Quotes by American Authors - Page 1056

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
Gore Vidal
Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.
Wendell Berry
This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values....
Laurie Halse Anderson
He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.
Frank McCourt
She'd jumped out of plenty of planes. Albeit with a parachute in place, but she pushed that worry aside.
Robin Bielman
Some people have a warped idea of living the Christian life. Seeing talented, successful Christians, they attempt to imitate them. For them, the grass on the other side of the fence is always greener. But when they discover that their own gifts are different or their contributions are more modest (or even invisible), they collapse in discouragement and overlook genuine opportunities that are open to them. They have forgotten that they are here to serve Christ, not themselves.
Billy Graham
Okay, so there’s just you. Your goals, your career, your crew, your prospects, and your God. All together, chillin’. Before the house, the apartment, the kids, the boyfriend, the wedding, the night you crossed over with your frat brothers, there’s that pivotal point of asking your heart, “Who am I, really? What do I really like? Do I want to change for someone else? Is my soul mate right now, somewhere, finishing this sentence and completing my thoughts?
Kirk Franklin
Life is many things, but if you don't try to control it, it will take hold of you and ruin you.
Bethany Morrell
A baby is as pure as an angel and as fresh as a blooming flower.
Debasish Mridha
Did you need Jordan for something, Cookie?" Gavin asked with thinly veiled impatience. Hands back in his pockets, he took a step away from Jordan. "Or do you merely excel at crappy timing?"t"Sorry, Chief." Cookie's short purple-and-blue hair stuck out in a hundred different directions, and she winked when she peeked out from behind the swinging door....t"It's a gift."t"That's not what I would call it," he grumbled.
Sara Humphreys
Each language is a unique repository of facts and knowledge about the world that we can ill afford to lose, or, at the least, facts and knowledge about some history and people that have their place in the understanding of mankind. Every language is a treasury of human experience. Eyak doesn't give a damn about tenses. But it sure does give a damn about other things, much more than I do. Therefore it broadens your thinking, enriches your ability to understand the world- to deal with reality and experience.
Michael E. Krauss
God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
Happiness doesn't just happen. I'm convinced that for the most part, those who focus their minds on it, obtain it.
Lisa Bloom
Whatever. I just won’t have Elena hurt, is all. Or the little red-headed witch.” “Ah, yes, sweet Bonnie. I wouldn’t mind one or two like her. One for Samhain and one for the Solstice.”Damon snorted drowsily. “There aren’t two like her; I don’t care where you look. I won’t have her hurt either.
L.J. Smith
Your bone shall remainYour flesh shall remain Your spirit shall remain
Kat Beyer
Evil is a cluster of well orchestrated blind spots. When it manifests itself to excess, we protest and want the blind spots that both produce it and conceal it back, and fast.
John Thomas Allen
Come right out and say you want it: “It’s been great hearing you talk about the position. I’d love to work here, and I think I could do a terrific job for you.
Kate White
It's not wrong to feel sorry for yourself. Just like it's not wrong to stand in a puddle of water while the rain pours down on your head. But neither is productive, unless you enjoy feeling cold and miserable and soggy while mascara runs down your face.
Richelle E. Goodrich
You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
Mitch Albom
Is there something wrong?” he asked.She gave a short negative motion with her head. And then words, so sweet, like a cool northern breeze blowing off the lake. “You could hold me now.”It was almost his undoing.“Ah baby.
Maya Banks
No attempt should be made to "reconcile" Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.The tension cannot be resolved in a facile manner by suggesting, for example, that Pharaoh has already demonstrated his recalcitrance, so Yahweh merely helps the process along, or that he is doing what Pharaoh would have done on his own anyway. Rather, 9:12 is a striking reminder of what God has been trying to teach Moses and Israel since the beginning of the Exodus episode: He is in complete control. However Pharaoh might have reacted is given the chance is not brought into the discussion. He is not even given that chance. Yahweh hardens his heart. It is best to allow the tension of the text to remain.
Peter Enns
She looked as if she were in the middle of posing for an unbelievably glamorous photo shoot. Then again, she always did. It was her talent. Clary, however, was staring stubbornly up into Isabelle’s face and talking to her. Simon thought Clary would get her way and get Isabelle to pay attention to her eventually. That was her talent.
Cassandra Clare
Chances are no matter how bad your troubles seem to be, someone somewhere, with less resilience, has successfully conquered a more severe version of your problems.
