~Richard Avedon

~

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t.
~Lucian Freud

Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
~Kehinde Wiley

~

Given the choice between instant gratification and the lasting satisfaction of earning the esteem of someone you respect and admire, all but the most small-minded would choose the latter.
~Mark Goulston

I always look at actresses who I most respect, and they make me think that you can make a choice in life. It’s whether or not you choose to go down the route of publicising your personal life. I choose not to.
~Vanessa Kirb

~

No matter what your choices are, you truly have no control about what people think of you.
~Neve Campbell

If every choice you make comes from an honest place, you’re solid, and nothing anybody can say about you can rock you or change your opinion.
~Angelina Jolie

Nothing that you do will ever feel good if you let people convince you that you have no choice.
~Fiona Apple

Make your important choices in life based on your values and your long-term objectives rather than on a need for approval… I make my own choices. I decide what I will and will not do. I am proud of my independence.
~Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I don’t want everyone to like me, and I don’t choose who likes me. You have to give them the choice, give them the option.
~Jean Dujardin

~

I have learned not to take too much notice of those who disapprove of my lifestyle choices, because I know that I was not designed to be part of the crowd. If I am different, I make no apology, and I hope that others will have the courage to be themselves and stand up for what they believe in, fight for those who need protection, love who they want to love, and be proud of it.
~Clare Balding

There’s not really a choice about, am I going to pursue a typical career? Because I’m not the typical standard, so that’s not even an option.
~America Ferrera

You have two choices in life ‒ you can dissolve into the main stream or you can be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different you must strive to be what no one else but you can be. Don’t be so concerned with the opinions of others; those who follow the quiet, creative voice from within are both fortunate and correct.
~Bob Proctor

~

When you are ten years old and people are screaming your name, trying to grab you at the Kids Choice Awards, and you go to the mall and groups of girls start following you around, it’s very unreal and like a dream. I can’t say I get used to it, it’s always been a little freaky.
~Aidan Gallagher

Child stars have nothing. They have no choice.
~Corey Feldman

~

I find it interesting where grunge originated from and then where it was taken, which was high fashion. My dad [Kurt] was so poor that they kept going to Goodwill to get donated ripped jeans. It wasn’t a fashion decision; it was an ‘I don’t have any money, I have no other choice’ type of decision.
~Frances Bean Cobain

I have practically no private life. I’m already used to this and ready for it. Yes, sometimes it is hard, but it is the choice I made.
~Cristiano Ronaldo

My fancy dress costume of choice is… something 1920s or 30s, when there was still so much elegance and attention to detail. An excuse for ultimate dressing-up indulgence.
~Ellie Goulding

—

For 24 years of my adult life, by choice I weighed well over 200 pounds. I say ‘by choice’ because I have never ‘accidentally’ eaten anything, so when I choose to eat too much, I have chosen to weigh too much.
~Zig Ziglar

When I’ve lost weight, some fans get very upset because they want me to stay curvy. But my own self-worth and wellness regime has to do with my well-being and longevity, so if I make the choice to take care of myself, and the outcome is losing weight, it’s disappointing that there might be some backlash.
~Sara Ramirez

Fat loss is an all-out war. Give it 28 days ‒ only 28 days. Attack it with all you have. It’s not a lifestyle choice; it’s a battle. Lose fat and then get back into moderation. There’s another one for you: moderation. Revelation says it best: ‘You are lukewarm and I shall spit you out.’ Moderation is for sissies.
~Dan John

This is what people don’t understand: obesity is a symptom of poverty. It’s not a lifestyle choice where people are just eating and not exercising. It’s because kids ‒ and this is the problem with school lunch right now ‒ are getting sugar, fat, empty calories ‒ lots of calories ‒ but no nutrition.
~Tom Colicchio

~

Anorexia is a real disease. The choice you do have is asking for help.
~Ginger Zee

The typical Western diet is the number-one cause of premature death and the number-one cause of disability. In other words, a long and healthy life is largely a matter of choice.
~Michael Greger

~

If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or Fight Like Hell.
~Lance Armstrong

~

Before my accidents, there were ten thousands things I could do. I could spend the rest of my life dwelling on the things that I had lost, but instead I chose to focus on the nine thousand I still had left.
~W Mitchell

I often say now I don’t have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson’s, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.
~Michael J Fox

So, we have choice, and sometimes it seems very hard, but the best way to heal physically or emotionally is to keep positive.
~Petra Nemcova

Talk with your doctor, make healthy lifestyle choices and most importantly, know your body ‒ as that can make all the difference in the world.
~Cynthia Nixon

—

People’s choice to become vegan, from people I’ve spoken to, seems motivated by fear.
~Anthony Bourdain

Being vegan truly is the secret to my life’s joy and peace. I feel physically and spiritually better than I could have ever imagined knowing that I am doing everything I can to reduce animal suffering with simple lifestyle choices like being vegan, never wearing any products made from animals (like wool and leather), and buying only from companies that NEVER test their products or ingredients on animals.
~Alicia Silverstone

These days, I’m a hypocritical, philosophical vegetarian. Vegetarianism would be the right choice, but I really, really love meat.
~Tim Minchin

~

Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: Always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.
~Mike Royko

If I had the smoked salmon and tinned salmon, I’d have it tinned. With vinegar.
~Harold Wilson

The first step towards solving the omnivore’s dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.
~Michael Pollan

~

I am a Gujarati by birth, but having spent most of the growing up years in Mumbai, I can eat all kinds of food, from pizza to Thai, but given a choice, I want to stick to Indian.
~Himesh Reshammiya

