Tom told me what his plan was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it.
″‘Very well!’ said Bilbo very downcast, and also rather annoyed. ‘Come along back to your nice cells, and I will lock you all in again, and you can sit there comfortably and think of a better plan-but I don’t suppose I shall ever get hold of the keys again, even if I feel inclined to try.‘”
“But now, by saying what his future was going to be like, he had created it. A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”
“I sat, staring at a photo of Lucy and me from medical school, dancing and laughing; it was so sad, those two, planning a life together, unaware, never suspecting their own fragility.”
“My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I’ve spent almost a third of my life preparing for it. I had mapped out this whole forty-year career for myself—the first twenty as a surgeon-scientist, the last twenty as a writer. But now that I am likely well into my last twenty years, I don’t know which career I should be pursuing. If I had some sense of how much time I have left, it’d be easier. If I had two years, I’d write. If I had ten, I’d get back to surgery and science. If only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”
″‘See these perfect rows, Miguel? They are like what my life would have been. These rows know where they are going. Straight ahead. Now my life is like the zigzag in the blanket on Mama’s bed.‘”
“‘I want to get married,” she said quietly. ‘And when I do, I want my father to walk me down the aisle and I want everyone I know to be there. I want the church bursting with people.’”
″Regardless of the timing, the economy, the product, or how big your venture is, the right acts done to the right degree over time will make you successful.″
″Why spend your life making only enough money to end up with not enough money? Why work out in the gym only once a week, just to get sore and never see a change in your body type? Why get merely ‘good’ at something when you know the marketplace only rewards excellence? Why work eight hours a day at a job where no one recognizes you when you could be a superstar—and perhaps even run or own the place? All these examples require energy. Only your 10X targets really pay off! ″
“There was a plan to break us out of the arena from the moment the Quell was announced. The victor tributes from 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 11 had varying degrees of knowledge about it. Plutarch Heavensbee has been, for several years, part of an undercover group aiming to overthrow the Capitol.”
“Dad paused, hesitating before speaking. ‘I just think that funerals are a lot like death itself. You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it’s out of your control.’”
“But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”
“Although I am nine months pregnant, although I have had plenty of time to dream, I have not really considered the specifics of this child. I have thought of this daughter only in terms of what she will be able to do for the daughter I already have…Then again, my dreams for her are no less exalted; I plan for her to save her sister’s life.”
″‘If I win [...] I’m going to make sure everyone on this planet has enough to eat. Once we tackle world hunger, then we can figure out how to fix the environment and solve the energy crisis.‘”
“rarely discusses his plans, he knows that whenever he talks about a dream, he uses a little bit of the energy from that dream in order to do so…A Warrior of the Light knows the power of words.”
“A dozen different plans went through his head, all wretched ones, and at last he fixed on the worst plan of all. He decided to wait till it was dark and then go back to the river and ... set out for Mount Pire alone, trusting for his direction to the line he had drawn that morning in the sand. It was a crazy idea and if he had read as many books as you have about journeys over deserts he would never have dreamed of it. But Shasta had read no books at all.”
“When a star running back or wide receiver is injured, the coaches worry about their game plans. When a star quarterback gets hurt, the coaches worry about their jobs.”
″You can always change your plan, but only if you have one. I’m a big believer in to-do lists. It helps us break life into small steps. I once put “get tenure” on my to-do list. That was naïve. The most useful to-do list breaks tasks into small steps. It’s like when I encourage Logan to clean his room by picking up one thing at a time.″
“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
“At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity.”
“Paul has created technical solutions to help the rest of us get to decency, a road map to decency that we can all follow without trying to imitate him.”
″‘All right,’ said the Ordinary Princess. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Well, first of all,’ said the King, ‘will you marry me?’
‘Perry!’ gasped the Ordinary Princess.
‘Yes or no,’ demanded Peregrine.
...
‘Yes,’ said the Ordinary Princess promptly.
‘Darling kitchen maid!’ said Peregrine, catching her into his arms and kissing her. ‘I knew you wouldn’t desert me. Then that’s all right. And now to business. You can’t go on being a kitchen maid, and anyway, you’ve been fired. So you can’t go on staying here.‘”
“It appears that a college education has been given an artificially high price tag in order to leave students with little money left over for the basic requirements of living. Burdened by poverty, students are induced to drink cheap beer and eat past--in short, they are forced to act like Pirates and Pastafarians--and we can only conclude that this is some part of His greater plan to spread FSMism.”
