#choices

So, what can't you take? Decide which of the two options is harder, and do the other. That way, no matter how hard your choice turns out to be, at least you can find comfort in knowing you're avoiding something even worse. ↗

— Josephine Angelini

#decision-making #comfort

Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions. ↗

— Dallin H. Oaks

#choices #priorities #determination

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 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 Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 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, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#death

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#good-people #human-nature #hypocrisy #pretending #roles

I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#life #beauty

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement. ↗

— Ken Burns

#based #choices #cynicism #disengagement #fear

For the past few years, I've been more selective than I have any right to be, but I think that's finally starting to work in my favor. I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it's only because I made a decision to stop worrying about making money. ↗

— Lizzy Caplan

#any #because #been #choices #consider

I fought all my life for women to make their own choices, in their personal and professional lives. I made mine. ↗

— Hillary Clinton

#fought #i #life #lives #made

If you look at anybody who's had along career, if you look at the choices they've made - even if the movies haven't worked - they've always worked with great filmmakers. ↗

— Bradley Cooper

#always #anybody #career #choices #even

No self-respecting gay guy would have ever made some of the hair and clothing choices I am still trying to live down. ↗

— David Copperfield

#choices #clothing #down #ever #gay