Quotes About Control

I argued that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but that I would never be able to break myself of the habit, since my mother talked as much as I did, if not more, and that there's not much you can do about inherited traits.

When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?

When we think we can do it all ourselves--fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution--it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we're going to squeeze the very life out of everything.

I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, they were such a pain in the ass.

whatever you come up with needs to suggest a voice that you are not trying to control. If you're lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home. You have to stop directing, because you will only get in the way.

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.

Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed

Thank God I am in charge of so little, or this could never have happened; life is much wilder, richer, and more profound than I am comfortable with.

He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

Dread was my governess growing up.

tucked his hands under his thighs as if they had to be contained, as if they would lash out otherwise, or fly away.

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose--paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

Complacency and ignorance, Zebara suggested, pouring more brandy. A very good way to keep a large population so tractable the society lacks rebellion.

overlooking the fact that a woman's most important function in life begins with physical domination?

She had had to learn that, although it was her nature to seethe, she must seethe discreetly. Unlike the average Pernese, dragonriders were apt to perceive strong emotional auras.

If we can still surmount what is natural and believe what we wish to believe, in spite of the force of evidence, then for a while at least we are masters of our fate, and we can paint the world we want.

Sometimes those who cannot create enjoy the power to destroy.

Those who hold power have never in all history been inclined to relinquish it willingly. Usually it has been taken from them by force, or it has slipped from their hands because they were too weak or corrupt to retain it.

If we can still surmount what is natural and believe what we wish to believe, in spite of the force of evidence, then for a while at least we are masters of our fate, and we can paint the world we want. I

Many of us deal badly with our pain or our need to feel as if we are in control of the world, even if we cannot control ourselves.