You’d have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I’d probably want to die in San Sebastian.
~Anthony Bourdain (@ge 61, Kaysersberg, France)

My favorite food from my homeland is Guinness. My second choice is Guinness. My third choice ‒ would have to be Guinness.
~Peter O’Toole

—

There’s going to be stress in life, but it’s your choice whether you let it affect you or not.
~Valerie Bertinelli

My message is that happiness is the first principle of life. But you must choose it. We all have pain, but suffering is a choice. You can be happier if you make some changes in your life.
~Alexandra Stoddard

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.
~Aeschylus

Whenever I’m asked about the greatest lesson I’ve learned, my response is, ‘Happiness is a choice I make.’
~Gabrielle Bernstein

Happiness is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy. No person will make you happy unless you decide to be happy. Your happiness will not come to you. It can only come from you.
~Ralph Marston

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
~Leo Buscaglia

I do believe in choice, the freedom of choice and carving out your own happiness.
~Sandra Bullock

I’ve realized that being happy is a choice. You never want to rub anybody the wrong way or not be fun to be around, but you have to be happy.
~Angelina Jolie

I think happiness is a choice. If you feel yourself being happy and can settle in to the life choices you make, then it’s great. It’s really, really great. I swear to God, happiness is the best makeup.
~Drew Barrymore

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.
~William Glasser

~ ~

§ MUSIC:
As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn’t until my 30s that I began a profession in music.
~Tom Glazer

I had no choice but to work hard. I was a straight-A student, went to college, and I loved business. I never thought I was going to be a singer myself. It came accidentally.
~Jenni Rivera

Music was always the distraction, so it was the obvious choice to pursue. My dad always said to find a job I love to do, that way it wouldn’t feel like a job. So I did that.
~Jason Mraz

Take care to do what you like or you will be forced to like what you do.
~George Bernard Shaw

Your talent is in your choice.
~Stella Adler

~

Played percussively, the piano is a bore. If I go to a concert and someone plays like that I have two choices: go home or go to sleep. The goal is to make the piano sing, sing, sing.
~Vladimir Horowitz

I enjoy all aspects of singing and I’m luckily given the choice to be part of different styles of music.
~Bryn Terfel

I chose busking because I didn’t want to be working for someone else. I wanted to work as I am. I feel like you ultimately do have a choice if you have your vision. So, I had a vision forever that I was going to play music. And there was no stopping that.
~Tash Sultana

~

Mexican music runs through my veins. I loved it. Growing up, my father didn’t allow us to listen to English music at home. That’s all I heard. I had no choice.
~Jenni Rivera

The one thing the blues don’t get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people’s throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.
~John Lee Hooker

The people have allowed me to ‒ they’ve respected my choice of wanting to be like, a little, you know, a baby alchemist, and just trying to mix different cultures together and things that I think are interesting.
~Pharrell Williams

—

Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life.
~Benjamin Spock

I think that our power of conscious origination is where free will comes in…We are originally choosing between the good and the less good, whether aware of it or not.
~Alfred North Whitehead

~

You can’t make your choices based on what critics think. You have to make your choices based on what’s honest for you.
~Nicolas Cage

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved ‒ bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
~Marcel Duchamp

~

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
~Thomas Merton

In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day ‒ which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie ‒ says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.
~David Levithan

~

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.
~Theophile Gautier

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives ‒ choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
~Aristotle

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.
~Lana Del Rey

You don’t decide to paint. It’s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.
~Leonora Carrington

~

I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion.
~Darren Aronofsky

In the world of Art there are no wrong choices.
~Herbie Hancock

Art is not predictable. Art is not golf, as great as that may be. There are 360 degrees of choice to make.
~Tina Weymouth

Creative choice is your birthright. Please own it.
~John Bradshaw

—

What is portraiture? It’s choice. It’s the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
~Kehinde Wiley

Sepia in particular tends to make everything look a bit romantic and almost sentimental, hence the fact that it remains such a popular choice for wedding photographs.
~Martin Parr

Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. ‘Lying’ is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
~Richard Avedon

~ ~

~Zac Efron: Ladies’ Choice (2:32) from “Hairspray“

~

~DEVO: Freedom of Choice (3:25) from skateboard face-off to donuts

~

~Mandy Moore: Ladies Choice (7:14) no video, best audio, long version

~

~Walther Fantola: K’s Choice • not an addict (4:50) evidence to the contrary

~

~Happy Accident Productions: George Jones • Choices (3:26) country song about consequences

~

~Sïan Able: The Choice Is Yours (4:14) Christian, interesting images for choice

~

~Film 44: Eisfabrik • The Choice (4:49) concert footage, message music

~

~EverHowtik: Jack Stauber • Choice (0:39) short, fan made, better because of it

~

~TopPop: People’s Choice • Do It Any Way You Wanna (1975) music for the pleasure of making music

~

~Choices: Less Is More (5:14) the message: we shared more when we had less, static image to a thumpin’ back beat, danceable

~

~the quorum: Teddy Pendergrass • You’re My Choice Tonight (3:04) opening credits to a movie

~

~Fatboy Slim: Bootsy Collins • Weapon Of Choice (3:45) hard to categorize, call it a surprise

~ ~

How many times have you said, ‘This is it. I’ve finally found my one true love’? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune… Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing ‒ the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture ‒ can make love shatter, stall or fade away.
~Haruki Murakami

