Not Choosing Me Quotes

1. "He had a thwarting day. The heath and moor were crisscrossed with little tracks, dusty and twisting between the heather and bracken and the little juniper trees with their clinging roots. There was not one way but many, all athwart each other like the cracks on a crazy jug, and he followed first one and then the other, choosing the straightest and stoniest and finding himself always under the hot-sun at another crossing just like the one he had just left. After a time he decided to got with the sun behind him always -- at least this led to consistency of proceeding -- though it must be told that when he decided this he had only the haziest idea, dear readers, of where the sun had been at the beginning of the venture. So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction. -- Possession"
Author: A.S. Byatt

2. "Jill told me that when you're really in love, you know right away. I'm not exactly sure how this happens. Is it like a flash of lightning? Like an angel tapping you on the shoulder? Or is it similar to choosing a puppy? You think you're picking the cutest one, but really you wind up going home with the one who keeps insisting on climbing into your lap."
Author: Alice Hoffman

3. "Isn't that how it is when you must decide with your heart? You are not just choosing one thing over another. You are choosing what you want. And you are also choosing what somebody else does not want, and all the consequences that follow. You can tell yourself, That's not my problem, but those words do not wash the trouble away. Maybe it is no longer a problem in your life. But it is always a problem in your heart."
Author: Amy Tan

4. "Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

5. "North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who's escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who've had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives."
Author: Barbara Demick

6. "It still took years for me to let go of learned pattern's of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love but always within an unfufilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting. Care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, out right cruelty."
Author: Bell Hooks

7. "Nate called out, "Team Meeting!" and pointed a finger in the air.When he had everyone's attention, Nate cleared his throat. "There are a few Team Awesome things we need to discuss."Tristan leaned over to Gabriel. "What's Team Awesome?""It's our team name," Heather smiled."We're not a team," Gabriel said."We are a team," Nate corrected. "We're Team Awesome and I'm team captain." He looked at Tristan. "You can call me Captain. Or Captain America, if you'd like. I'm even willing to settle for Captain Jack."Tristan crossed his arms. "Yeah, that's not going to happen."Heather's eyes lit up. "Ooh! Can we choose code names? Can I be Catwoman?""We're not choosing code names." Gabriel looked incredibly annoyed and Tristan almost smiled."
Author: Chelsea Fine

8. "You need a name. I heard some interesting ones today;perhaps you'll like one." He mentally ran through the list Brom had given him until he found tow names that stuck him as heroic, noble and pleasing to the ear. "What do you think of Vanilor or his successor, Eridor? Both were great dragons." No, said the dragon. It sounded amused with his efforts. Eragon. "That's my name; you can't have it," he siad, rubbing his chin. "Well, if you don't like those, there are others." He continued through the list, but the dragon rejected every one he proposed. UT seemed to be laughing at something Eragon did not understand, but he ignored and kept suggesting names. "There was ingothold, he slew the..." A revelation stopped him. Thats the problem! I've been choosing male names. You are a she!"
Author: Christopher Paolini

9. "DestinySomewhere there waiteth in this world of oursFor one lone soul another lonely soulEach choosing each through all the weary hoursAnd meeting strangely at one sudden goalThe blend they, like green leaves with golden flowersInto one beautiful and perfect whole;And life's long night is ended, and the wayLies open onward to eternal day"
Author: Dean Koontz

10. "The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can't be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem 'begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.'I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it."
Author: Debbie Millman

11. "You are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:41-42)Choosing to please God sounds right at first, but it so often leads to a performing life, a girl trying to become good, a lean-on-myself theology. If I am trying to please God, it is difficult trust God. But when I trust God, pleasing him is automatic.Anything we do to get life and identity outside of Christ is an idol, even service to Christ. He doesn't want my service. He wants me. And from that life-giving relationship, "streams of living water will flow from within" (John 7:38 NIV)"
Author: Emily P. Freeman

12. "Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

13. "To say it for those who know how to explain a thing: women have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward. Women are often privately amazed at the great honor men pay to their hearts. When men look especially for a profound, warm-hearted being, in choosing their spouse, and women for a clever, alert, and brilliant being, one sees very clearly how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman--that is, not for a complement, but for the perfection of their own merits."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

