Tracy Quotes

Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.

You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.

I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.

... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?

The time to make up your mind about people, is never.

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called it "Chops" because that was the name of his dog And that's what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X's and he had to ask his father what the X's meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it "Autumn" because that was the name of the season And that's what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it "Innocence: A Question" because that was the question about his girl And that's what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year that Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle's Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three a.m. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That's why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it "Absolutely Nothing" Because that's what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn't think he could reach the kitchen.

It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.

Everything you do is triggered by an emotion of either desire or fear.

Positive expectations are the mark of the superior personality.

Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

Don't make your life about the loss. Make it about the love.

Look for the good in every person and every situation. You'll almost always find it.

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, Be more active, Show up more often.

The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers.

The only real limitation on your abilities is the level of your desires. If you want it badly enough, there are no limits on what you can achieve.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

He turns me inside out with a look, destroys me with a kiss.

The most important thing you can do in this world, the most necessary thing, is to survive it. You can't do anything for anyone else if you don't take care of yourself first.

Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.

You have within you,right now,everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

Two faults. My race and my gender. But they are not faults. They are strength. And I am more than this man can comprehend.

Never say anything about yourself you don't want to come true

The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the indispensable prerequisite for success.

Some truths only tragedy can teach. The first one I learned is that when people acknowledge your pain, they want your pain to acknowledge them back. They need to witness it in real time, or else you're not doing your part.

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

Love is a powerful thing, more powerful than blood, although both run through us like a river.

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. {Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, 15 August 1820}

If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.

Always choose the future over the past. What do we do now?

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.

I’m just keeping the faith. I continue to eat well, take turmeric, cayenne pepper, milk and honey, and exercise my eye muscles frequently.

Blind, broke, jobless, and frustrated, Kevin found it difficult to get through the following few months. But he had one big thing going for him. He was sober. It was a new beginning.

The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

The way you give your name to others is a measure of how much you like and respect yourself.

The more you seek security, the less of it you have. But the more you seek opportunity, the more likely it is that you will achieve the security that you desire.

Excellence/Perfection is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.

Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives you a 1,000 percent Return on Energy!

Imagine no limitations; decide what's right and desirable before you decide what's possible.

Your biggest opportunity probably lies under your own feet, in your current job, industry, education, experience or interests.

What truly ties us together is not blood but pain. When we love someone and lose them, that loss imprints itself on everyone else we love too.

If you envy successful people, you create a negative force field of attraction that repels you from ever doing the things that you need to do to be successful. If you admire successful people, you create a positive force field of attraction that draws you toward becoming more and more like the kinds of people that you want to be like.

Who's the literary nerd? The quoter or the one who recognizes the quote?

Some truths only tragedy can teach.

There’s not much to be afraid of when you’ve already lost everything that matters.

The more credit you give away, the more will come back to you. The more you help others, the more they will want to help you.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home

Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting.

Sober, gainfully employed, and physically secure once again, Kevin began to relax. His confidence slowly returned. For the first time since the onset of his blindness, he let his guard down and a crack in his carefully constructed veneer formed. Light flooded in. And with it, hope.

Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of very part of your life.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and importance, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.

One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.

Today the greatest single source of wealth is between your ears.

But grief isn’t a competition. It’s not an identical pain that we all meet one day when death finds us. It’s a monster, personalized by our love and memories to devour us just so. Grief is suffering, tailored.

And then I unwind her. One strand for my mother. One for my father. One for me. I unravel the rage until it courses through my veins like fuel in an engine. I let it become a part of me, but not all of me. Hot, scorching pain under my skin, under my tongue, under my nails. I let it spread through me—until there is no more “Before” and no more “After.” I am her and she is me.

Everything works out in the end. if it hasn't worked out yet, then it's not the end.

If you're reading this, then maybe you know you ought to read everything. And maybe you know you ought to read deeply. Because there's witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.

Nothing to do but admit that—obnoxious smirk or not—this boy is sexy af. A little wicked, a lot wild, and all dangerous.

Why someone dies is not the same question as why they are gone.

It’s written all over his face—he would disintegrate anyone—everyone—if it means saving me. He would literally set fire to the world.

She remembered the day vividly, for how can you forget the day your heart is broken? The funny thing about a broken heart is that it's not fatal. Though you wish in vain that it were, life continues on and you have no choice but to continue on with it. You take the hand that fate has dealt you and you press forward because there is nothing else that can be done.

Do you trust me?” he asks. “Of course, but—” “Do. You. Trust. Me?” he asks again, and in the space between the words—the space between us—are all the things we’ve never said. “Yes,” I whisper, even as my entire body recoils from the hole in the ground he’s made for me. “Yes?” he asks, his blue eyes a little disbelieving and a lot determined. “Yes, Hudson. I trust you.

My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

I don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.

Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.

I can see something in his eyes. Something powerful and terrible and all-consuming.

Perhaps this is what it was all about. Leaning on God when life made no sense, as well as when the answers seem clear.

it is clear to me that things are starting to regenerate. There is a gentle tingling in my face, centered below the cheekbones that occurs from time to time throughout the day. At night there is a subtle throbbing in my throat that is accompanied by a noise that varies from a churning sound to something akin to slowly letting air out of a balloon. It is fascinating that I’m literally hearing those long dormant cells struggling to come back to life.

today, I added a new concoction to my recuperative regime; I began drinking honey and milk. Taken together, they form a powerful antioxidant that has been used by many cultures for centuries. As the saying goes—“ it couldn’t hurt.

You wouldn’t ask because you thought I wouldn’t pick you. But I would. I would pick you, Hudson. If there was any other way, I would choose you. I love you.

How does this boy navigate my emotions like a seasonal sailor, finding the clear skies and bringing them closer, when all I seem able to do is hold fast to the storms?

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

For every woman who has been told to sit down and be quiet... And who stood up anyway.

I’ll never make you choose, Grace. How could I when I know that you’d never choose me?

everything/ that ever was still is, somewhere

Everything has two histories. Especially in the South.

Because death breaks out connection... death is not a thread. it is the sharp cut that severs us. Death separates us from one another, and yet holds us close. As deeply as we hate it, it love us more.

Sometimes life hands you more than a new hand of cards to play—it hands you a whole new deck, maybe even a whole new game.

If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first." This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.

If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?

Some folks call her a runaway. A failure in the race. But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun

Everyone answers to me...eventually.

We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.

To earn more, you must learn more.

You are my king now, cariad

As Kevin climbed the three flights of stairs to his apartment, his brain formulated a vague plan of action. He could not have explained it to anyone or even to himself in coherent sentences. But the outline was there in Kevin’s subconscious. It would not only change his life, but many others, as well. A Call to Action had been born.

Love is hate War is Peace No is Yes And we're all free.

As I lay in bed, I experienced continual, yet gentle, throbbing throughout my face, but most pronounced directly under my eyes. At one point, around 1 a.m., I felt a build-up of pressure in my left eye, then a release. It was followed by quite a bit of crusty discharge. Suddenly, my eyes feel living—rooted.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

patience, prayer and turmeric; the foundation, the corner stones of my journey out of the darkness. Each one of these elements has played a critical role in the process. Since October, in addition to a diet replete in anti-oxidant rich foods, I’ve been ingesting cayenne pepper and turmeric four times a day. The cayenne I mix in a glass of water; the turmeric is hidden in lemon or blueberry yogurt.

This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand. But look at your world and your life seems to shrink to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?