Don Williams
Musician, Songwriter
"The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination."
Twists quotes
Twists
183 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Charles Dickens
Novelist
"For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him."
Kurt Vonnegut
Novelist, Satirist
"Everything is nothing, with a twist."
Thomas Jefferson
Politician, Founding Father
"The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."
Denis Diderot
Philosopher, Writer
"What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside twists — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Twists quotes (page 1 of 10)
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"I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point."
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"No matter how explicit the pledge, people will turn and twist the text to suit their own purpose"
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"Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways"
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"An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere."
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"I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all."
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"I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing."
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"There's gonna be all the twists and turns you would expect and twists and turns you did not expect. The finale is probably the most jam-packed episode there's ever been. Things are packed into it like sardines. All of the life is squeezed in there. They lengthened it to 90 minutes because there's just so much. It's a supersized monstrosity."
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"That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
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"I've decided to skip 'holistic'. I don't know what it means, and I don't want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward 'Gestalt' and the 'Twist', and lived to tell the tale."
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"Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands."
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"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad."
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"The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning."
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"Twist my Body like the Exorcist."
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"It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking."
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"The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail?"
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"I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side."
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"Sometimes God takes your life for some crazy twists and turns."
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"Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'."
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"Oliver Twist has asked for more!"
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"Good things come, but they're never perfect; are they? You have to twist them into something perfect."
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