14. "All love on this earth involves choice. When, for example, a young man expresses his love to a young woman and asks her to become his wife, he is not just making an affirmation of love; he is also negating his love for anyone else. In that one act by which he chooses her, he rejects all that is not her. There is no other real way in which to prove we love a thing than by choosing it in preference to something else. Word and signs of love may be, and often are, expressions of egotism or passion; but deeds are proofs of love. We can prove we love our Lord only by choosing Him in preference to anything else."
Author: Fulton J. Sheen

15. "This life of ours . . . is a gift from God. It is not of our choosing. It comes to us by his choice. Since it is of his choosing, it is of his designing. We neither made ourselves nor can we manage ourselves as we like, nor manage the life that comes to us. For that reason we can take a most hopeful view of life. . . . [For] the thought that it is his gift and after his design gives us courage."
Author: George Weigel

16. "He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye."
Author: Graham Greene

17. "We need to be shaping our kids into arrows that will fly straight to the target God has set for them. If we're not carefully shaping and aiming our arrows, others will try to steal them and shape them for their use. What's worse, they will aim our children at targets of their own choosing. We should never be surprised if we are wounded by the members of our own family, if we have allowed sworn enemies of Christ to aim them."
Author: Gregg Harris

18. "To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing it with something else, something that we think we understand better. But what we compare it with turns out to have a huge influence on the outcome."
Author: Iain McGilchrist

19. "Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts."
Author: Isabel Wilkerson

20. "I am not choosing you or him. I'm choosing me."
Author: Kiera Cass

21. "No, I'm not choosing him or you. I'm choosing me."
Author: Kiera Cass

22. "Remember every mistreatment experience shows up to give you the opportunity to learn love at a deeper level. You don't need to defend yourself because you cannot be diminished. You must understand that defensiveness doesn't protect you. It actually makes you feel more vulnerable and unsafe. In protecting yourself you are embracing the idea that you can be hurt and this will only create more fear in your life. If you embrace fear and judgment you are choosing to live in fear and judgment.If you choose to let go of the need to protect and defend yourself and put down your defenses because you understand you cannot be hurt - you will actually feel safer. When you choose to feel bulletproof, infinite and absolute all the time, no defense is ever necessary."
Author: Kimberly Giles

23. "I think of these desert years of mine, not of my choosing. Maybe if it were all smoothe and comfortable, if my pride and professionalism were defining life for me, God's steel-quiet, penetrating word would have been lost in the babble and sheen of success."
Author: Luci Shaw

24. "I pictured Becs and myself together, squabbling, but always over little things, while I rotted away at the core from love of Ferris.It was hopeless.‘Here.' I laid my hands on the table, palms up, and jerked my head at them, ‘put yours on top.'Ferris did not move.‘Please,' I said.He laid his cold hands on mine and I curled my fingers, folding his within them.‘Now,' I said, ‘I've neither accepted nor refused. Speak it out plainly, tell me and I'll do it.'He cried, ‘Don't put it onto me! Choose for yourself.'‘This is choosing. Tell Aunt I will do whatever you'll have me do, and that's my answer.' I kept hold of his fingers. We stayed there silent and motionless for some time, while the candles burnt down.At last he said quietly, ‘It is a lot to give up.'‘Well. My history is bad enough without bigamy,' I replied, at which he smiled but made no reply. The candles were half burnt. I took one and rose.‘Goodnight, Ferris.'‘Goodnight, Jacob."
Author: Maria McCann

25. "Perhaps all men were moved against their will. A man ordered his life, and then an obscurity of circumstance sent him down a road that was not of his own desire or choosing. Something beyond a man's immediate choice and will reached through the earth and stirred him. He did not see how any man might escape it."
Author: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

