Mattered Quotes

1. "No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert neither of them, Daru knew, could have really lived."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "Go and experience life the way that someone else might experience it. Maybe you'll find meaning in a different corner of your brain. The fact that it changed doesn't negate the fact that it ever mattered."
Author: Angel Olsen

3. "She couldn't have cared less when she got home or if she ever got home. All that mattered was this moment & that this moment continues."
Author: Beth Harbison

4. "You knocked the door down." Disbelief rang in his matter-of-fact tone. "I know," she answered,unable to say anything else. Unable to look away from his body."But it's solid oak.""I know." She felt the solid oak beneath her and a little shocked that she'd done it, too. If it mattered at all, her shoulder felt a little bruised. And it was the slight pain that brought some reality back into the moment. "You don't have any clothes on." Oh, God, did she really say that?"
Author: C.C. Hunter

5. "A brother's love? You don't know him at all, do you. What's a death but easy, quick. It's supposed to haunt you forever that the one time he beat you was the one time that mattered."
Author: C.S. Pacat

6. "Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer--you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine."
Author: Chad Harbach

7. "... and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

8. "It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. Tabloid news didn't matter. No-compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this?"
Author: David Levithan

9. "One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day."
Author: Dean Koontz

10. "He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had."
Author: Dennis Lehane

11. "The first rose on my rose-treeBudded, bloomed, and shattered,During sad days when to meNothing mattered.Grief or grief has drained me clean;Still it seems a pityNo one saw,—it must have beenVery pretty."
Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

12. "It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made."
Author: Elizabeth Goudge

13. "Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment if his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn't the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces. Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life -- the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost."
Author: Hannah Senesh

15. "There in the dim light, staring at the shadow on the wall, I poured out the story of my life. (…) How nothing touched me. And I touched nothing. How I'd lost track of what mattered. How I worked like a fool for things that didn't. How it didn't make a difference either way."
Author: Haruki Murakami

16. "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

17. "I felt like I had lost something. But not something silly, like my keys or my gum; more like my arm or my foot, something that really mattered. Like something that I could live without, but would make life much harder if it were missing. And life is hard enough. Life is hard enough with everything we're given."
Author: James Frey

18. "Perhaps it was an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free."
Author: James Joyce

19. "...it honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet?"
Author: Jane Goodall

20. "That's when I finally got it. I finally understood. It wasn't the thought that counted. It was the actual execution that mattered, the showing up for somebody. The intent behind it wasn't enough. Not for me. Not anymore. It wasn't enough to know that deep down, he loved me. You had to actually say it to somebody, show them you cared. And he just didn't. Not enough."
Author: Jenny Han

21. "I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins."
Author: Jerry Spinelli

22. "I wondered if everyone had a secret like this, something slightly wretched, bent and corroded with time, like a lost key that might not even unlock anything anymore. And if, in the end, it might be the only thing that mattered."
Author: Jessica Soffer

23. "That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible."
Author: John Irving

24. "You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry."
Author: Jonathan Lethem

25. "That man had deliberately set out to charm her. It didn't matter that he'd succeeded, she thought perversely. It only mattered that he had done it deliberately, probably because he wanted something from her."
Author: Julia Quinn

26. "For years he'd strived to make a difference in the world, and he'd worked like a dog to make that happen, and yet here he was, a man sitting on a dock with his children, and never had he felt more certain that his words mattered."
Author: Kristin Hannah

27. "It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery - or other measurable thins. Every person had a clearly defined part to play - as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of awful truth."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

28. "My legs were on fire. All of me was burning and my back was a solid bar of pain. But it didn't matter.What mattered was Graved next to me, also rubbing my back and laughing like he'd just found Christmas in his pants."
Author: Lili St. Crow

29. "Ethan: "You think I'm a hero?"Beth: "Yes."Ethan: "But lousy husband material?" Like that really mattered to him.Beth: "Don't sweat it. So was Superman."
Author: Lucy Monroe

30. "When we kissed, it didn't matter that I had been a wolf hours ago, or that I would be a wolf again. It didn't matter that a thousand snares were laid for us as soon as we left this moment. All that mattered was this: our noses touching, the softness of his mouth, the ache inside me."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

31. "But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing."
Author: Nicholas Sparks

32. "But I think what happened was that Clinton knew how to fight back. And the way he fought back was on the issues - being tough in staying on the things that mattered to people in their lives."
Author: Paul Begala

33. "They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones,and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximitymight link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing hisfuture and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and ahalf, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all thatmattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environmentof decay. Once he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn'tnot talk to them, couldn't but listen to them when they spoke. Between himand those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than nowtranspired between him and those still clad in their flesh."
Author: Philip Roth

34. "Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going."
Author: Quentin Crisp

35. "I knew it would be all of those things and so much more to me, but it was his heart I was yanking from his chest with my decision, and that's what mattered to me. I was giving up a piece of my own as well, but it was a choice. His was just collateral."
Author: Rachael Wade

36. "All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I'd just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I'd also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn't care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us."
Author: Richelle Mead

37. "Ethan rescued Carter now though, didn't he? Or they rescued each other. It got too complicated for Carter to think about. They needed each other. It boiled down to that. That they wanted each other too was the bonus. Carter dreamed about Ethan, about his dick, his hands, as much now as he had before they were together.There it was, a new Before, and now, a new After, one they could share. "I love you," Carter whispered. Ethan heard anyway and grinned down at Carter. Nothing mattered in the room except Ethan. Maybe nothing mattered in the world except Ethan."
Author: Ryan Loveless

38. "Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening."
Author: Sarah Dessen

39. "We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now."
Author: Sarah Dessen

40. "He didn't want the respect of people who weren't worth wiping his nose on—people who weren't worth the spatout gum attached to the bottom of his worn-out shoes. The only respect he wanted was from himself and the people who really mattered in his life. The people who really loved and cared about him."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

41. "That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight."
Author: Siri Hustvedt

42. "All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him--the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing. Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it. A bird sang."
Author: Susan Dexter

43. "They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to me in the past!"
Author: Suzanne Collins

44. "Started to see that none of the accepted "causes" of cancer, in the absence of a high-animal-protein diet, mattered that much. Not genetics, not chemical carcinogens like AF,"
Author: T. Colin Campbell

45. "Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know."
Author: Tao Lin

46. "When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn't matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You know something? It's not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear."
Author: Terry Brooks

47. "N indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more deeply to rest, and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely, to confirm—what else was it murmuring—as Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain?"
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "Come, Spirits" she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here."
Author: Wes Moore

50. "I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life."
Author: Willa Cather

Mattered Quotes Pictures