M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Meant to be heard and not seen”
Source: The Selection
“Meant to be together? Are you listening to yourself? This isn't one of your fairy tales, Fallon. This is real life, and in the real world you have to bust your ass for the happy ever after!”
Source: November 9
“Meant to be?’ It's just something people say so that they don't have to look at all the things they did wrong and wish they could take back. Only by the time they figure that out, it's too late.”
Source: The A-List #10: California Dreaming: An A-List Novel
“Meantime, a midsize Labrador mutt cut me off at the cul-de-sac. He was in desperate need of a rubdown. I gave it a thought but feared his bark and constant gruff. I locked eyes then noticed his black and white patches rotated with agitations. He yapped and yapped and bluffed mightily, but he cautiously stayed a safe distance away. Eventually, he lost all courage and quietly ran for shelter. As for me, I never stopped advancing toward my brother’s place. It took some effort but
I serpentine and zigzagged my way through dandelions and fast-food wrappings lying in the
yard.
The closer I got, the more definite the sounds of dishes breaking, kids playing, infants testing
their lungs, and TVs watching themselves became. Jerry and his wife had separated some time ago. Regardless, he was left with four adult daughters still in the nest. Obviously, the girls brought kids of their own to the mix. But everything unfolding before me appeared chaotic on the other side of that threshold. That entire scene grew larger andmore intimidating with every timid step I took.”
Source: My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift
“Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.”
Source: The Souls of Black Folk
“Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burnt up in the fire of its own hot passions; and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, woth the light of morning in its eyes.”
Source: Roads to Freedom
“Meantime, when once we know from nothing still
Nothing can be create, we shall divine
More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are,
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.”
Source: On the Nature of Things
“Meanwhile 1st April to lie as if they were honest throughout the year.”
“Meanwhile Aeneas the True longed to allay her grief and dispel her sufferings with kind words. yet he remained obedient to the divine command, and with many a sigh, for he was shaken to the depths by the strength of his love, returned to his ships.”
Source: The Aeneid
“Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.”
“Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics that are unknown to people who aren't ascetics.' 'No doubt. And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.' 'But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.' 'In other words, lunatics are better than sane men. Which I deny. The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states. He's not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself. He strikes a balance. It isn't easy of course; it's even damnably difficult. The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile. The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being The life of the one is the other's death and vice versa. But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance. The Christians, who weren't sane, told people that they'd got to throw half of themselves in the waste-paper basket. And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us. But I don't want to be three-quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It's time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.”
Source: point counter point
“Meanwhile Appu-Kili had caught a dragonfly and with nimble fingers slipped a lasso round its tail. Abida looked at the dragonfly, into its eyes of a thousand crystals. The eyes shone dully with the chronicles of the dead. If dragonflies were memories of the dead, as they believed in Khasak, whose then was this memory? Perhaps it was her mother’s pining images of sin and regret and drowning. The crystal eyes fell on her.”
“Meanwhile, as I think about dumb stuff, the situation is getting worse.”
Source: Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon, Vol. 1
“Meanwhile, at a Tokyo 7-Eleven, someone right now is choosing from a variety of bento boxes and rice bowls, delivered that morning and featuring grilled fish, sushi, mapo tofu, tonkatsu, and a dozen other choices. The lunch philosophy at Japanese 7-Eleven? Actual food.
On the day we missed out on fresh soba, Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and I chose a couple
of rice balls (onigiri), one filled with pickled plum and the other with spicy fish roe. For $1.50, convenience store onigiri encapsulate everything that is great about Japanese food and packaging. Let's start in the middle and work outward, like were building an onion. The core of an onigiri features a flavorful and usually salty filling. This could be an umeboshi (pickled apricot, but usually translated as pickled plum), as sour as a Sour Patch Kid; flaked salmon; or cod or mullet roe.
