The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
—Wendell Barry
There are some forms of religion that are bad; just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
—Karen Armstrong
It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your crops and floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest to the constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.
—John Burroughs
You want to believe in black and white, good and evil, heroes that are truly heroic, villains that are just plain bad, but I’ve learned in the past year that things are rarely so simple. The good guys can do some truly awful things, and the bad guys can sometimes surprise the heck out of you.
—Karen Marie Moning in Darkfever
Where humor is concerned there are no standards—no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
—Mary McCarthy
I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?
—Gabrielle Zevin in Elsewhere
There is no reason to repeat bad history.
—Eleanor Holmes Norton
You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It's the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't no good. There is, and lots of it, too.
—Charles Martin in Chasing Fireflies
There comes a point when you just love someone. Not because they're good, or bad, or anything really. You just love them. It doesn't mean you'll be together forever. It doesn't mean you won't hurt each other. It just means you love them.
—Laurell K. Hamilton in Incubus Dreams
There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.
—Patrick Ness in A Monster Calls
Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.
—Rita Mae Brown
A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.
—Samuel Goldwyn
People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.
—Gabrielle Zevin in Elsewhere
If you have the ability and the opportunity to help someone, but you don't do anything just because you're scared or it's inconvenient or something, then maybe you're just as bad as the people who caused the trouble in the first place.
—Bree Despain in The Lost Saint