26. "Pride, oh pride—a friend from the past, a bodyguard of the present, and an enemy of the future. Books, oh books—a friend from the past, a soul mate of the present, and a protector of the future. Slowly, softly, and surely through the pages of the past, I have found a new me. There were so many things to learn and so many things remaining to learn. I delight in the truth of why some books I will read, and other I will not. The truth is: I was not choosing. In pleasing myself with books, I transform myself. And I've found sometimes the most amazing keys to unlocking a different part of me in the strangest of books. I go to libraries and there they are waiting for me. I love them, and they love me."
Author: Mark O'Brien

27. "There's different ways of doing things wrong, Lynn, and not all of it is choosing to hurt others. Sometimes it's the things you don't do that make you feel the worst."
Author: Mindy McGinnis

28. "Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth."
Author: Naomi Wolf

29. "Quitting is not giving up, it's choosing to focus your attention on something more important. Quitting is not losing confidence, it's realizing that there are more valuable ways you can spend your time. Quitting is not making excuses, it's learning to be more productive, efficient and effective instead. Quitting is letting go of things (or people) that are sucking the life out of you so you can do more things that will bring you strength."
Author: Osayi Osar Emokpae

30. "I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?"
Author: Pat Conroy

31. "Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."
Author: Richard Dawkins

32. "Think of the many, many stories about God choosing people. There are Moses, Abraham, and Sarah; there are David, Jeremiah, Gideon, Samuel, Jonah, and Isaiah. There is Israel itself. Much later there are Peter and Paul, and, most especially, Mary.God is always choosing people. First impressions aside, God is not primarily choosing them for a role or a task, although it might appear that way. God is really choosing them to be God's self in this world, each in a unique situation. If they allow themselves to experience being chosen, being a beloved, being somehow God's presence in the world, they invariably communicate that same chosenness to others. And thus the Mystery passes on from age to age. Yes, we do have roles and tasks in this world, but finally they are all the same—to uniquely be divine love in a way that no one else can or will."
Author: Richard Rohr

33. "Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations."
Author: Rolf Potts

34. "The ability to choose well seems to depend in no small part upon our knowing our own minds. And when we ask for more choice, we seem to be saying, "I know what I want, so however much choice you give me, I will be able to pick out the thing that I want." We firmly believe that no matter how many alternatives we're given, ultimately we'll know which door we prefer to walk through. Yet, paradoxically, asking for more choice is also an admission that we don't always know what we want, or that we are changeable enough that we cannot know what we want until we are in the moment of choosing. And it's clear that after a certain point, the amount of time and energy directed toward choosing counteracts the benefits of the choice."
Author: Sheena Iyengar

35. "(... We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.)"
Author: Siri Hustvedt

36. "Honestly i don't understand the rousing of romance all that well. i used to believe in this thing called fate, or destiny. a romantic romeo and juliet, monet and veronica, etc. but now i feel jaded, maybe agnostic to the idea.but choice used to seem so unromantic, as if some mystic force was not behind the meeting of 2 beautiful individuals. but now i think choice is the greater of the two simply for this fact: by choosing someone you are saying that out of all the people in the entire world i have decided that i want you apart of my life in perpetuum, for the rest of my life, and no one else.no haphazard circumstance, no chance meetings where distant planets align. it's simply two rational individuals who make a choice and an effort to remain together."
Author: Stephen Christian

37. "Deathbed confession or mere ordinance work do not change man's nature. This is the reason Satan's plan to force everyone to be good would have failed, for there could never be a returning to the presence of the Eternal Father without a testing in the face of opposites and temptation and without the continuous choosing of the highest good over lesser goods and over evil. Any other approach to salvation ignores this process of growth and turns it all into some kind of an arbitrary and awesome mystery that, to many, is the hallmark of spirituality."
Author: Stephen R. Covey

38. "From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, [...] and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attilla and a pack of other lovers with queer names [...] I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest..."
Author: Sylvia Plath

39. "This path was not that of my conscious choosing. But after persistent subconscious confrontation, I have finally embraced what is, 'souly' for me...and I am thankful, when called upon, to be able to share and give to those who seek their own way of the path."
Author: T.F. Hodge

40. "It's not about choosing somebody over her. It's about making space for somebody along with her."
Author: Toni Morrison

Not Choosing Me Quotes Pictures