Quotes by American Authors - Page 1031

Adoption is grief in reverse.
Jody Cantrell Dyer
The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.
John F Kennedy
Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness. This disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.
Richard Louv
Little known fact- a cat which has just bitten itself in the ass can achieve impressive speed at it dashes madly straight up a curtain.
Amy Petrie Shaw
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.
Paul Auster
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Junot Díaz
Integrity is the essence of a beautiful, ethical life.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Study as if you were going to live forever live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Maria Mitchell
It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
if there isn’t a them, there can’t be an us.
Jodi Picoult
When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.
Geneen Roth
Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.
Abigail Van Buren
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence...and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D.YALOM
You are the Magician.You are the alchemist of your life. You have the power to manifest the highest vision of your life.
Eileen Anglin
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When gorillas smell danger, they run around and call out to the rest of the primates in the jungle to warn them something evil is coming. And when one of their own dies, they mourn for days while beating themselves up in sadness for failing to save that gorilla, even if the cause of death was natural. And when one colony is mourning, their chilling echoes migrate to other colonies — and those neighbors, even if they are territorial rivals, will also grieve with them. When faced with a common danger, rivals turn into allies. And when faced with death, the loss of just one gorilla becomes the loss of the entire jungle.
Suzy Kassem
That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.
Shannon Wiersbitzky
Folks around here like to say we came from the stars. Perhaps it's simpler to think of us not as human but as creatures made of stardust--that if you cut us, not blood but constellations will pour from out wounds.
Leslye Walton
To be free, get an education. To be happy, spread compassion.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Let nothing human be considered sacred. Let nothing human be considered divine.
Marty Rubin
You like it. Knowing things about people. It makes you feel powerful.
Sara Wolf
But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?
Jack Kerouac
I want to pick up a few other items at the house,” Jules said as Katie stepped around the car. “I still have my roller skates and yours in my closet.”Katie opened the door and paused, staring at Jules.“What?” Jules asked.“Are you serious? Our lives are in danger and you want to get our roller skates?
Mary Abshire
We all have our own loves, insecurities, strengths, weaknesses, and unique capabilities. And we have to take those into account in figuring out where our talents and desires intersect. That intersection is what I call your "blue flame" -- where passion and ability come together. When that blue flame is ignited within a person, it is a powerful force in getting you where you want to be.
Keith Ferrazzi
Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius
Aberjhani
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly... very slowly.
Gypsy Rose Lee
The biggest wall you have to climb is the one you build in your mind: Never let your mind talk you out of your dreams, trick you into giving up. Never let your mind become the greatest obstacle to success. To get your mind on the right track, the rest will follow.
Roy T. Bennett
Love gives us the perfect, pure, and sweetest joy of life.
Debasish Mridha
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Abbie Hoffman
In her room death would come as a friend, a friend with cool gentle hands . . .
Mary Higgins Clark
What values do achievement, degrees, and diplomas have if you don't have wisdom and love?
Debasish Mridha
He laughs. And in his laugh I hear bliss. I hear feet dancing, the rush of skirts twirling. The sound of children.Is that the first sign of love?You hear in the person you're destined to love the sound of those yet to be born.
Alyson Richman
Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.
Rabih Alameddine
That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.
Sam Tanenhaus
You weren't being punished. You were waiting for me.
Jean M. Auel
An honest politician is an oxymoron.
Mark Twain
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.
Henry Miller
Indeed, woman can be a machine run wild, or a machine can be a better, more subjugated, and efficient woman.
Françoise Meltzer
I follow Jesus not because I don't have any doubts. I follow Jesus because in my doubt, He has always been tender with me.
Jonathan Martin
Ten minutes with a genuine friend is better than years spent with anyone less.
Crystal Woods
She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Michael Cunningham
Money holds terrible power when it is loved
Elisabeth Elliot
Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.
Veronica Roth
When you see the sadness in life, be compassionate. When you see the darkness, become the light and be passionate.
Debasish Mridha
If you don't know what you want, you'll never find it.If you don't know what you deserve, you'll always settle for less.You will wander aimlessly, uncomfortably numb in your comfort zone, wondering how life has ended up here.Life starts now, live, love, laugh and let your light shine!
Rob Liano
I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.
Henry David Thoreau
I believe that we must align our actions with our highest principles. No matter the outcome, we will not have failed if we act from our best intentions.”“The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Captain,” Chakotay said with equal certainty.“So is the road to peace,” Cambridge observed.
Kirsten Beyer
A wonderful person finds amazing beauty in everything and everyone.
Debasish Mridha
Where life ends, peace begins!
Debasish Mridha
The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.
Shirley Abbott
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
Murray Kempton
People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist real
Vera Nazarian
One never sleepwalks through grizzlyland, dreaming of other places to be.
William Stolzenburg
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody other than the person he is.
Angelo Patri
She couldn’t walk away from him again. Her heart couldn’t take it and she didn’t think his could either. When she'd left him, it had been like cutting off a limb. And she had, essentially. Because Ian was a part of her, embedded in her skin, her soul.
Katie Reus
If tomorrow were never to come, it would not be worth living today.
Albert Einstein
Reading doesn't put you to sleep... it makes you dream...
Nanette L. Avery