Quotes by American Authors - Page 1059

Changing yourself changes everything.
Bryant McGill
Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.
Ursula K Le Guin
Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.
Matthew Desmond
I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.
Derrick Jensen
Our nonverbal behavior (including posture) gives away our inner personality and reflects our inner attitude.
Cindy Ann Peterson
He's an undersized pissant with delusions of adequacy.
Lois Greiman
We live in a universe made up of energy. The energy that binds, as it whirls and swirls physical atoms, exists at varying levels of vibration and frequency.
Susan C.Young
Blessed are the meek, for to them we shall say "attaboy".
Christopher Moore
The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.
Wally Lamb
He considered himself, and the way he moved in reaction, like a pinball, from one thing to the next, as he was told, as was expected, as made the least friction, and he knew this was the lazy behavior of a scared boy.
Laleh Khadivi
Innovation becomes simply “creating value by solving simple or complex problems.
Pearl Zhu
He is holy, and so we worship (adoration). He is merciful, and so we repent (confession). He is gracious, and so we express appreciation (thanksgiving). He is loving and caring, and so we petition him for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our world (supplication).
David Mathis
After I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I said yes to food, with great enthusiasm. . . . I vowed to taste everything I could eat, rather than focusing on what I could not.
Shauna James Ahern
Life," Graveworthy said, when he saw Jack was awake and staring at him, "is a series of desperate gambles and boxing matches for the wits, bookended on the one side by events in which one is shot at, and on the other end by mornings like this.
Sam Starbuck
Just because a child doesn’t have both parents raising him or her, doesn’t mean that child becomes half the person they were meant to be. One wonderful parent can love enough for two, and love will always be the biggest influence in a child’s life.
Ron Baratono
I glanced at Derek. The boy wonder didn't melt into a pile of goo, although his gaze was glued to Rowena's chest. Avoiding eye contact. Good strategy.
Ilona Andrews
I know it's beyond what you can bear, child. You must not try to carry this alone.
Rosslyn Elliott
God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he'd be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals
Mario Puzo
Spiritualizing sex is actually a movement of energy—feeling and emotion—that rises within you and moves into your sexual physicality as an alive, tender, erotic, or passionate expression. Your bodies move without inhibition so all the energy can flow out of you and between the two of you. You allow spiritual energy to express its dance through you. Sexuality can be a profound demonstration of your love, and especially your freedom, to express and bond. Spiritual sex, then, combines how you express your love with the intentions or blessings you bring to your partnership.
Alexandra Katehakis
There has never been a meaningful life built on easy street.
John Paul Warren
Mr. Speaker, I once again find myself compelled to vote against the annual budget resolution for a very simple reason: it makes government bigger.
Ron Paul
Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.
Lorrie Moore
Faith without reason produces a mindless Christianity which is less than useless; the focus on justice in this world produces a theology that chases its own tail."~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
Jesus, Samara Jane, do you fuck your girlfriend with that mouth?” She tugs my lip between her teeth. “Only when she’s good.
Dahlia Adler
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.
Mark Lawrence
The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.
Sarah Vowell
In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.
Aberjhani
Listening actively confirms for people that you are positively receiving and thoroughly understanding the message they are conveying.
Susan C.Young
To change yourself, let go of what you are and accept what you want to be.
Debasish Mridha
Things always appear clear and simple from behind glass. It is in the thick of tribulations that blurring details arise, complicating my life. You can't rightly judge me, nor can you assist, from a shielded viewpoint.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.
Anne Rice
Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong.
Bryant McGill
A false religion is like the imitation of high fashion. The very presence of counterfeits proves the existence of the real. There would be no imitations without a genuine product. God’s original design has always had imitators and counterfeits!
Billy Graham
The more closed your network, the more you hear the same ideas over and again, reaffirming what you already believe, while the more open your network, the more exposed you are to new ideas.
Whitney Johnson
War is the science of destruction.
John S.C. Abbott
The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.
Rick Yancey
Her wavy, shoulder-length hair was the colour of polished mahogany.
William Hjortsberg
It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.
Emma Forrest
If life was fair Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
Johnny Carson
Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Donna Tartt
Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
We never move on from the cross. We only get a more profound understanding of the cross.
C.J. Mahaney
...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. "Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!" he sighed. "Who knows what's going to happen to them?
Paul Bowles
Warmblood now a bloodborne death,Will rob your body of it's breathMark your skin and seal your fate The Underland becomes a plate
Suzanne Collins
People will always notice something about you. It might be the way you walk or the way you talk, or just simply your personality. Live each day in the way you want to be remembered. Live in such a way that people will be inspired by those unique qualities that you have and strive to live better lives for themselves.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
A pattern of raised crisscrossed scars, some old and white, others more recent in various shades of pink and red. Exposing the stress of the structure underneath its paint
Amy Efaw
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.
Truman Capote
I'd been making desicions for days.I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever-a black slinky one- innapropriate- that she loved.I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace, her most beloved strappy sandals.I collected her makeup to give to the funeral director with a recent photo-I thought it would be me that would dress her;I didn't think a strange man should see her nakedtouch her bodyshave her legsapply her lipstickbut that's what happened all the same.I helped Gram pick out the casket,the plot at the cemetery.I changed a few linesin the obituary that Big composed.I wrote on a piece of paper what I thoughtshould go on the headstone.I did all this without uttering a word.Not one word, for days,until I saw Bailey before the funeraland lost my mind.I hadn't realized that when people say so-and-sosnappedthat's what actually happens-I started shaking her-I thought I could wake her upand get her the hell out of that box.When she didn't wake,I screamed: Talk to me.Big swooped me up in his arms, carried me out of the room, the church,into the slamming rain,and down to the creekwhere we sobbed togetherunder the black coat he held over our headsto protect us from the weather.
Jandy Nelson
You know, there's no more dangerous creature on Earth than the teenage girl.
Miranda Kenneally
What I'm trying to say, Brooke Overland, is that I want to be your nanny."That's seriously the most romantic thing I've ever heard in my life.
C.M. Stunich
In the morning, celebrate the beauty and warmth of sun light,in the evening, celebrate the song of silence and love of night.
Debasish Mridha
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.
Daniel Todd Gilbert
Make your lives a masterpiece, you only get one canvas.
E.A. Bucchianeri
The Earl of Woolsey was indeed completely nude. He did not seem particularly perturbed by this fact, but Miss Tarabotti felt the sudden need to close her eyes tight and think about asparagus or something equally mundane.
Gail Carriger
I couldn't think of anything helpful to say, so I resorted to humor, my shield of last resort. 'Just please tell me they don't have a dog and a picket fence.'He smiled. 'No fence, but a dog, two dogs.''What kind of dogs?' I asked.He smiled and glanced at me, wanting to see my reaction. 'Maltese. Their names are Peeka and Boo.''Oh, shit, Edward, you're joking me.''Donna wants the dogs included in the engagement pictures.'I stared at him, and the look on my face seemed to amuse him. He laughed. 'I'm glad you're here, Anita, because I don't know a single other person who I'd have admitted this to.
Laurell K. Hamilton
I am not a glutton-I am an explorer of food.
Erma Bombeck
Bing: You’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy.
John O'Hara
A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.
Khaled Hosseini
We never want to be taken for granted, but our partners should be able to expect our honest loyalty. That is a powerfully strong foundation block for a relationship. I want to meet the greatest expectations, without being the greatest fraud.
Cathy Burnham Martin