Quotes by American Authors - Page 1085

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
That's exactly where you're wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far -- and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know.
Patricia Highsmith
Even the most beautiful girl in the world becomes unsightly without depth of character.
Ken Poirot
If more people understood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors' padlocks, to the local food co-op and library, the sidewalks busted up by old trees - if we all held home with longer arms - we'd live in a very different place...We wouldn't feel so alone, no matter the size of our houses or our bank accounts, no matter whether we had good health or congestive heart failure. We would begin to see that each moment presents an opportunity to relax, to notice that the wind has shifted and a storm is coming, or that our friend's toddler has decided to wear dinner instead of eating it. We would see that each minute counts for something timeless and, if we want, we all can find our way inside these big, tiny, moments.
Dee-Williams
If a woman likes another woman she's cordial. If she doesn't like her she's very cordial.
Irvin S. Cobb
Roger said, 'I don't know about having a shrink around all the time. Are you analyzing me right now?'Sophie rolled her eyes. 'How original. No, I'm not analyzing you. It'd take a whole team of shrinks to figure out your crazy ass, and I simply don't have the time or energy.
Jennifer Lane
There was no necessity for either to have the last word. For the first word became the only word of their romantic conversation.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.
Jacob M. Appel
Next time I walk away,” she whispered into his skin, “come with me.” She let her gaze drift up to his throat, his jaw, his lips. “When this is all over, when Osaron is gone and we’ve saved the world again, and everyone else gets their happily ever after, come with me.” “Lila,” he said, and there was so much sadness in his voice, she suddenly realized she didn’t want to hear his answer, didn’t want to think of all the ways their story could end, of the chance that none of them would make it out alive, intact. She didn’t want to think beyond this boat, this moment, so she kissed him, deeply, and whatever he was going to say, it died on his lips as they met hers.
V.E. Schwab
Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
Susan Ertz
Nothing succeeds like one's own successor.
Clarence H. Hinclcs
The world would be a nicer place if everyone had the ability to love as unconditionally as a dog.
M.K. Clinton
To be considerate of othersIs for the way of the wiseThere’s more fighters than loversLeaving us with blackened eyes
Justin Bienvenue
I hate being told what to do! Especially by myself!
Lynn Flewelling
My luck was my father not striking oil... we'd have been rich. I'd never have set out for Hollywood with my camera and I'd have had a lot less interesting life.
King Vidor
What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.
Dean Koontz
The diaries also revealed a deeply sensitive, intelligent woman, one who had hoped to start a college for Hawaiian women, affording them the 'same education as men.' She had planned to open a bank for women, enabling them to handle their own financial affairs. She recognized the need for more female lawyers and physicians, the need for women's rights over their bodies, and their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women 'basically didn't need them.
Kiana Davenport
I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.
Donna Tartt
Waiting is a very active part of living. Waiting on God, if we do it correctly, is anything but passive. Waiting works its way out in very deliberate actions, very intentionally searching the Scriptures and praying, intense moments of humility, and self-realization of our finiteness. With the waiting comes learning. I can’t think of much I’ve learned that’s positive from the times I’ve plowed ahead without waiting on God.
Wayne Stiles
Never disagree, agree to reach the destination in a different way.
Debasish Mridha
For Adam, screwed-up bonding thing or not, I’d wait forever.“Really?” he asked in a tone I’d never heard from him before. Softer. Vulnerable. Adam didn’t do vulnerable.“Really what?” I asked.“Despite the way our bond scares you, despite the way someone in the pack played you, you’d still have me?”He'd been listening to my thoughts. This time it didn't bother me.“Adam,” I told him, “I’d walk barefoot over hot coals for you.
Patricia Briggs
So I figured I'd leave the area, because I had no ties there anyway except for this girl I was seeing. We had conflicting attitudes: I really wasn't into meditating and she wasn't really into being alive. I told her I knew when I was going to die because my birth certificate has an expiration date.
Steven Wright
In retrospect, it is evident that highlighting abortion rather than reproductive rights as a whole reflected the class biases of the women who were at the forefront of the movement. While the issue of abortion was and remains relevant to all women, there were other reproductive issues that were just as vital which needed attention and might have served to galvanize masses. These issues ranged from basic sex education, prenatal care, preventive health care that would help females understand how their bodies worked, to forced sterilization, unnecessary cesareans and/or hysterectomies, and the medical complications left in their wake. Of all these issues individual white women with class privilege identified most intimately with the pain of unwanted pregnancy. And they highlighted the abortion issue. They were not by any means the only group in need of access to safe, legal abortions. As already stated, they were far more likely to have the means the to acquire an abortion than poor and working-class women. In those days poor women, black women included, often sought illegal abortions. The right to have an abortion was not a white-women-only issue; it was simply not the only or even most important reproductive concern for masses of American women.