Most women have jobs that require them to leave the house. A cat is actually a perfect pet. You get the love and companionship of a creature covered in fur, and you don’t have to take it for a walk, and it can feed itself. Less maintenance. Surely any man can appreciate the practicality of this choice.
~Iliza Shlesinger

Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality, a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience, and every area of temptation that the Bible clearly talks about.
~Ravi Zacharias

~

I’ll tell you this: Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality. And the protections that we have, for religion ‒we protect religion‒ and talk about a lifestyle choice! That is absolutely a choice. Gay people don’t choose to be gay. At what age did you choose not to be gay?
~Jon Stewart

I don’t blame homosexuals for being angry when people say they’ve made a choice to be gay, because they don’t.
~James Dobson

I learned a lot more about transgender people. It’s not a choice, but a physiological condition that has to do with the size of the hypothalamus part of the brain.
~Mercedes Ruehl

Valentino was apparently gay or bisexual. And his two lesbian wives. But without any question, he had sex with men. From choice. So he was one or the other.
~Cesar Romero

Being gay is natural. Hating gay is a lifestyle choice.
~John Fugelsang

Choose your love, Love your choice.
~Thomas S Monson

Love is not in our choice but in our fate.
~John Dryden

~

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
~Noam Chomsky

~

Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
~Dan Millman

Every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything you reject everything else— just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others.
~G K Chesterton

Now we have two choices in life: have sex with the same person forever or risk a terminal disease. Either way, your life is over.
~Andy Kindler

For me working on the marriage and not making the easy choice of cheating was something that I could not do.
~Al Goldstein (either a pornographer, or CEO)

~

I find the selectivity of erotic love ‒ the choice of this man or this woman ‒ much more intelligible if liking the person is the origin of sexual interest, rather than the other way.
~Mortimer Adler

Long-term relationships are an everyday choice. It’s harder to be in a marriage than it is to bounce from one relationship to the next.
~Pink

Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
~Barbara De Angelis

~

Well, my career choice made a difference because I never would have met my wife, Jenny. I met her through comedian Buddy Hackett. He set us up on a blind date and then we got married.
~Bob Newhart

Surely, marriage is throwing anchor and saying, ‘This is where I’m staying. I’ve made my choice, and this is all I want because I’ve been on the up and down escalator, through the revolving door, and I want to stand still.’
~Pete Burns

True love ‒ that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy ‒ is a choice. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances.
~Mark Manson

The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make not just on your wedding day, but over and over again ‒ and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife.
~Barbara De Angelis

~

There’s just me and my wife and a dog and we feed him Healthy Choice also.
~Mike Ditka

~

I’m pro responsible choice. You know, there is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kinds of good choices.
~Sharron Angle

~

Let’s suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.
~Albert Ellis

~

I suppose women are attracted to the bad-boy image sometimes because it’s fun to have an adventure. It’s like eating junk food… it’s fun at the time, but ultimately not the best choice.
~Dita Von Teese

~

I like all types of women. I accept them as they are when they come into my life… But I’m not a romantic. I’m just up-front. I like to be a part of something real, not make-believe. I tell women to tell me the truth, to just lay it out. Let me be the judge and decide if I want you around or not. Let me have my choice.
~Future

~

I chose and my world was shaken.
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken;
the choosing was not.
You have to move on.
~Stephen Sondheim

~

I love being a wife and homemaker ‒ because it’s my choice. My husband doesn’t expect me to do it. I don’t mind doing things for him because he does so much for me; we both feel that way so there is no power struggle.
~Salma Hayek

And all the charms of face or voice
Which I in others see,
Are but the recollected choice
Of what I feel for thee.
~John Clare

~

Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.
~Willie Nelson

—

It is the parents duty to intervene when they see wrong choices being made.
~M Russell Ballard

Should kids check phones at dinner? I don’t know. To me, that’s a parenting choice.
~Sundar Pichai

I didn’t tell my kids, ‘You have to play viola, and you have to play piano.’ They chose these things on their own, and I don’t think we have to give kids every choice, but we do have to give them some choice because that autonomy is crucial for fostering passion.
~Angela Duckworth

~

It’s immoral to parent irresponsibly… And it doesn’t help matters any when prime time tv, like “Murphy Brown“, a character who is supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the importance of the father by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.” Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is…
~Dan Quayle

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible ‘lifestyles’ turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind
~George Will

Given the choice, children who don’t want for anything will not save… We have an obligation as parents to give our children what they need. What they want we can give them as a special gift, or they can save their money for it.
~Barbara Coloroso

The absence of doll babies in my toy chest didn’t seriously influence my later decision not to become a mother; rather, I disdained Hasbro’s Baby Alive wetting doll because I was already the kind of girl who would grow up to be childless by choice.
~Lionel Shriver (journalist)

I’ve had no contact with my daughter for years. That’s her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don’t want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.
~Anthony Hopkins

I’ve been writing the same book my whole life ‒ that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family, and it’s not your choice, and you can’t get out.
~Ann Patchett

It wasn’t through choice that I became a mum at 36. I wanted to be a young mum but things never worked out for me.
~Denise Van Outen

My mother made a choice. And when I was younger, I judged her for making that choice. Then I got older and got to be an adult, and I realized that was the ultimate sacrifice that any parent and any mother could possibly make.
~Jose Antonio Vargas

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.
~Tom Brady

Our family makes us who we are, defines us totally. When you go to a therapist or have analysis, whatever reason you go in for, they will always bring you back to your family. We’re strong or weak according to what family we have. You might have left them long ago, might not even talk to them, but something lingers; we have no choice.
~Sandrine Bonnaire