Gary Hopkins
Kindness is like a muscle, the more we exercise it the better we are at it.Kindness starts as a thought but ends as an action. Acting kindly toward others is the only real way to let people know we care about them and their happiness. Without action, kindness just lives in our minds but never touches the real world.Being kind to others doesn’t have to be complex or fancy. Sometimes the simplest acts of kindness are seen as the most sincere, such as holding the door, helping with directions, saying “please” and “thank you,” or even just a smile.
Steven Handel
You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.
Robin McKinley
She knew the way of things. She knew ifyou weren't always stepping lightly as a bird the wholeworld came apart to crush you. Like a house of cards.Like a bottle against stones. Like a wrist pinned hardbeneath a hand with the hot breath smell of want andwine. . . .
Patrick Rothfuss
Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.
Michael Lewis
When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?
Scott Douglas
All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.
David Baldacci
When you live as a fountain of abundant love, instead of an empty well waiting to be filled by a lover, you will attract your SoulMate.
Annette Vaillancourt
These people make my family look easy to get along with.
Megan Whalen Turner
Those who have committed no faults want no pardon. We are only defending what we deem our indisputable rights.
George Washington
For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.
Isabel Allende
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'm tired of waiting by the phone, and second-guessing what a guy says and trusting someone not to hurt me. Again. I've been storming the relationship castle for fifteen years, and I still don't have my prince. I've got a bunch of battle scars from the field and I want to go home and nurse my wounds. I don't want to fight anymore.
Kim Gruenenfelder
You are like a god, like an immortal one,' she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. 'Oh, my love,' I whispered back to her, 'I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every night that I lie with you.
Roman Payne
...sometimes when you are lost for direction, you are open to a new way of seeing.
Lauren Lola
After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?
Tad Williams
There was good in people - deep down, there was always a shred of good.
Sarah J Maas
Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.
Dan Brown
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
Saul Bellow
It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
John von Neumann
If you want greater prosperity in your life start forming a vacuum to receive it.
Catherine Ponder
I expected to be happy, but let me tell you something. Anticipating happiness and being happy are two entirely different things. I told myself that all I wanted to do was go to the mall. I wanted to look at the pretty girls, ogle the Victoria's Secret billboards, and hit on girls at the Sam Goody record store. I wanted to sit in the food court and gorge on junk food. I wanted to go to Bath and Body Works, stand in the middle of the store, and breathe. I wanted to stand there with my eyes closed and just smell, man. I wanted to lose myself in the total capitalism and consumerism of it all, the pure greediness, the pure indulgence, the pure American-ness of it all. I never made it that far. I didn't even make it out of the airport in Baltimore with all its Cinnabons, Starbucks, Brooks Brothers, and Brookstones before realizing that after where we'd been, after what we'd seen, home would never be home again.
Matthew J. Hefti
Young love is so ridiculous, as is middle-aged and old love. And it’s also hilarious. When have you ever felt so vulnerable and wonderful and terrible at the same time?
Grace Helbig
The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.
David Brooks
Every failure if you let it is an opportunity to reinvent yourself and move forward.
Jerry Gladstone
We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.
Paula McLain
Some of life's greatest wisdom comes from observing the lives of very lost people.
Shannon L. Alder
Creation pulls something from an abyss of nothing. Startups take the something and give it to those in the dark, at first, perhaps, for nothing.
Ryan Lilly
Justice DeniedThousands of women, probably moreI cannot reach them behind justice doorsMany stay silent, barred just like me.Haunted by demons, faces unseen.Still by the hundreds, they continue to serveDuty and country, active and reserve.Thankless, forgotten through America's warsScarred like their brethren, treated as foes.Volunteered to go to the shores.Died like the others, shamed to the core.Where is the dignity, long since denied? Lost in the White House of Justice DeniedWomen in service since beginning of time Often they're treated like victims in crime.Where is their voice, silence throughout the years? It's dead in the Senate and House, with their tears!
Diane Chamberlain
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.
John F Kennedy
The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac
With its reverent silence the Library was as close to a religious experience as anything he had ever encountered. Its domed reading room was a thing of sheer beauty and wonder. It always inspired in him a childish desire to stand in the centre and spin round and round, making it appear as though the books spiralled into infinity.
J.E. Allen
If someone's a racist, punch them in the mouth so they will be sadder, and therefore less likely to stereotype. (Even if Fargas's theory is flawed, on the upside, at least you've punched a racist in the mouth.)
Jeff Wilser
Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.
Bill Bryson
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists
Stephen Jay Gould
This is the biggest damn IPod I've ever seen," Claire said, which made him choke on his beer. "Kidding. I have seen a jukebox before.
Rachel Caine
But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it.
Janet Givens
Don’t make me angry-kiss you
Rainbow Rowell