Quotes by American Authors - Page 1145

The difference between the rich and the poor, is finding true love.
Anthony Liccione
As Edison is credited with saying, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." We all want to be successful, but most of us aren't willing to do what those who are successful did to attain it. We want success without sacrifice, but you can't have one without the other!
Mark Batterson
We see what we want to see. We idealize each other with our own fantasies.
Eric Jerome Dickey
Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?
Laurell K. Hamilton
True beauty happens when two worlds collide and become one.
Imania Margria
If someone were to ask whether communications skills or meekness is most important to a marriage, I'd answer meekness, hands down. You can be a superb communicator but still never have the humility to ask, 'Is it I?' Communication skills are no substitute for Christlike attributes. As Dr. Douglas Brinley has observed, 'Without theological perspectives, secular exercises designed to improve our relationship and our communication skills (the common tools of counselors and marriage books) will never work any permanent change in one's heart: they simply develop more clever and skilled fighters!
John Bytheway
I'm not a vain person, but I am human...
Jennifer Niven
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
Henry David Thoreau
... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Seek out the company of those who will never ask you to jump," the earth advised.Bertie remembered the rush of feathers as she soared above the audience. "I can catch myself.""Of those whose love will never fill your lungs with water-" the earth argued."But it did not kill me.""there should be more to love," said the earth, "than 'it did not kill me.' More than 'I survived it.
Lisa Mantchev
...as long as she was worrying about it, it probably wasn't going to happen. Like some sort of anxiety vaccine. Like watching a pot to make sure it never boiled.
Rainbow Rowell
Feeling old? Remember, you will never again be as young as your are today.
Raymond C. Nolan
The women looked from one to the other, knowing what the men didn’t know. We knew the heartbeat and interior graces, compensation for our own clumsiness; the beatitude as we renounced our bodies, our noble little parasites the higher calling. We knew, without saying, the watery rollover, tremor, seismic shudders, the steadiness of the baby’s hiccups, the reliable stab from a kick to the kidney
Naomi Levy
What do you think destiny is? A smooth path that never jostles you? No. When you walk in your destiny, you will crash and fall more times than you can count. But the secret is to hold on to God’s vision for your life — and for the lives of those He puts under your charge. No matter how many times you fall, crash, and fail, you get up. You get up and face your obstacles.
Tessa Afshar
Support what is good and spit out what is bad. Get off of your knees and reject the role of slave to the culture of violence.
Bryant McGill
So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.
Howard Zinn
Adrian", I whispered, my tears starting to flow faster.His head snapped up--and then he moved with his incredible speed, gripping me in those powerful arms. Tilting my head back and covering my mouth in a bruising kiss that made joy rip through me with all the intensity of the pain I'd felt before. When he finally broke away several minutes later, I could hardly breathe, but I still managed to speak."I love you," I choked out. "I love you, I love you, I love you--"His kiss cut me off again, and this time, I wasn't crying when I kissed him back. I was smiling.
Jeaniene Frost
The only limits for tomorrow are the doubts we have today.
Pittacus Lore
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
Louis Kronenberger
Commander! Sir! Wake up!"Jack surfaced from sleep, wondering who the commander was and wishing he'd respond so he could go back to sleep - until he remembered that he was the commander.
Cinda Williams Chima
What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn't even notice how she has to keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn't like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses.
Rick Moody
Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.
Ruth Ozeki
Why do I need clothes?" she said as she found the black lacy pair she'd been looking for. "Two words -- burnt eggs.
Paige Tyler
One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional—it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story.
Angie Thomas
And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it. I choose to block out all the external (and internal) noise and distractions, and to come home again and again to creativity. Because without that source of wonder, I know that I am doomed. Without it, I will forever wander the world in a state of bottomless dissatisfaction—nothing but a howling ghost, trapped in a body made of slowly deteriorating meat
Elizabeth Gilbert
You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.
Jonathan Haidt
It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.
Audrey Niffenegger
I know of few families today that aren’t touched to some extent by the heartache of divorce, including our own.
Billy Graham
Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.
Chuck Palahniuk
Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.
Chris Hedges
Some people only hate you because of the way other people love you.
Karen Salmansohn
Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can’t afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she’s being abused—pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground.
Laura Davis
When in doubt, focus on your heart. It will show you your destiny.
Debasish Mridha
What relationships need strengthening in your life? Don’t wait for them to grow cold or bitter, but ask God to help you strengthen them by putting God’s love into action—begin today.
Billy Graham
I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.
Criss Jami
Acknowledge and accept that there will be chaotic times while being on your raft from being lost in true freedom. Engulfed by darkness at sea, we are consumed by a great loneliness that has consistently existed even when people surrounded us, and that is when we must throw all that is heavy into the water, and float independently through to the present.
Forrest Curran
Many of life's circumstances are created by three basic choices: the disciplines you choose to keep the people you chose to be with and the laws you choose to obey.
Charles Millhuff
Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
By the time men get to be of our age, Mr. Vaiden, about all any new acquaintance can do is to remind them of somebody else. You know at times I have thought that is why we die. We become more and more intricately linked with the past, until finally we drift completely into it...and we are dead.
Thomas K. Stribling
I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.
Roman Payne
A quick and brutal fuck from behind usually served as an effective reminder of where you stood in the pack hierarchy.
Nenia Campbell
The only thing that happens overnight is recognition. Not talent.
Carol Haney
You have a light in your heart and that is your love, it can shine like a sun to enlighten the whole world.
Debasish Mridha
You have succeeded in life when all you really WANT is only what you really NEED.
Vernon Howard
Mystic grimoirs, walking corpses... I'm so far out of my wheelhouse that I might as well be on the moon.
Mark Waid
Children have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with the kind of respect we are so confident it ought to be given. To the irritation of authority figures of all sorts children expend considerable energy in "clowning around." They refuse to appreciate the gravity of our monumental concerns while we forget that if we were to become more like children our concerns might not be so monumental.
Conrad Hyers
Learn to keep close to [Jesus], to listen to His voice, and follow Him.
Billy Graham
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Stanley Kubrick
Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?
Sarah Dessen
At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman!' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good,' he said quietly.
Willa Cather
When you have a good friend that really cares for you and tries to stick in there with you, you treat them like nothing. Learn to be a good friend because one day you're gonna look up and say I lost a good friend. Learn how to be respectful to your friends, don't just start arguments with them and don't tell them the reason, always remember your friends will be there quicker than your family. Learn to remember you got great friends, don't forget that and they will always care for you no matter what. Always remember to smile and look up at what you got in life.
Marilyn Monroe
Most of your problems exist because your heart is hard and you are being arrogant.
Bryant McGill
During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.
Captain Hank Bracker
Do you know what sentence of his (Wordsworth) I admire the most? It is "The bright day is done, and we are for the dark." I wish I'd known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them--and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
Mary Ann Shaffer
American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson
We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.
Mark Epstein
Every time you strip my sword, I owe you a kiss. How's that sound?" I bit my lip to keep from giggling. "That sounds really dirty." Patch waggled his brows. "Look whose mind just rolled into the gutter.
Becca Fitzpatrick
Lost Time is never found again.
Benjamin Franklin
One woman filled with self love and self acceptance is a model more super than any cover girl.
Amy Leigh Mercree
...I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance.
Lorraine Hansberry