Famous Quotes & Sayings

Annie Dillard

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

Cullen Hightower

A stepping-stone can be a stumbling block if we can't see it until after we have tripped over it.

Dan Chaon

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

Dave Cook

He was skinning a bear. I was terrified at first, because the corpse resembled a naked man quartered between two trees. He'd created a deadfall trap over some big talus blocks and the bear had fallen in. He used the skin for something and jerked the meat. If it wasn't astonishing enough behavior in a national park, the next day he made donuts, using bear fat for grease ! Surely, by now, he's created an empire somewhere in the world...

Don Johnson

You can go one block to the next in San Francisco and get a completely different opinion of what the issue is.

Don Herold

I wish I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours. If all you can see is your shadow, you're blocking your own light. If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

Dylan O'Brien

That's such a relevant thing, as an actor - committing and not being distracted by any kind of technical awareness, or whatever. You do have to block things out sometimes, and sometimes it's easier than others.

Doris Lessing

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Doris Lessing

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Donnie Wahlberg

In high school, I was one of the cofounders of New Kids on the Block my freshman year in high school. But I also started studying theatre in high school my freshman year as well. So throughout high school, I was actually doing both.

Cory Doctorow

If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?

Clive Cussler

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.

Andre Gide

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.

Ann Patchett

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Anne Carson

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Ann Aguirre

We stood back-to-back, blocking and striking in harmony; sometimes it felt like his arms and legs were an extension of me. I could count on him to keep them off me from behind.

Amy Carmichael

I think of the love of God as a great river, pouring through us even as the waters pour through our ravine at floodtime. Nothing can keep this love from pouring through us, except of course our own blocking of the river. Do you sometimes feel that you have got to the end of your love for someone who refuses and repulses you? Such a thought is folly, for one cannot come to the end of what one has not got. We have no store of love at all. We are not jugs, we are riverbeds.

Allyson Felix

Before a race, I block out what's going on in the stadium. It's different for everyone. But for me, I've always been able to block it out. For a sprint race, it's important not to get distracted.

Anne Rice

Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don’t do it. … Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. … Don’t take any guff off anybody.

Anna Garlin Spencer

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

Ambrose Bierce

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Etna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

Anthony Kiedis

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

Alicia Keys

I promised myself that I'd never actually admit to listening to 'New Kids on the Block.'

Alice Walker

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

Amy Waldman

In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It's somewhat controversial and has met some resistance.

Suzanne Somers

Well, stress definitely blocks estrogen receptors, especially at my age, which means your estrogen levels drop even lower at this age.

What it actually does is blocks those receptors so serotonin can't go into them and cause more nausea.

Alexander McCall Smith

What I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.

Alexander McCall Smith

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

Alexander Pope

To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.

E. L. James

I think virgins are far more interesting to write about. If we've been around the block a few times, we know what to expect. Not so with virgins.

Douglas Smith

Whatever blocks you encounter, you have learned that there is a way over, around or through them. It is not those obstacles that inhibit your progress but your confidence, and will to break the inertia of fear and doubt.

Dwight Freeney

My favorite part is that 1-on-1 matchup... Block out everything else and stare into that guys eyes.