Quotes About Influence

Maybe too many of my expectations have been shaped by bad television.

You can't make people love you but you can make them fear you.

Tyler refused to listen to CDs, insisting that real vinyl records were the only way to go. Blair worried her brother was turning into a loser.

Tinsley felt like a puppeteer playing with her marionettes, holding all the strings.

leader is a leader around the clock. No matter how tired you are, no matter whether you want to concentrate on a ball game or your magazine, you still send her the same calm-assertive leadership energy.

Without a role model, there's no incentive to get better.

If my role in a relationship is to help someone, I become invested in that person's success. I'm nudging someone along their career on a path that I believe is the right one. So, if that path leads to success, it's my success as well.

It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon...

He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed.

My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.

Traditions are born by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries

He said to me one day in the second week of July, "Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower.

For no matter what the factual data were, all the books written about Blacks by their conquerors reflected the conquerors viewpoints. Nothing else should have been expected.

Each of us carries around those growing up places, the institutions, a sort of backdrop, a stage set. So often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe that is is terrifying to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted, limited, constricted by that old view.

She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.

The men I've been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy's polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I'm supposed to come out precious and sparkling again. Does it work? They seem to think so. How do you feel? I asked. A little smaller. (1998: 148- 149)

That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this.

If it's easy to be friendly she will be. If the wind blows the other way her friendship will be gone. And I'm thinking the wind is blowing the other way. She has found some other way to be an important person in her own right by hating others.

Eric appeared to be counting my eyelashes. I tried to keep my gaze on my hands, to indicate modesty. I felt power tweaks kind of flow over me and had an uneasy feeling Eric was trying to influence me. I risked a quick peek, and sure enough he was looking at me expectantly. Was I supposed to pull off my dress? Bark like a dog? Kick Bill in the shins? Shit.

You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

Vampires, bringing America together!

Every now and then I felt like I was Bill's doll.

Maybe' is such a bad word," I said. "You can 'maybe' yourself back to Adam and Eve and the serpent.

But sooner or later, this prosperity will extend everywhere. It just got here first.