—

Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends.
~Jacques Delille

On the choice of friends,
Our good or evil name depends.
~John Gay

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects.
~Oscar Wilde

Be careful about the environment you choose for it shapes you; be careful about the friends you choose for you will become like them.
~W Clement Stone

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.
~Ben Jonson

I’m surrounded by nothing but great people. I’ve been blessed with that, so really, I’ve got no choice but to be an all-around good person.
~Tim Duncan

—

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.
~Sheryl Sandberg

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we’ve always had: work, or prison.
~Tim Allen

~

I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, ‘I love what I look like and this is who I am,’ or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, ‘If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.’ That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.
~Lena Dunham

God made a very obvious choice when he made me voluptuous; why would I go against what he decided for me? My limbs work, so I’m not going to complain about the way my body is shaped.
~Drew Barrymore

You can be a thousand different women. It’s your choice which one you want to be. It’s about freedom and sovereignty. You celebrate who you are. You say, ‘This is my kingdom.’
~Salma Hayek

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
~Amy Tan

Women can be powerful, graceful, and complex, with the ability to make any choice they desire.
~Jessica Chastain

~

When a man is shooting a handgun, it’s just like he is shooting because that’s his job, and he has no other choice. It’s no good. When a girl is shooting a handgun, it’s really something.
~Hayao Miyazaki

If I had a choice of educating my daughters or my sons because of opportunity constraints, I would choose to educate my daughters.
~Brigham Young

~

I’m not saying a housewife is in any way inferior to a workingwoman. No, she isn’t. But as an activist, as a woman, I would say the choice of being a housewife or pursuing a career should be left entirely to the woman and that choice should be respected.
~Shabana Azmi

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
~Camille Paglia

A man is given the choice between loving women and understanding them.
~Ninon de L’Enclos (French author, courtesan, intellectual, 1620-1705)

~ ~

~ ~

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.
~Woody Allen

Being funny wasn’t a career choice growing up, it was my way out of situations; a way to survive another day.
~Tracy Morgan

I’ve never set out to write a funny movie or be a funny comedian as a woman. I am a woman. I don’t really have a choice in the matter. My goal is just to be funny.
~Maya Rudolph

In life you have two choices. You can laugh or you can cry. You have to laugh, you have to.
~Mariska Hargitay

~

Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.
~Gregory David Roberts

Yeah, I know, some people are against drunk driving, and I call those people ‘the cops.’ But you know, sometimes, you’ve just got no choice; those kids gotta get to school!
~Dave Attell

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
~Dave Barry

May the God of your choice bless and keep you. I respect Him as long as He does not circumcise me anymore.
~Kinky Friedman

—

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.
~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I was never afraid of failure after that because, I think, coming that close to death you get kissed. With the years, the actual experience of course fades, but the flavor of it doesn’t. I just had a real sense of what choice do I have but to live fully?
~Debra Winger

~

If a man has wealth, he has to make a choice, because there is the money heaping up. He can keep it together in a bunch, and then leave it for others to administer after he is dead. Or he can get it into action and have fun, while he is still alive. I prefer getting it into action and adapting it to human needs, and making the plan work.
~George Eastman

Service to others seems the only intelligent choice for the use of wealth.
~Manoj Bhargava

~

The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.
~Sheena Iyengar

—

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.
~David Elkind

I think it’s your own choice if you turn from an angry young man to a bitter, old bastard.
~Billie Joe Armstrong

~

This girl at 17 really led an army, this girl at 19 really burned at the stake by her own choice. And you sit there and you want to figure out why did she make these choices? How did she live such a life?
~Leelee Sobieski

I was 37 when my father died‒and I no longer had any freedom of choice over what I would do with the rest of my life.
~J Paul Getty

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
~Maya Angelou

~

I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, ‘Only children can be abandoned. Adults can’t be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don’t have a choice.’
~Demi Moore

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.
~Audrey Hepburn

People from the most horrendous of childhoods can have good lives, but it comes down to a very seemingly simple word. ‘Choice.’
~Laura Schlessinger

~

I don’t really have a choice. I’m getting older.
~Annette Bening

The need to make wise choices encompasses every area of our lives. Since we have time for only a limited amount of stuff, we need to choose wisely what stuff we’re going to allow to take up that time.
~Elaine St James

The ultimate goal is to be more satisfied. I really don’t believe you get wiser because you get older. It’s a choice, perhaps not to take some things so seriously.
~Boy George

~

Choice is a form of compromise, no? So why choose if you can have both?
~Neri Oxman

Even children learn in growing up that ‘both’ is not an admissible answer to a choice of ‘Which one?’
~Paul A Samuelson

A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.
~Harry Mathews

Full maturity is achieved by realizing that you have choices to make.
~Angela Baron McBride

—

Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
~Joan Didion

It only takes one mistake,’ the Dan Banyan guy says, ‘and nothing else you ever do will matter.’ With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, ‘No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you’ll always be known for that one poor choice.’ He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, ‘Do that one wrong thing‒ and you’ll be dead for the rest of your life.
~Chuck Palahniuk

One day, we will look back and wonder how on earth we used to believe that depression was a lifestyle choice, only to be debated and taken seriously when an A List film star took his life, and the world filled with people saying how shocked and saddened they were.
~Alastair Campbell

One of my favorite movies of all time is ‘It’s A Wonderful Life,’ which is a pretty interesting choice for a seasonal Christmas favorite, because it’s about a guy who wants to commit suicide and is presented with reasons not to.
~Frank Darabont

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is a choice and I think if we work with that with kids, we’ll get somewhere.
~Peter Lynch

