JM Tohline Quotes

“The way my mind flows is conducive to self-learning. I do better obsessively studying various writers and writing techniques and writing theories on my own than I would do if I were in a classroom and the professor was telling me (and 20 other students at the same time) to study these same things. Even if the professor told us to study the exact things I would otherwise be studying on my own, I would have a much harder time applying myself and focusing and taking anything the professor assigned seriously. That’s just the way my mind works–my fear of groupthink, my desire toward (passion for, obsession with) uniqueness and originality and the creation of new things. By studying things on my own, I might arrive at the exact same place others arrive at as they study amongst their peers–but to my mind, this would be okay. I at least would have arrived there (at those thoughts, at those techniques, at those ideas and approaches and whatever-else-have-you) on my own. And that’s just me.”

“Without desire how is it possible to make a story?”

“No credit--no debt. Credit leads a man into temptation. Cash down is the only thing that will deliver him from evil.”

“There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever. There will be a reckoning yet. . . there's a day coming that will burn as an oven. It may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just.”

“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting. If we want different results, we must change the way we do things.”

“No great manager or leader ever fell from heaven, its learned not inherited.”

“Just because we live in a world of chaos and madness doesn’t mean we have to subscribe to that sort of behavior.”

“Perhaps I really was disillusioned; unable to see myself for who, and what, I really was. Maybe I really was an ungrateful wretch who just refused to take responsibility for my own actions. Maybe I was lying to myself because I didn’t want to admit to being a bad person. Maybe…”

“My step-dad’s rendition of events was uncontested even by me and therefore, it became our truth. Truth I’d never be able to prove or change; truth that protected him from suspicion and penalty. Truth that I now knew was a lie.”

“What did that say about me? Had I become one of the monsters I thought I was fighting?“Things didn’t have to be like this,” I commented. “He could’ve made different choices.”