Limited Choices Quotes

When people ask for book recommendations, I say this: Do some math. If you read one book every week for the rest of your life, and if you're lucky enough to live for 50 more years, you're only going to get to 2,600 books.

There are no good options in the midst of a crisis.

The menu of my mother consisted of only two choices: Leave it or take it

But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.

The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.

I regret my lack of options. I regret being painted into a corner and having that be the only instrument to get me from point A to point B.

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.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

I'd always ask my grandma, who was so, so smart, why she didn't work, and she would explain that her parents didn't approve of her working after she had children. She didn't feel like she had choices.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

I never thought I had a career. I think Meryl Streep has a career. I have jobs that I am lucky to get... I'm one of those actresses who never turns down a part, no matter how small. I don't have the luxury of picking and choosing. I take everything.

I'm enormously sympathetic to talented people who have few roles to choose from.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

It's pretty sad when you have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

I'm not really a child of this '120 TV channels, a billion websites' era. I tried to live that for a long time but recently realized I don't get anything from it. I told myself it was luxury, but it was really only annoying. I'd rather just watch the same 50 movies over and over.

In our world marriage was the best option for any woman. No girl ever chose to have a career unless she couldn't get a man. It was very much a tertiary life.

I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices.

I think in small towns like this one, whether you're a man or a woman, you basically do what there is to do.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

Beautiful women get in Hollywood's door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they're inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree.