Quotes from Worth the Effort

Mara Jacobs ·  265 pages

Rating: (724 votes)


“We’ll have to rent Knute Rockne, All American so you can see who George Gipp was.” “Now you’re showing your age, old man. You don’t rent anymore. You stream.” “Whatever. Ronald Reagan played the Gipper.” “Who’s Ronald Reagan?” she teased.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort


“He chuckled and took a drink of his pop,”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort


“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy. ~ Jim Rohn”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort


“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ~ Douglas Adams”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort


“She could hear her brothers goofing off on the other side of the large, circular lookout. Maybe they’d take their games too far and fall off the side of the mountain and she’d at least have the backseat to herself for the interminable ride home.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort



About the author

Mara Jacobs
Born place: The United States
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Popular quotes

“My form master in 4B1, Snappy Priestman, was a gentle man, cultivated, kind and civilized except when he (very occasionally) lost his temper. Even then, there was something oddly gentlemanly about the way he did it. In one of his lessons he caught a boy misbehaving. After a lull when nothing happened, he began to give us verbal warning of his escalating internal fury, speaking quite calmly as an objective observer of his own internal state. Oh dear. I can't hold it. I'm going to lose my temper. Get down below your desks. I'm warning you. It's coming. Get down below your desks. As his voice rose in a steady crescendo he was becoming increasingly red in the face, and he finally picked up everything within reach - chalk, inkpots, books, wood-backed blackboard erasers - and hurled them, with the utmost ferocity, towards the miscreant. Next day he was charm itself, apologizing briefly but graciously to the same boy. He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance - as who would not be in his profession? Who would not be in mine, for that matter?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist


“But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?”
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“I am going to die, her brain recited calmly. I am going to be stabbed until I am died. How infuriating. I have so much left to do.”
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“It’s at your most lunatic moments that I can resist you least.”
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― Niall Williams, quote from Four Letters of Love


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