~

Sometimes the wrong choice is the only one that lets you face the end with dignity, grace, and the awareness that you’re doing the right thing.
~Mira Grant

I’m for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It’s her choice… All the big powers they’ve silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.
~Jack Kevorkian (euthanasia)

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
~Chuck Palahniuk

No law can give or take away the choice to commit suicide.
~Maggie Gallagher

~ ~

~ ~

Honorable Mentions: Choice Implied

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
~Carlos Castaneda

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost

There’s still time to change the road you’re on…
~Robert Plant

A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one.
~Rita Mae Brown

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past… any and every part of your life in an instant.
~Tony Robbins

~

There is a time when we must firmly choose the course we will follow, or the relentless drift of events will make the decision.
~Herbert V Prochnow

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
~Theodore Roosevelt

We are given one life, and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up your mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
~Omar Nelson Bradley

~

Every human has four endowments ‒ self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.
~Stephen Covey

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
~Abraham Lincoln

A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
~Tony Robbins

—

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
~Ayn Rand

~


Choice of attention ‒ to pay attention to this and ignore that ‒ is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
~W H Auden


~


Every choice moves us closer to or farther away from something. Where are your choices taking your life? What do your behaviors demonstrate that you are saying yes or no to in life
~Eric Allenbaugh


~


The statement “I have no choice” is a lie. You can choose. You simply do not prefer the alternatives available to you, for whatever reason.
~Neale Donald Walsch


~


If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.
~Rita Dove


~


Faced with the choice of enduring a bad toothache or going to the dentist, we generally tried to ride out the bad tooth.
~Joseph Barbera


~


If you wish to achieve any success in this life, do your best to surround yourself with an orgy of good choices.
~Chris Hardwick


~


The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life‒different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability‒mingle so freely.
~Tom Vanderbilt


~


With a labyrinth, you make a choice to go in ‒ and once you’ve chosen, around and around you go. But you always find your way to the center.
~Jeff Bridges


~


Incontinence is not a vice for it is contrary to choice while vice flows from choice.
~Aristotle


~


When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.
~Samuel Johnson

—

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
~William Jennings Bryan

It’s choice‒not chance‒that determines your destiny.
~Jean Nidetch

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfill our destiny, but our fate is sealed.
~Paulo Coelho

—

But you’ve got to make choices, and you’re not going to be right all the time.
~Earl Butz

The choices that we make aren’t always perfect but it’s ok… It’s part of the journey.
~Hayley Williams

Making mistakes is part of learning to choose well. No way around it. Choices are thrust upon us, and we don’t always get things right. Even postponing or avoiding a decision can become a choice that carries heavy consequences. Mistakes can be painful‒sometimes they cause irrevocable harm‒but welcome to Earth. Poor choices are part of growing up, and part of life. You will make bad choices, and you will be affected by the poor choices of others. We must rise above such things.
~Brandon Mull

~

People will hurt you. But don’t use that as an excuse for your poor choices, use it as motivation to make the right ones.
~LeCrae

I get a choice every time I have to open my mouth: that it can be with civility and dignity and grace ‒ or not.
~Dana Perino

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.
~Angelina Jolie

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.
~Henepola Gunaratana

We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives.
~William Glasser

Every life has a watershed moment, an instant when you realize you’re about to make a choice that will define everything else you ever do, and that if you choose wrong, there may not be that many things left to choose… I’m not sure we can recognize those moments until they’ve passed us.
~Mira Grant

Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment… It is all a journey,
~Miss Jewell.

I have come to understand that that is what life is all about‒a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.
~Mary Balogh

One choice can transform you.
One choice can destroy you.
Once choice will define you.
~Veronica Roth

No matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life.
~Jonathan Maberry

—

In every work out there comes a moment where you have to decide to keep pushing hard ‒ through the doubt, discomfort and fear of the pain. You have two choices at this point ‒ to push through and to mentally divorce your mind of the doubt, discomfort and fear or you can surrender.
~Lisa Rainsberger

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.
~Harriet Lerner

Most of our decisions are driven by either love or fear. Figure out who’s doing the talking, then decide what you’ll do.
~Bob Goff

You are ready and able to do beautiful things in this world….you will only ever have two choices: love or fear. Choose love, and don’t ever let fear turn you against your playful heart.
~Jim Carrey

—

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms ‒ to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~Viktor E Frankl

I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it’s only a choice of attitude.
~Judith M Knowlton

~

You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.
~Paulo Coelho

The only thing you sometimes have control over is perspective. You don’t have control over your situation. But you have a choice about how you view it.
~Chris Pine

Every morning when I get up, the first thing I decide is: What do I want? Misery? Blisfullness? What am I going to choose today? And it happens that I always choose blissfulness. It is my choice, it is my life.
~Abdullah

We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it’s a continuing choice.
~John C Maxwell

Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.
~Osho

Because with every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.
~Rob Bell

~

The remarkable thing is, we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.
~Charles R Swindoll

Big things are built one brick at a time. Victories are achieved one choice at a time. A life well lived is chosen one day at a time.
~Lysa TerKeurst

~

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
~Oscar Wilde

A positive attitude is a choice, like walking to the other side of a street to avoid trouble or making a 180-degree turn when you feel you’re heading in the wrong direction.
~Richard M DeVos

Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.
~Nathan Pyles

I am an optimist…I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.
~Tom Hiddleston