Next is the rice, packed lightly by machine into a perfect triangle. Japanese rice is unusual among staple rices in Asia because it's good at room temperature or a little colder. Sushi or onigiri made with long-grain rice would be a chalky, crumbly disaster. Oishinbo argues that Japan is the only country in Asia that makes rice balls because of the unique properties of Japanese rice. I doubt this. Medium- and short-grain rices are also popular in parts of southern China, and presumably wherever those rices exist, people squish them into a ball to eat later, kind of like I used to do with a fistful of crustless white bread. (Come on, I can't be the only one.)
Next comes a layer of cellophane, followed by a layer of nori and another layer of cellophane. The nori is preserved in a transparent shell for the same reason Han Solo was encased in carbonite: to ensure that he would remain crispy until just before eating. (At least, I assume that's what Jabba the Hutt had in mind.) You pull a red strip on the onigiri packaging, both layers of cellophane part, and a ready-to-eat rice ball tumbles into your hand, encased in crispy seaweed.
Not everybody finds the convenience store onigiri packaging to be a triumph. "The seaweed isn't just supposed to be crunchy," says Futaki in Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice. "It tastes best when the seaweed gets moist and comes together as one with the rice." Yamaoka agrees. Jerk. Luckily, you'll find a few moist-nori rice balls right next to the crispy ones.”
Source: Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo
“Meanwhile, at our present level of development, largely oblivious to our origins and our destination, we are half-asleep in frog pajamas.”
Source: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
“Meanwhile, bank regulators looked off somewhere in the middle distance, wearing the same expression as a dog owner who’s pretending that his pooch isn’t pooping on your lawn.”
Source: This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class
“Meanwhile dogs don't hold grudges humans fetch your files from the archives”
Source: The Azanian
“Meanwhile, Hawaiian politicians tried to make up for lost time by officially granting cops the “right” to rape sex workers by spelling the permission out in the text of the new prostitution law. When a legislator discovered this provision in 2015 and rewrote the law to scrap it, the cops demanded that their decades-old droit du seigneur remain in place, and it probably would’ve had not the media gotten hold of the story and a public outcry not ensued. Now there’s a movement to decriminalize sex work there, which might at last free Hawaiian whores from the tender mercies of cops.”
Source: The Essential Maggie McNeill, Volume I: Collected Essays from "The Honest Courtesan"
“Meanwhile, hemlocks kept their footings in the deep, shady wrinkles of lower mountain slopes— coves shaped by intimate creeks and gorges carved by thundering rivers. Even east of the mountains, hemlocks survived on steep, north- facing slopes. In all of these places, microclimates continued to mimic conditions experienced in the region during the ice age. These isolated pockets are the last vestiges of a forest that once covered much of the Southeast. They are refugia.”
Source: On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
“Meanwhile, I have started carrying a small spiral-top notepad and a black pen with me. I am in need of a new system for processing reality.”
Source: State of Paradise
“Meanwhile, I learned my future depended not on the plans of another, but on fate and myself.”
Source: Old Burnside
“Meanwhile, I watch and work up my rage at men, who can be villainous to all, but virtuous to some. Watching them be kind to children should make me think of them as better men, but it make them worse, for no other wicked is more wicked than choosing with who you dole out kindness.”
Source: Moon Witch, Spider King
“Meanwhile I'll probably see him again. That's how sick I am.”
“Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.”
Source: Transformations
“Meanwhile, in the garden they dug large pits and in each pit they buried ten men alive. On both sides of the gate they constructed huge pyramids made up of the Derevlian commoners' severed heads.”