“Sirs, if you mean to take only one of us, it should be Frankie. He’s one of the youngest here. Mrs Pennyweather plans to put me out to hire soon. I’m not old enough, but I guess I’m big enough. It’s why she’s not too keen on me leaving. But if I’m out working for months at a time. I won’t be able to look out for Frankie. And he’s still little.”
“I would like to make fun plans with you, but then just do ordinary things; or plan ordinary things but find we have stepped through a wardrobe into a world of ordinary magic.”
“She remembered walking back from there last month, half-drunk with a gaggle of half-friends from her dorm, and when one of them asked her (only half-giving a shit) where she’d planned to go for Christmas break, Darby had answered bluntly: that it would require an act of God Himself to make her come back home to Utah. And apparently He’d been listening, because He’d blessed Darby’s mother with late-stage pancreatic cancer.”
“Dear Die-ary, there’s nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their ‘discomfort’ like a favorite shirt. I can’t say I’m very pleased with where my life is just now... but I can’t help but look forward to where it’s going.”
“For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes.”
“But it didn’t work the way they expected. Mama didn’t get fed up at all. After a while Brother and Sister forgot about being super polite and were just polite.”
“Artemis paused, his gaze tugged momentarily upstairs to the converted loft. Perhaps, he thought. Do I really need all this gold? And was his conscience not needling him, leaching some of the sweetness from his victory? He shook himself. Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan. No emotion.”
“Next Saturday we play Wangaroo for the Peninsula Junior Colts Premiership. The whole town is talking about it, it’s the biggest thing to happen here since the second prize in the S.A. Tidy Towns Competition (Section B). Just shows what sort of town I live in. Hopeless.”
“this dire emergency, to meet only the beautiful eyes of perfect strangers, instead of the merry, friendly, commonplace, twinkling, jolly little eyes of its own brothers and sisters. “This is most truly awful,” said Cyril when he had tried to lift up the Lamb, and the Lamb had scratched like a cat and bellowed like a bull. “We’ve got to make friends with him! I can’t carry him home screaming like that. Fancy having to make friends with our own baby!—it’s too silly.” That, however, was exactly what they had to do. It took over an hour, and the task was not rendered”
“We’d better hide our treasure before we reach the abbey. The abbot is sure to be curious about the contents of the bag and ill probably find his way inside it.”
“Yes. Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she’s doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer.”
“Meantime, Bubba an me, we has got us a plan for when we get outta the Army. We gonna go back home an get us a srimp boat an get in the srimpin bidness.”
“he rushed out of the church and into the town to put his idea into practice. And what an awful place the town was, much worse than he had imagined. He almost gave up his idea, but then he thought, ‘If it’s always as nasty as this, everybody is bound to agree to my plan’. So he hurried on...”
″‘Po Po, Po Po, I have a plan. At the door there is a big basket. Behind it is a rope. Tie the rope to the basket, sit in the basket and throw the other end to me. I can pull you up.‘”
“Coaching to me is the ultimate high, especially when you have a game plan and you see that game plan executed to perfection. To see those players take what you put in front of them in preparation and turn it into a masterpiece - it doesn’t get any better than that.”
“One plan, however insane and unlikely, to free the enslaved kingdom: find and obliterate the Wyrdkeys the King of Adarlan had used to build his terrible empire. She’d gladly destroy herself to carry it out.”
“She had made a vow—a vow to free Eyllwe. So in between moments of despair and rage and grief, in between thoughts of Chaol and the Wyrdkeys and all she’d left behind and lost, Celaena had decided on one plan to follow when she reached these shores.”
″‘Perhaps the elephant will turn back into a white hen,’ murmured Delphine. ‘After all, she only did it for the game. When we’ve stopped playing Noah’s Ark there won’t be any reason for her to go on being an elephant.‘”
“I don’t think much of a club, so I’ll change my plan, too. I don’t think much of a club, so I’ll make me a sling out of this piece of cloth. I used to be very fond of slinging, ever since I read of David slaying Goliath the Philistine, and I was once thought to be expert at it”
″‘Any plans I might have?’ I repeated. If I’d had a different last name, if I’d had a dad who was a dentist and a mom who stayed home, he wouldn’t have acted like the future was something I might have thought about.”
“Having learned that Arsène Lupin plans to escape before his trial, the police allow it to happen while secretly watching him in order to arrest his accomplices.”
″...recalling Isabella’s hopes and fears, and anxious wishes for her son, and her commendations of him to his care, he grieved bitterly at the prospect of yielding him up, and searched in his heart how it might be avoided.”
I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me.