~

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.
~W Clement Stone

Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.
~Roy T Bennett

~ ~

@Writers Platform

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
~Christopher Hitchens

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.
~Jason Reynolds

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
~Toni Morrison

Perhaps, The Moon and the Yew Tree
~Ed Note

~

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.
~Laura Hillenbrand

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.
~Edward Gibbon

~

I write the story as it comes to me ‒ YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.
~Marie Lu

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.
~Paula Danziger

I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
~Clifton Fadiman

~

Great deeds give choice of many tales. Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then let wise men listen.
~Pindar

~

Much of the time I’m an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer’s sensibility.
~Robyn Davidson

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.
~Alice Koller

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
~Sylvia Plath

The moment of choice has come—to go forward or to go withdraw into solitude. The decision must be in complete accord with one’s innermost being.
~Yi Jing

Hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.
~Fred Rogers

—

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.
~Alva Noto

Philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thoughts.
~Emmet Fox

When you know your intention, you are in a position to choose the consequences that you will create for yourself. When you choose an intention that creates consequences for which you are willing to be responsible, that is a responsible choice.
~Gary Zukav

Albert Camus, a great humanist and existentialist voice, pointed out that to commit to a just cause with no hope of success is absurd. But then, he also noted that not committing to a just cause is equally absurd. But only one choice offers the possibility for dignity. And dignity matters. Dignity matters.
~David Simon

—

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
~Jane Jacobs

To me, the good thing about living in L.A. is diversity in lifestyle choices, color, and religion.
~Sandra Bullock

If I had to think where I could live if not Moscow, London would be my first choice and second would be New York.
~Roman Abramovich

For my wife and I, for so many years, a lot of our identity was based on being Hollywood haters. We were like, ‘We’re east-coast. We’re New Yorkers. This is just a place that we have to come to, but not by choice.’
~Kevin Bacon

The beautiful thing about New York is, you have to expose yourself to other people the minute you step outside the door. There is no choice. And I love that.
~Sarah Jessica Parker

Each person makes their own choice, but my spirit is meant to stay in Iran, especially with the work that I do, and with the emotional connection I have with the country ‒ with all its difficulties, this is why I stay.
~Asghar Farhadi

~ ~

Prewritten Prompt: choice

~ ~

People who are free to choose may choose wrongly. This is the age-old paradox. Sin is the other side of freedom’s coin. A world without sin would be a world without choice.
~Charles Handy

And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.
~Rumi

It requires courage to make good choices, even when others around us choose differently. As we make righteous choices day by day in little things, the Lord will strengthen us and help us choose the right during more difficult times.
~W Craig Zwick

‘Right’ choices can be for the wrong reasons; one can ignore a potent higher reality.
~Alfred Henry

~

It’s fun being in Islamic countries, to know there’s only one religion. There’s order. You wear a burqa. There’s no choice. People are happy with that.
~Prince

For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced ‒ in his smallness of mind ‒ that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone ‒ against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts ‒ that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to G-d.
~Meir Kahane

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
~Henry Ward Beecher

~

You are at a choice-point in every moment of each circumstance, each activity, spoken word and thought.
~Dr Michael Beckwith

Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.
~Alfred A Montapert

~

In a way, forgiving is only for the brave. It is for those people who are willing to confront their pain, accept themselves as permanently changed, and make difficult choices. Forgivers are not content to be stuck in a quagmire. They reject the possibility that the rest of their lives will be determined by the unjust and injurious acts of another person.
~Gordon Dalbey

You’ve got to be willing to forgive and say, ‘God, get something good out of something bad.’ And if you’ll make that choice… God will do it.
~Don Young

Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.
~William Inge

~

The meaning of life. The wasted years of life. The poor choices of life. God answers the mess of life with one word: ‘grace.’
~Max Lucado

The Lord sees weaknesses differently than He does rebellion.
~Richard G Scott

When granted many years of life, growing old in age is natural, but growing old with grace is a choice. Growing older with grace is possible for all who will set their hearts and minds on the Giver of grace…
~Billy Graham

The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time.
~Pope Benedict XVI

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
~Aldous Huxley

~

Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our ‘accepting’ and ‘willing’ are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God.
~Aiden Wilson Tozer

Freedom is a choice. The grace of God abounds, and man is nonetheless free.
~Michael J Knowles

~

The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts us under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our will, then he’s responsible for every choice we make.
~Orson Scott Card

According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment.
~Naguib Mahfouz

If God created our will, then he is willing for every choice we make, permitting a more compassionate reading of Eden.
~author unknown

~

When you have a sense of calling, whether it’s to be a musician, soloist, artist, in one of the technical fields, or a plumber, there is something deep and enriching when you realize it isn’t just a casual choice, it’s a divine calling.
~Charles R Swindoll

Choice is a divine teacher, for when we choose we learn that nothing is ever put in our path without a reason.
~Iyanla Vanzant

It is no use to grumble and complain;
It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain ‒
Why, rain’s my choice.
~James Whitcomb Riley

God always gives his very best to those who leave the choice with him.
~James Hudson Taylor

—

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
~James Gleick

The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.
~Alonzo Church (math/logic/tec)

~

My choice of learning pharmacy was driven by my interests, curiosity, and a desire to seek new medicines for patients.
~Tu Youyou

I was a lousy academic. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria. But I met fantastic people from all kinds of fields; law, medicine, history, and they eventually dispersed all over the world to do their fieldwork. I liked the way these people committed to the long term in a sincere, visionary way. Their projects weren’t about “next season.” They were ten-year commitments. They were lifestyle choices that had traditions of fieldwork built into them ‒ moving around, living on location, discipline, a real rigor for research.
~Aleksandra Mir

