Background Quotes

“We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

“Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

“He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I operate under the assumption that people don't notice the good in me. That's just how things always seem to play out. I get blamed, while con-artist kids like Venus, and Camille, and Gemma get believed. But the rescue lady noticed. In the background, just observing, she noticed.”
― Wendelin Van Draanen, Runaway

“We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need—all so we can kill them with less resistance.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Using Microsoft Windows 10 has been marked by extremely poor computer performance whenever background updates are in progress.”
― Steven Magee

“Oh dear, thought Demelza, how strange it all is! Me, sitting here, a mother, like a middle-aged dowager, moving in the best circles, behaving with prim propriety, hands folded on reticule, feet politely together, smiling graciously when spoken to, inclining the head this way and that, the perfect lady; when I've still got two scars on my back from my father's leather strap, and I learned to swear and curse and spit before I was seven, and I crawled with lice and ate what food I could find lying in the gutter, and had six dirty undernourished brothers all younger than me to look after.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“Paradoxically, minimalism is the maximum use of space.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Knowing the background and history of the person you are trying to connect with can be of great help.”
― Abhishek Ratna, small wins BIG SUCCESS: A handbook for exemplary success in post Covid19 Outbreak Era

“Should we storytellers make sure we pass on the experience of our own culture? Yes, of course. It's one of our prime duties. But should we only tell stories that reflect our own background? Should we refrain from telling stories that originated elsewhere, on the grounds that we don't have the right to annex the experience of others? Absolutely not. A culture that never encounters any others becomes first inward-looking, and then stagnant, and then rotten. We are responsible for bringing fresh streams of story into our own cultures from all over the world, and welcoming experience from every quarter, and offering our own experience in return.”
― Philip Pullman, Dæmon Voices

“The bad things that happen to us don't define us. It's just important sometimes that people understand where we're coming from.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“While the world has been on COVID-19 lock down, good things have been happening in the background that will eventually be revealed.”
― Steven Magee

“We have different backgrounds, different arrangements of occurrence and life experiences.
Don't trip when you see others doing better than you.
Yours is yet to come.”
― Ojingiri Hannah

“A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
... Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes,”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“When you take breaks, your diffuse mode is still working away in the background.”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“I loved my dish towel. This one was two-toned, and had, on one side, stitchings of fat purple roses on a lavender background, and on the other side, fat lavender roses on a purple background. Which side to use? An optical-illusion namesake with which I could dry our dishes. It was soft and worn and smelled like no-nonsense laundry detergent.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Greatness is not dependent on your background, it is dependent on how much value you were able to add to yourself per time.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“The defining background experiences of our childhood affect our vital adulthood decisions and method of apprehending the world.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Humans must be skeptics in order to find truth. Because there is always something that lies beneath.”
― Maria Karvouni

“There is no sign of a mathematical pedigree in Nash’s ancestry or any indication that mathematics was much in the air at the Nash household.”
― Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

“A lot of the psychological insights [in Parabellum] stemmed from my personal experiences. For example, I was a college athlete, so I could imagine what the ex-athlete was going through when her sports career ended. I'm a little emotionally detached (which helps in a field like forensics where I can see some unpleasant things), so I could identify with the detachment of the programmer. I tried to take my experiences and push them a little farther to develop characters with more serious psychological issues. And I read several memoirs to get a sense of what it feels like to live with depression, PTSD, brain trauma, etc.”
― Greg Hickey, Parabellum

“A gifted woman may come from a poor background, but she does not let poverty deprive her of a better life. She allows her gifts to make room for her to shine.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“It is not your background that determines how far you can go in life. It is God’s plan, your hard work and determination that matters. Have faith in God. He will turn your life around.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Essence of Faith: Daily Inspirational Quotes

“When she turned eighteen, Tara had traveled to India in search of her father. She hadn't found him, but she had spent ten years in a yoga ashram in Jammu. She'd come home with Siddhartha, a four-year-old boy she'd adopted, and joined her mother in running the studio. Two years after that she'd adopted India from an orphanage in Bangkok, and two years after that China from an orphanage in Nairobi.
India hadn't known there was anything different about her family until a substitute teacher in her kindergarten classroom had looked at her with an expression India would come to know well as she grew up, and asked, Aren't you one of that yoga teacher's kids? The ones with the cleft lip scars adopted from three continents?
When India had told Sid about it on their way home from school, he'd said, But India and Thailand are on the same continent.
It's how India had learned that adults, even teachers, didn't always know everything. To India, their family was how families were supposed to be. Many years later, when China was in her rebellious phase, she had asked Tara why she had felt the need to adopt children from three countries.
I took a lifelong vow of celibacy. How else was I supposed to have children? That had been Tara's answer.”
― Sonali Dev, Incense and Sensibility

“The age or background of a leader must never be a determining factor for success or failure in leadership. A leader’s impact is what matters the most.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader

“She did like books and reading, but sometimes she just wanted to talk to her mom. She listened, though, because her mother never failed to find the exact-right perfect book, and she read it in a way that made you want to listen forever.
As always, her mother was right. There was a book for everything. Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, her mom could find a book that embodied exactly the things Natalie was worrying about.
And sure enough, Maya Running, about a girl from India whose family didn't fit in, did make her feel better. Like she wasn't the only kid in the world with a different kind of family. You're never alone when you're reading a book, Mom liked to say.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“Behavior is background.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“Make behavior your background, make behavior your culture, make behavior your identity, and the world will have all the uplift it needs.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“By emphasizing a deep root and strong foundation, the student can reach to the high heavens without fear of toppling over.”
― Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing