Quotes About Priorities

We don't have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable.

Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot have a baby.

That's right, you never cared about money, Billy, Olive said. Certainly not to the extent that those of us who forgot to be born into wealthy families care about it.

We don't have time for perfect.

We don't have time for perfect.

The most urgent war is always the one fought at home.

What are you willing to give up to live the life you are pretending you want?

Why was there never enough time?

We don't have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable:

Give him a trophy for it, but don't marry a man just because he's nice. And try not to make a habit of getting engaged in the first place, Vivvie. It can lead to marriage if you're not careful.

The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. The

He would have to marry her, and in doing so give up all his dreams, all his hopes, of having a family. She

I myself have no objection to comfort so long as it does not interfere with more important activities.

It never registered to them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore. (The White Azalea)

Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.

Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one's time.

How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending.

I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time coming when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell those that I already have.

Everything we stand for can be expressed in terms of how we spend our money.

There were a million things we needed to figure out—and the congressman thought the most important thing we needed to do was slice up the operating budget so each political party was assured its "fair share"? Welcome to Washington. Once

Families are going broke because they buy too much stuff!

It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.

It is not what you have, it's what you don't have that counts.

When a dutiful brother came to relieve him, he went to his bed, and slept as soon as he lay down. He had the gift. There was no profit in laying awake fretting for what would, in any case, have to be faced on awaking, and he had long ago sloughed off the unprofitable. It took too much out of a man, of what would be needed hereafter.