Gayla Bassham > Gayla's Quotes

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Lesson learned? When people say, "You really, really must" do something, it means you don't really have to. No one ever says, "You really, really must deliver the baby during labor." When it's true, it doesn't need to be said.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“I was a little excited but mostly blorft. "Blorft" is an adjective I just made up that means 'Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.' I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“I have no affinity for animals. I don’t hate animals and I would never hurt an animal; I just don’t actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”
― A.A. Milne

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
― Nora Ephron

“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”
― Nora Ephron

“... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.

”
― Nora Ephron

“…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007