Quotes About Choice

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Hesitating, at the threshold of various illusory paths of life, I considered them one by one, without daring to pursue any one of them.

People need to understand that when they're deciding between breastmilk and formula, they're not deciding between Coke and Pepsi.... They're choosing between a live, pure substance and a dead substance made with the cheapest oils available.

Life didn't chose you, you chose life

Men aren't necessities. They're luxuries.

I love ghosts; I prefer ghosts to some people.

Every time we choose safety, we reinforce fear.

Every day," she'd told him, "you have to decide how to fail, and make the best of it.

Every day," she'd told him, "you have to decide how to fail, and make the best of it." At the time, he'd found it cynical. Now he honestly found it helpful — if for no other reason than he knew it was normal and he knew he wasn't alone.

Every day,' she told him, 'you have to decide how to fail, and make the best of it.' At the time, he'd found it cynical. Now he honestly found it helpful — if for no other reason than he knew it was normal and he knew he wasn't alone.

God, why don't you just hang a sign on my head that reads 'never the choice'?

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

There's always a sunrise and always a sunset and it's up to you to choose to be there for it,' said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.

The fuck is your life. Answer it.

At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.

What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I'd done some things I shouldn't have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything different from what I'd done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn't have done were what got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

I'll never know and neither will you about the life you didn'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.

Go because you want to go. Because wanting to leave is enough.

They're tortured by indecision and guilt and lust. They love X but want to fuck Z. It is the plight of almost every monogamous person at one time or another. We all love X but want to fuck Z.

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence." It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts.

Will you do it later or will you do it now?

The bull, I acknowledged grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn't seen where he'd run once I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward.