decisive moments Quotes

“It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when the moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.”

“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”

“Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, something more momentous had happened than if the mountains had been shoved aside.”

“Know someone as much as you can. Hold onto the moments that define them. Then when their body leaves, they won’t.”

“They decided that the time for asking permission had ended.”

“The moment between deciding to open your eyes and then actually doing it is as scary a thing as there is in the new world.”

“Bartleby: ‘I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.‘”

“Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.”

She showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection which comes out in men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life—those moments when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.