Source: Bloody Wedding in Kyiv: Two Tales of Olha, Kniahynia of Kyivan Rus
“Meanwhile, increased unhappiness results from our deteriorating social relationships. Relationships with family, peers, colleagues, neighbors, and community members have proven over and over to be the biggest determining factor in our happiness, once our basic needs are met. Yet because we’re working more than ever before to afford and maintain all this Stuff, we’re spending more time alone and less time with family, with friends, with neighbors. We’re also spending less time on civic engagement and community building. In Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam chronicles the decline in participation in social and civic groups, ranging from bowling leagues to parent-teacher associations to political organizations. We end up with a situation in which we have fewer friends, fewer supportive neighbors, less robust communities, and near total apathy about our role within a democratic political system. As a result, our communities can’t provide the things they used to. One-quarter of Americans now say they have no one in their lives with whom they can discuss personal trouble; that number has doubled since 1985, when far fewer people reported being socially isolated. Alongside emotional support, logistical support has dried up too: if you need child care, help moving, a ride to the airport, food delivered to your door when you’re sick, someone to bring in the mail or walk the dog or water your plants when you travel, or a group with whom to play a game of basketball, softball, or poker, you’re likely out of luck. Increasingly we’re all too busy and/or too isolated for these things. Since we still need all these things, the market has filled the void. We can now hire someone to watch our pets, coach us through a rough breakup, or move our Stuff. We pay for child care and activities to entertain our kids. We can even buy computer games that simulate sports with live opponents. This is commodification at work: the process of turning things that were once public amenities, neighborly activities, or the role of friends into privately purchasable Stuff or services—i.e., commodities. Systems thinkers often talk about negative feedback loops—problems that cause an effect that adds to the original problem. For instance, when global temperatures rise, ice caps melt, decreasing the planet’s ability to reflect sunlight off that bright snow, so global temperatures rise further. The same thing is happening with our melting communities. We have to work harder to pay for all the services that neighbors, friends, and public agencies used to provide, so we’re even more harried and less able to contribute to the community. It’s a downward spiral.”
Source: The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and our Health—and a Vision for Change
“Meanwhile, infants and small children are exceptionally authentic beings because their emotional reactions and their thoughts are raw and honest. If they are happy, they smile, giggle, exclaim in pure joy, and feel excited, motivated, curious, and creative. If they are hurt, they cry, disengage, get angry, seek help and protection, and feel betrayed, sad, scared, lonely, and helpless. They don’t hide behind a mask.”
Source: Human Development and Trauma: How Childhood Shapes Us into Who We Are as Adults
“Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?”
“Meanwhile, Kev wondered what to do about Win.
It seemed that love was working through him inexorably, more erotic and sweet and disorienting than raw opium. More pervasive than oxygen from air. He was so damn tired of trying to resist it.
Cam had been right. You could never predict what would happen. All you could do was love her.
Very well.
He would give in to it, to her, without trying to qualify or control anything. He would surrender. He would come out of the shadows for good. He took a long, slow breath and let it out.
I love you, he thought, looking at Win. I love every part of you, every thought and word... the entire complex, fascinating bundle of all the things you are. I want you with ten different kinds of need at once. I love all the seasons of you, the way you are now, the thought of how much more beautiful you'll be in the decades to come. I love you for being the answer to every question my heart could ask.
And it seemed so easy, once he capitulated. It seemed natural and right.”
Source: Seduce Me at Sunrise
“Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.”
Source: The Waves
“Meanwhile let us cast one shadow in air and water.”
“Meanwhile"
Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.”
Source: Collected Poems
“Meanwhile, men like Huxley, Carnegie and Frick were the very select few who were reaping in the gargantuan rewards of gold, or in this case, coal and steel.”
Source: A Blazing Gilded Age
“Meanwhile, Milo had been in the Senate on that day until it was dismissed and then came home. He changed out of his formal clothes, waited for a little while his wife got herself ready--you all know how that goes-- and set out at the hour when Clodius, if he had been planning on coming back to Rome that day, would have returned.”
“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
Source: Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
“Meanwhile myself et cetera lay quietly in the deep mud et cetera (dreaming, et cetera, of your smile eyes knees and of your Etcetera.)”
“Meanwhile, nobody said, Haha, dang, isn’t it bad enough that rape and assault and abuse and harassment and boyfriends doing the emotional psychosexual whatever equivalent of sticking their beefy hand into your brain and wearing it like a baseball mitt or a puppet so they can just really move it around and infinity et cetera happens to so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many of us, and we can’t even talk about it without having to apologize afterward?”
