Quotes by American Authors - Page 1089

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.
George Washington
Embrace the magnificence that is inside you.
Debasish Mridha
Real humility is graceful power, not a mandate to be victimized and abused.
Bryant McGill
Never abandon your personal message. No matter what comes your way, remain dedicated to that which you hold close to your heart
Jerry Gladstone
You will be fine,' the fortune teller says. 'There may be decisions to make and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.
Erin Morgenstern
He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me that he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business gentleman, or it was a God I cannot worship.
Mary Doria Russell
She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side.
Victoria Kahler
Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.
Geneen Roth
What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
Theodore Roethke
Where else," I will say, "does an old turtle crossing the path Make all the difference in the world?
Patricia MacLachlan
I’d prefer silence and random jokes about the passing billboards and scenery, but I know how he likes music. I just hope he doesn’t start singing.
C.B. Cook
I found I could only glance at him for tiny moments and then I had to look away. He was perfect enough to hurt my feelings for a long time, and I wanted to let him.
Laura Anderson Kurk
He was the darkest of voices inside her head, the Night-kind King, and when he turned his gift of persuasion onto her, she wanted to take her soul out of her body and hand it to him.
Thea Harrison
The trouble with entering the upper echelon is you have to work harder to stay there.
John Jay Osborn Jr.
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Steven Johnson
I used to think that if I were a certain kind of person I would spend all my time creating something beautiful. Well, it turns out I am, and I am.
Jason Letts
This is my present, also yours, free to choose. I am here at your side, alive, and no ghost. Let beauty and care forge the weapons tonight.
Janny Wurts
Nothing is louder than silence.
Christy Hall
No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.
L. Frank Baum
And for the love of God, bitch, don't get stabbed this time!
Alexandra Bracken
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Toni Morrison
The warrior who goes off to battle should not boast as the one who returns from it.
Richard Paul Evans
A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.
Kilroy J. Oldster
By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: "I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning.
Sam Harris
Kindness rarely costs anything, but its worth is immeasurable.
Debasish Mridha
...people don’t take trips—trips take people.
John Steinbeck
Wait, and you had to ask him if Faye’s in danger? IF? Okay, first of all, I’m just going to admit that I didn’t know Japan had a Mafia, but I also didn’t know they got a Disney World. If someone gets an invitation from the Mafia, I’d say there’s potential for a bit of danger, wouldn’t you? I mean, am I the only one here who saw Goodfellas?
Elle Lothlorien
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
One Day you might desperately need to hear power chords and indulgent drum solos. Another might be a day for orchestral sounds. Picking one band above all else is just wrong. But, then again, it's not like what I say has to be etched in blood. Changing my mind later doesn't necessarily mean I'm a total waffler.
Kara Lee Corthron
An entire lifetime can change in one afternoon. The rest of the world can continue on, unaware of a quiet, solitary cataclysm occurring a few feet away.
Nadia Hashimi
By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you've got a very convincing - though divided - self.
Adyashanti
In researching this book, I quickly discovered a surprising thing about the 1960s: the decade was not nearly as radical as we've been led to believe. In fact, the upheaval was really confined to a very narrow stratum of society. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the 1960s was a conservative decade.
Jonathan Leaf
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
Tarryn Fisher
I feel like we have to deal with things, so we realize change! Change comes after pain and pain comes after truth. Truth is hurtful.
Sara Keddar
There is a place where the sidewalk endsAnd before the street begins,And there the grass grows soft and white,And there the sun burns crimson bright,And there the moon-bird rests from his flightTo cool in the peppermint wind.Let us leave this place where the smoke blows blackAnd the dark street winds and bends.Past the pits where the asphalt flowers growWe shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,And watch where the chalk-white arrows goTo the place where the sidewalk ends.Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,For the children, they mark, and the children, they knowThe place where the sidewalk ends.
Shel Silverstein
You’re white. You’re straight. You’re well educated, healthy and beautiful. Every time is for people like you.
Tiffany Reisz
Parents are not alone in focusing their expectations on success at the graduation exam: The whole education system colludes with them. The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace.
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.
Paula Danziger
You're only as good as your last thought of yourself.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
To step into God’s will is a step into a different realm, even though your feet remain on firma terra.
Toni Sorenson
But see you, we should travel by night. Dark times for dark business, as they says. No sun to bother Valeriana or you, Kaylana's surely no' disadvantaged, and I know I work better in darkness. Anybody looking for us will have a harder time of it. Besides, marching in daylight is for the heroes. If we're going to do this, we may as well go all out.
Eve Forward
... answered his knock with a smile, a short one forced through because she was at heart a warm person, not given to the dark mood swings which now plagued her.
John Grisham
histories of the world before our own. That was a world of empires, of corruption, of war-and more freedom than I've ever known. But the people of that time are gone, their dreams in ruin, existing only in smoke and ash.
Victoria Aveyard
As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Henry David Thoreau
I don't have much time for stories," Vin said."Seems that fewer and fewer people do, these days." A canopy kept off the ash, but he seemed unconcerned about the mists. "It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all such a fetish for it. It's not a very nice place these days.
Brandon Sanderson
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")
Wendell Berry
After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.
Meg Wolitzer
The act of going within, finding our truth, and then sharing it, it helps us far more than we know.
Kamal Ravikant
A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
Gabrielle Zevin
The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
Brennan Manning
Sometimes, I think we're afraid to admit we want certain things. Especially things that contradict the image we have of ourselves.
Debbie Macomber
You can't keep resisting my irresistibleness, Natara Stone. You'll give in eventually, and I won't quit until you do.
Kelsey Ketch
I got a shotgun and a backhoe and no one looks under a septic tank for a dead body. (Bubba)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
So little I know in my innocence. Ideals, like pebbles in a stream wash away, wash away. Life makes no sense.
Kristen Heitzmann
The kitchen door, painted red from the day Naomi moved in, and a geranium, also red, outside on the stoop, gave the whole area a feeling of whimsy.
Suzanne Palmieri
Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart.
Steven Pressfield
in the most decent sometimes sun there is the softsmoke feeling from urns and the canned sound of old battleplanes and if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge you'll find dirt, maybe even earth. and if you look out the window there will be the day, and as you get older you'll keep looking keep looking sucking your tongue in a little ah ah no no maybe some do it naturally some obscenely everywhere.
Charles Bukowski
The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.
Erich Fromm
No matter what, love everyone because everyone is craving love.
Debasish Mridha
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.
James Howard Kunstler