The human body and mind are tremendous forces that are continually amazing scientists and society. Therefore, we have no choice but to keep an open mind as to what the human being can achieve.
~Evelyn Glennie (Scottish percussionist)

~

What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.
~Henry A Wallace

AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.
~Oren Etzioni

~

Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.
~Susan Orlean

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.
~Alvin Toffler

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
~Elizabeth Gilbert

Making a wrong choice early may limit making the right choice later.
~James E Faust

Too much freedom inhibits choice. Constructive narrowness clarifies choice.
~Darby Bannard

~

Technology is an enabler; you have to be at the cutting edge of technology ‒ there is no choice.
~Uday Kotak

If I could come back as anything ‒ I’d be a bird, first, but definitely the command key is my second choice.
~Nikki Giovanni

—

I feel angry that I have been born into a society where, by no choice of my own, by no agreement, by no actual decision, I am inherently complicit in the destruction of the world. It is hard to do the right thing. You have to be militant. You have to be an activist. You have to be branded as green to do the right thing.
~Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: ‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.’
~Erich Fromm

I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests.
~Wangari Maathai

We have no choice: we must protect Arctic ice, enable it to continue to act as an essential temperature regulator for the planet, avoid the catastrophic rise in sea levels that would result from the ice melt, and stop the disappearance of permafrost releasing irreversible quantities of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.
~Albert II, Prince of Monaco

People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow ‘passengers.’
~Daisaku Ikeda

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.
~Pope John Paul II

Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs.
~Stewart Udall

—

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.
~Al Yankovic

Before high school ended, I started applying to college. It really wasn’t even a choice because of the brainwashing of my parents.
~Tatyana Ali

In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn’t sit too well with them!
~Stormzy

The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The
willingness to learn is a choice.
~Brian Herbert

~

In a time of tight budgets, difficult choices have to be made. We must make sure our very limited resources are spent on priorities. I believe we should have no higher priority than investing in our children’s classrooms and in their future.
~Bob Riley

Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon–destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroy us. A nation that doesn’t read much doesn’t know much. And a nation that doesn’t know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box and the voting booth… The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is more rewarding than carrying guns.
~Jim Trelease

Always make the choice to learn. What Princeton taught me was whatever mess you are studying, pull a thread with great persistence ’til you have clarity of thought. Princeton taught me how to solve a problem. How to think ‒ that’s what we pull out of this place.
~Maria Ressa

~

When I was mayor of New York, my views changed. I began as mayor of New York City thinking that I could reform the New York City school system. After two or three years, four years, I became an advocate of choice, of scholarships, and vouchers, and parental choice, because I thought that was the only way to really change the school system.
~Rudy Giuliani

Yes, I believe in school choice. Parents know far better than government bureaucrats what their children need from an education standpoint, and they should be permitted to make that choice.
~Matt Salmon

~

Know to choose well. Most of life depends thereon. It needs good taste and correct judgment, for which neither intellect nor study suffices.
~Baltasar Gracian y Morales

Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.
~Maria Montessori

~ ~

§ The Exercise:

pending review

screenwriter’s blood
ink for text
motion as action
stuntman sweats
unvarnished truth
director’s cut
people’s voice
not academy’s choice
no!
say ‘t ain’t so!
feel-good outdated
happy overrated
honor is hexed
fine, we try horror next

~

in praise of Liberty, a ditty

my kingdom my kingdom
built on greed, motive mum
Liberty out, down-voting thumbs

Liberty of Ellis once safely ensconced
booted to curbs, roundly denounced
needed seeds for the future the target announced

changed direction, issued directives, bury files of abuse
one reigns deigning to rein in contradictory news
may rain on Her parade but not change history’s views

Liberty Liberty: cracked bell, carved statue
reduced to submission, diminished in stature
let Her ring out defiance, endure as rendered in statute

court jester court jester,
lest unspoken things fester
say you detest it lest you disgust Her

~

Pity The Opinion, a ditty

Politics, for puerile advantage and power plays
business arm-twisting the old-fashioned way
Diplomacy, the fine art of trading unfeeling arms
for less waste and whole lives minus the harm

More opinions mean more options
ambition’s conniptions trimmed of corruption
Proverbial equivalence, plowshares into swords
Politician and Diplomat, two different words

~

numbers

real and imaginary
positive and negative
age, multiplication tables
PINs and phones
enabled drones, real clones

ones and zeroes for yes and no
binary choice, best of two
not the one got zeroed out
undecipherable her zodiac charts
unpredictable, the art of hearts

whole integer gathering decimals
designation: personality
denomination: human being
determination: @time of death
destination: don’t hold your breath

~

5s ‘n 7s

harsh new fear in the forest
deplore what, not the clearest
new bid’ness owners in town
prepared to burn it all down
champion chimp, chump and scamp
resident tramp in the house
choice of voice, grouse or a mouse

~

confusion turned convulsion
turned chaos, deadly riots
town marshal going martial
rule of law turning partial
golden rule judged as hurtful
measures pleasuring cæsar
bold seizures, playbook: control

~

take me to some vasty space
vacant between-the-ears place
somewhere one can meditate
void the race, escape debate
treasured choice where peace awaits

~

passing thought for leading track
chaste melody, what it lacks
choice harmony, paint it black
that brooding mood, them’s the blues
punch it up, the money hack

~

posit: truce from war
a time to breathe, a reprieve
barter: chance for choice
brand new brand: diaspora
mount for a temple attack