Source: A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
“Meanwhile, other cupcakeries were popping up all over Manhattan. A near Magnolia replica turned up in Chelsea when a former bakery manager jumped ship to open his own Americana bakeshop, Billy's (the one AJ and I frequented). Two Buttercup employees similarly ventured downtown to the Lower East Side and opened Sugar Sweet Sunshine, expanding into new flavors like the Lemon Yummy, lemon cake with lemon buttercream, and the Ooey Gooey, chocolate cake with chocolate almond frosting. Dee-licious.
Other bakeries opted for their own approach. A husband-and-wife team opened Crumbs, purveyor of five-hundred-calorie softball-sized juggernauts, in outrageous flavors like Chocolate Pecan Pie and Coffee Toffee, topped with candy shards and cookie bits. There were also mini cupcakes in wacky flavors like chocolate chip pancake and peanut butter and jelly from Baked by Melissa and Kumquat's more gourmet array like lemon-lavender and maple-bacon.
Revered pastry chefs also got in on the action. After opening ChikaLicious, the city's first dessert bar, Chika Tillman launched a take-out spot across the street that offered Valhrona chocolate buttercream-topped cupcakes. And Pichet Ong, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten alum and dessert bar and bakery rock star, attracted legions of loyal fans- no one more than myself- to his West Village bakery, Batch, with his carrot salted-caramel cupcake.”
Source: Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light
“Meanwhile, our politicians, global corporations, and money changers have redefined the American Dream. Many of us grew up not even knowing that we were considered "poor," but now it seems that no one can stand the thought of not being rich. Politicians and the media told us that America is about having the most stuff, the nicest cars, and the biggest homes. Almost everyone, it seemed, was in it for themselves. Compassion, we were told, was a victim of capitalism.
We should now see that for the lie it is. Compassion and capitalism go hand in hand, but compassion does not go with what these people are really promoting: greed. . . .
In short, politicians promised us a new, easier way to success and happiness---and many of us too eagerly embraced and promoted it. . . . There are no shortcuts in achieving and living the American Dream. It takes hard work, relentless dedication to your core principles and values, and, above all, patience.”
Source: Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine
“Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them.
There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP.
It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.”
Source: Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“Meanwhile someone is shining my head to get it dry to attach my top-hat to my head with toupee tape. I get into microphone and get back up into my dressing room for the rest of my costume. I get snapped into all these things and layers and bundled up. I walk downstairs to the pit. Someone hands me my baton (which lights up like a wand) and I watch the first three minutes of the show. Then I come up out of the pit and there I am.”
“Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
“In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.”
Source: Figuring
“Meanwhile spring arrived. My old dejection passed away and gave place to the unrest which spring brings with it, full of dreams and vague hopes and desires.”
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
“Meanwhile, spring came, and with it the outpourings of Nature. The hills were soon splashed with wild flowers; the grass became an altogether new and richer shade of green; and the air became scented with fresh and surprising smells -- of jasmine, honeysuckle, and lavender.”
Source: Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama
“Meanwhile, Susan looked carefully into each of our faces. She was actually waiting for us to answer, to give reasons why people fall in love and get married. Nobody knows, I wanted to say. Nobody really knows. But that doesn't mean you're allowed to not do it.”
Source: Bobcat and Other Stories
“Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.”
“Meanwhile the Adversary of God and man, Satan with thoughts inflamed of highest design, Puts on swift wings, and towards the gates of hell Explores his solitary flight.”
“Meanwhile the antelope was butchered, and the flesh was found to be crawling with maggoty parasites. Cookie announced he had eaten worse, but they decided on a meal of biscuits and beans instead. Johnson recorded that "I am already thoroughly sick of beans, with six more weeks of them still before me." But it was not all bad.”
Source: Dragon Teeth
“Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. (Set the Night on Fire)”
“Meanwhile the ceaseless requirements of the entertainment industry also threaten to deprive us other forms of critical style and of the means of appreciating them. To be called 'satirical' or 'ironic,' is now to be patronized in a different way. The satirist is the fast-talking cynic, and the ironist merely sarcastic or self-conscious and wised up. When a precious and irreplacable word like 'irony' has become a lazy synonym for 'anomie,' there is scant room for originality.”
Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian