Alison Lurie Quotes

Saying 'yes' to one thing means saying 'no' to another. That's why decisions can be hard sometimes.

Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.

We all have choices we have to make, and with those choices come certain sacrifices.

Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out.

Life is full of trade-offs. At different phrases in your life, you're able to do certain things that you can't do at other phases. And you make choices.

Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

You have to make choices always. It's about the omission of something for the sake of another.

You can't have your kayak and heat it.

Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent and urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things.

Choosing one path means abandoning others - if you try to follow every possible path you will end up following none.

Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just for leaving things as they are, a price for everything.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

But the path you end up on means that you have to close a lot of doors, too.

You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both.

Life's all about choices. Everyone's destination is the same; only the paths are different.

Unfortunately, in life, you have to make decisions based on so many things. I love watching the Premier League, and I've always had the opportunity to go, but a better offer always got in the way.

I will always need to compromise and make choices - you just have to work hard at making the right choice day by day.

Sometimes in life you have to make a decision and make sacrifices.

Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.