Desperate Quotes - Page 25

• Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

  Aldo Leopold

  Nature, Land, Lasts

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• I don't want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know I couldn't be doing this by my own power. I want to live in such a way that I am desperate for Him to come through. That if He doesn't come through, I am screwed.

  Francis Chan

  People, Looks, Want

  Francis Chan, Preston Sprinkle (2014). “The Francis Chan Collection: Crazy Love, Forgotten God, Erasing Hell, and Multiply”, p.234, David C Cook

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• The Kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning: it is for the desperate.

  James Denney

  Heaven, Kingdoms, Wells

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• Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Prayer, People

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• Modern Democrats aren't the first political party to abuse power - far from it. Obama isn'€™t the first president to abuse executive power - not by a longshot. But he has to be the first president in American history to overtly and consistently argue that he's empowered to legislate if Congress doesn'€™t pass the laws he favors. It's an argument that's been mainstreamed by partisans and cheered on by those in media desperate to find a morsel of triumph in this presidency.

  David Harsanyi

  Party, Media, Law

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• I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Hurt, Pain, Cat

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• Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.

  Germaine Greer

  Girl, Clever, Men

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.

  Robin McKinley

  Cutting, Desperate Measures, Hair

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• Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Long, Childhood

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.265, Macmillan

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• I want to be a worshiper with that heart-desperate to be as close to my Savior as possible, and following his every move and step.

  Vicky Beeching

  Moving, Heart, Want

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• I am tortured too. I am tortured by belly fat and magazine covers about how to please everyone but myself. I am tortured by sheep who click on anything that will guarantee a ten-pound loss in one week. Sheep who will get on their knees if it means someone will like them more. I am tortured by my inability to want to hang out with desperate sheep. I am tortured by goddamned yearbooks full of bullshit. I met you when. I'll miss the times. I'll keep in touch. Best friends forever. Is this okay? Are you all right? Are you tortured too?

  A.S. King

  Life, Mean, Yearbook

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• The longing for initiation is universal and for modern youth, it is a desperate need. When nothing is offered in the way of spiritual initiation to prove one's entry into the world of men and women, initiation happens instead in the road or the street, in cars at high speed, with drugs, with dangerous sex, with weapons. However troubling, this behavior is rooted in a fundamental truth; a need to grow.

  Jack Kornfield

  Spiritual, Sex, Men

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• For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

  Athol Fugard

  Believe, Writing, Issues

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• Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Running, Struggle, Nurse

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “Tender is the Night”, p.32, HarperCollins

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• You... are now servants to the ear that needs quiet solace, and the eye that needs the consolation of beauty, servants to the mind that needs desperate repose or pointed inquiry, to the heart that needs invitation to flight or silent understanding, and to the soul that needs safe landing, or fearless, relentless enlightenment.

  Joyce DiDonato

  Heart, Eye, Understanding

  Joyce DiDonato's Commencement Address at the Juilliard School in New York City, New York, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 13, 2014.

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• Life is a big collaboration - and when you're tackling something that is painful and troubling and is causing you such desperate grief that you think life's not worth living - you need to reach out. To people who will reach back.

  Tim Gunn

  Grief, Thinking, People

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• Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Rip, Real, Snakes

  D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey (2003). “Studies in Classic American Literature”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

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• The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Dream, Ambition, People

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• The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work everyday because they hate their job.

  Yvon Chouinard

  Jobs, Hate, Passion

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• You have never felt the weight of disappointing love or of failing to live up to expectations. The only thing you've ever been is lonely by yourself-you have no idea how desperate it is to be lonely in the midst of people who love you, and whom you would have done anything to make happy.

  Alma Alexander

  Lonely, Love You, Ideas

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• For those who were desperate, my camera became an object of hope (...)Throughout my year-long coverage of the monsoon world, my strongest conviction was that I was involved in the fundamentals of life.

  Steve McCurry

  Years, Long, Cameras

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• I'm doing my bit for the women's movement. The women have always been naked in movies, and now I'm just desperate to take my clothes off as much as possible.

  Ewan McGregor

  Clothes, Naked, Movement

  "Naked talent" by John Patterson, www.theguardian.com. September 26, 2003.

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• My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's "More Than Words" at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

  Ed Helms

  Football, Stars, Looks

  "Hangover Helper". Interview with Andrew Goldman, www.elle.com. May 27, 2011.

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• I think mortality makes you live a fuller existence. When I was a kid I was scared of death, and maybe that's what made me desperate to get the most out of life.

  Dolph Lundgren

  Kids, Thinking, Scared

  "MH Grill: Dolph Lundgren". Interview with Brittany Kennedy, www.menshealth.co.uk. February 19, 2013.

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• Because I never set out to be an actress, I always feel so lucky and grateful. There are so many people who are really desperate to be stars, and it was completely the opposite for me - I fell into it.

  Sophia Myles

  Stars, Grateful, Opposites

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