Bell Hooks
This is why magic is dangerous. It lures you in. It makes you curious.
Callie Bates
He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
Cormac McCarthy
We sat on the dusty floor like that for what felt like hours, our legs intertwined in the kneeling position. Like the demon and the angel reaching for one another on Jet’s arm, I felt half of everything. Half pure, half used. Locked in a dark, beautiful embrace. One I wouldn’t wish on anyone yet one I wouldn’t ever reverse if given the chance.Not when it had the power to save a life. - Skylla Warden
Rachael Wade
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
Naomi Wolf
When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.
Roger Zelazny
To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.
Clark Ashton Smith
Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
David Foster Wallace
She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING.
A. Lee Martinez
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The aim of the climb is not intellectual satisfaction. The aim is worship. God gets more honor when we worship on the basis of what we know about him than he gets if we worship on the basis of what we don’t know.
John Piper
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know how much you needed to know.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Hands and lips and teeth, and you'd forgotten-no, you'd never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.
Alaya Dawn Johnson
The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.
Marie Lu
The nine Greek Muses, awakened again for this generation of man and meant to inspire mankind forward in the sciences and the arts.
Lisa Kessler
I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don't "speak from our power," but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from.
Jessica Valenti
We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.
Robin Hanson
By strengthening our compassion, we give fuel to our courage and determination.
Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
The beauty of truth is in its simplicity.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
I love you, my brother, whoever you are - whether you worship in a church, kneel in your temple, or pray in your mosque. You and I are children of one faith, for the diverse paths of religion are fingers of the loving hand of the one supreme being, a hand extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, eager to receive all.
Kahlil Gibran
In this kind of personal artwork, jettison any idea that you can help yourself or others by interpreting, praising, or criticizing. These kinds of creative pieces and experiences are only for being with. The only helpful response is to nourish the imagination and your piece by associating other images to it and noticing what feelings it evokes in you.
Jill Mellick
Too many women are afraid to be labeled feminists, afraid to stand up and say, “Yes, I am a feminist,” for fear of what that label means, for fear of how to live up to it, for fear of feminism as something essential, for fear of the punishments—both obvious and indirect—that come with openly owning feminism or doing feminism wrong.
Roxane Gay
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway
I am not me, I am not a human being.I am empty. Infinite emptiness dwells in me.I am the spirit.Emptiness is me.
Debasish Mridha
How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof.
Cornelius Van Til
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
Faith is trusting yourself to believe in uncertainties.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
Larry Niven
He'd turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky.
James S.A. Corey
Yes, the human race is a small species in an infinite universe filled with many other planets and many other things, but though small; this race is bearer of very great and big things: Destiny, Virtue, Hope, Love... and that's what makes this species different. That's what makes this species very shiny and very visible and very important, in a whole, whole, big, big, vast, expanding universe!
C. JoyBell C.
Failure is only postponed success as long as courage "coaches" ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Herbert Kaufman
Yes, our Father has a plan, Ciminae,” he said. “But he leaves it up to his children to accept his will. It is their agency. He cannot force his will upon them. If he did, he would cease to be God. They . . . we must choose for ourselves to accept his will with unbreakable faith in our Father. That is when the Father moves us to do his will.” (The Spirit. From Book 2, "Worlds Without End: Aftermath," coming September 1, 2012)
Shaun Messick
Right now. Living. Aiming to misbehave or just trying not to fade away.
Michael R. Underwood
We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Who among us is greater? True humility and servant leadership is a rare and elusive attribute these days however the greatest example of this spirit is beautifully documented in John 13, verses 3-5 “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.” Just moments before this humble undertaking His disciples were arguing with each other about who among them was greater. This simple but powerful example of strength in humility should be our pattern in how we treat and consider others. Regardless of our stature, our positions in our communities and within our own families, true greatness begins and ends with a servant’s heart and a humble spirit. I submit to you, the greatest among us are those who are willing to put others before themselves. ~Jason Versey
Jason Versey
To be a philosopher you do not need to be a professor but you do have to love and understand nature.
Debasish Mridha
Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.
Goldie Hawn
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die." (The Faith of a Heretic)
Walter Kaufmann