~

lack-love handicap
cringe-worthy cripple
moist social outcast
ought to be horse-whipped
neglected to vote
there in my mirror
offender of note

~

whether stay or go
is it yes, or no
are we us, or what
pick up the pieces
my choice lives with that

~

some pictures of you
posing for pictures
choice: see or be seen
scoping for next shot
eyes bright, missed the plot

~

underworld thug
blessed the lawless, hugs ‘n shrugs
makes for good story
mugshot revelatory
added spice to past glory

~

bombast’s feral try
tried villain, not at all shy
good choice for bad guy

~

now, at this moment
given a choice to live on
cashews and swiss cheese

—

Dear Reader,
This edition’s Exercise was taken up with politics in a way that is unseemly for a mild curator of quotes. As a dedicated member of the audience who must surrender up fickle choice for a wider understanding, this Disclaimer:

None of the above exercises were intended to reflect or depict any person living, past or present. Wordplay offered itself up in too many delicious ways to resist. No aspersions were intended, and future efforts at restraint will be more stringently applied.

The claim of this Disclaimer is validated by the distinction that exists between the vapid wanderings of a poetaster, and the encompassing wonders of a poet. No harm, no foul.
~Ed Note

~ ~

The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes

Behaviors are a choice. Feelings are sometimes out of our control. Behavior has to do with choices.
~Randall Terry

The choices we make in the heat of emotion would be better if left for some other day.
~Dr Shad Helmstetter

~

Some people are cowards… I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they’ve got to make that choice.
~Tom Hanks

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer

~

We imagine things ‒ that we wouldn’t be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.
~Joan Didion

That’s what is incredible about human beings, is the choice to keep going.
~Jack Antonoff

~

Heroism is a matter of choice.
~Richard Cohen

Choices are the hinges of destiny.
~Pythagoras

~

Whenever you’re faced with an explanation of what’s going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.
~Charles Krauthammer

Politics is a field where the choice lies constantly between two blunders.
~John Morley

~

Once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.
~H G Wells

Even in my really bad, drugged-out days, I didn’t go away. I still toured, still did interviews. I never gave up the fight. That’s why I’m who I am today, because I didn’t leave. And I think I made the right choice.
~Stevie Nicks

~

Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you.
~Caroline Myss

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder.
~Paul Graham

~

You have two choices: You can come down from the mountain and spend the rest of your days thinking it was so beautiful there, or you can create a vision, look upward, see the next mountain, and start the climb all over again.
~Oprah Winfrey

There are ultimately two choices in life: to fight it or to embrace it. If you fight it you will lose ‒ if you embrace it you become one with it and you’ll be lived.
~Rasheed Ogunlaru

~

We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing.
~Simon Sinek

Use wisely your power of choice.
~Og Mandino

~

Liberty is the right to choose. Freedom is the result of the right choice.
~Jules Renard

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
~Archibald MacLeish

~

You are your choices.
~Seneca

The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not. You have to move on.
~Stephen Sondheim

~

Choices determine character.
~Brandon Mull

It is our choices that show what we truly are far more than our abilities.
~J K Rowling

~

Your choices today determine your tomorrow and you make your life through the power of choice.
~Kathy Smith

Accept that you are where you are and what you are because of your own choices and decisions.
~Brian Tracy

~

Once you make a choice, you have no choice.
~Anna Chin-Williams

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.
~Leon Blum

~

Boredom is a choice. Like tardiness. Or interrupting.
~Mike Rowe

To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.
~David A Bednar

~

I’d rather believe in my own choice and see it all go wrong than do something I’m not fully convinced of and later feel guilty about it.
~Alicia Keys

I don’t have regret about things I’ve done that are successful or not successful or what people perceive or don’t know or whatever. I just know for me it had to be the right choice at the time. Sometimes that choice is just about getting a job.
~Mark Harmon

~

Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I’d rather lie around. No contest.
~Eric Clapton

If it’s a choice between doing a film and not doing a film, I’d rather not. But then, you remember that you’re supposed to be earning a living and that it’s your career.
~Hugh Grant

~

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~Franz Kafka

~

A lot of people think that addiction is a choice. A lot of people think it’s a matter of will. That has not been my experience. I don’t find it to have anything to do with strength.
~Matthew Perry (@ge 54)

Drugs? Every one has a choice and I choose not to do drugs.
~Leonardo DiCaprio

~

A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.
~Neale Donald Walsch

An exercise: exchange places for the words “action” and “creation” in the above quote to see if it adds another layer of meaning for you
~Ed Note

~

The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity’s traditional sources of meaning ‒ work, community, family, and identity ‒ or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.
~Klaus Schwab

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
~John Irving

~

Man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
~St Thomas Aquinas

If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy.
~Tim Burton

~

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
~Arthur Miller

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.
~Arnold J Toynbee

~

The right choice is hardly ever the easy choice.
~Rick Riordan

The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it.
~Eliezer Yudkowsky

~

We cannot lead a choiceless life. Every day, every moment, every second, there is a choice. If it were not so, we would not be individuals.
~Ernest Holmes

The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.
~Tavis Smiley

~

Live today. Let go of your attachment to your past as an excuse for your life conditions today. You are the product of the choices you are making right now.
~Wayne Dyer

Life is a sum of all your choices. So, what are you doing today?
~Albert Camus

~ ~

The Olio’s Quote Harvest
https://azquotes.com, https://brainyquote.com, https://wisesayings.com

~

Fun Tarts: https://gocomics.com, https://pexels.com

~

The Salmagundi Video Harvest
https://venmo.com, https://vevo.com, https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

~. .~

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts