Quotes by American Authors - Page 1182

The ways your desire could humiliate you.
Emma Cline
Any good is good enough.
Bryant McGill
Paris answered for him. "Last time he spread the flashing love, Reyes threw up all over his shirt. I never laughed so hard in my life. Lucien, though, has no sense of humor and vowed never to take us again.""I'm surprised you didn't mention the part where you fainted," Lucien said wryly.Strider chortled. "Oh, man. You fainted? What a baby!""Hey," Paris said, frowning at Lucien. "I told you I hit my head midflash."Lucien
Gena Showalter
Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
John Philip Sousa
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
David Foster Wallace
He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.
Toni Morrison
The Warrior's Diet Three Rules of Eating:Rule #1: Always start with subtle-tasting foods and move to the moreaggressive foods.Rule #2: Include as many tastes, textures, colors, and aromas as possible in your main meal.Rule #3: Stop eating when you feel much more thirsty than hungry.
Ori Hofmekler
JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting.
David Pietrusza
His eyes were dark. “Brooke.”She knew what he was asking. “Yes.”Immediately, Cade took her hand and led her – quite briskly – along the sidewalk.“Thank God I’m not wearing the red high heels today,” she said.“In two minutes you’ll be wearing nothing,” he said in a low voice.Well, then.
Julie James
There’s nothing easier to ‘acquire’ than a girl with a broken heart.
Daniele Lanzarotta
If God gave Dad Alzheimer’s, He’s got to understand when Dad forgets what church he belongs to.
Joanne Fluke
The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.
Walter Lippmann
I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.
Maggie Nelson
And then I heard the ring of metal on concrete, and I went cold, because one of them had found a piece of rebar lying around, and I knew with sudden certainty that these guys were going to kill me right here on this stupid sidewalk, for nothing, without even the reason of knowing my name or hating my politics. They were just going to kill me because they needed to kill something, and I was handy. At least zombies would have had a reason.
Rachel Caine
To everyone battling a difficulty or under attack right now, smile, keep your head up, keep moving and stay positive, you'll get through it.
Germany Kent
Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine.
Ned Hayes
People take power trips at the most inopportune times.
Lida Sideris
Service to others is the rent you pay for living on this planet.
Marian Wright Edelman
The thing about fairy tales is that the princess find her prince, but there's usually a price to pay. A compromise is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fair tale is general the one who pays the price. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice.
Roxanne Gay
In the search for truth,what you believe matters lessthan how you believe.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Since you’re obviously in need of something to do, instead of shouting at me through this whole drill, isn’t there some tree you could fell with your bare hands, or a boulder somewhere that needs tossing?
Julie James
Our beliefs about the sources of joy are frequently experienced as colored imaginations that captivate our hearts.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Little old laidesspeed away in their wheel chairs,frightened meals on wheels.
Ryan Mecum
He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them...They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.
Ray Bradbury
Oh God. We’re talking about me being naked, in the shower with cooter cream. Please world, end. Kill me. “I know it’s not soap. I just… if it’s scented… I can’t do scented. Flowers and stuff like that. Fruit-flavored soaps make… things… burnish.” She could tell from the peeks at his face Mr. Fitzwell had never stepped foot in bath and lotion store, wanting to try the array of fun fragrances. Nor had he purchased Peppermint Candy shower gel, foamed up his nether regions, and felt like he had dipped them in lava. Dove crossed and uncrossed her legs at the memory. Mr. Fitzwell seemed concerned. “Okay, just a heads-up. It’s definitely not good to put any fruits or plant life near your genitals.” He made a V with his hands and formed his own pretend vagina in front of his pants. Dove covered her eyes and tried to defend herself because now she could hear the sickly older woman beating her supporters with a purse. Dove’s mumbling got louder with her embarrassment. “I don’t put weird things down… there. Just make sure that the cream’s vagina-scented. Just plain. For vaginas.” She kept her eyes on the counter.
Debra Anastasia
We breathe in as existence, and breathe out as life. It is the heartbeat of the eternal moment.
Franklin Gillette
Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.
Pat Conroy
Honour, like insult, comes from others. It is their recognition of our worth. It is the intrusion of the social into the psychological, the public into the private. After all, others honour us for what they find of worth in us. ‘To pursue [honour],’ wrote Baruch Spinoza in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677), ‘we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding, fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they commonly seek.’ So what we come to think of as worthwhile in ourselves is bound to have as a large component what others think to be worthwhile in us.
C. D. C. Reeve
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Walt Whitman
If you judge a person that you don't even know by the tattoos they have, the piercings they have, the way they dress or by how they look to you in general, YOU are the one with the issue, not them. Stop the hate. Live and let live.
Tanya Masse
As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.
Michael Crichton
A bulimic person's shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anything or anyone. When that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish that others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without her having to ask for anything. To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food, rather than relationships, for comfort".
Sheila M. Reindl
Our dreams become our home where we dwell.
Debasish Mridha
The first step to success it's to imagine it
Pete Hautman
Most times you only have to be Brave ENOUGH.
andrea T Goeglein
You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.
Marilynne Robinson
Some evangelists spend too much time thinking and even planning about how to achieve visible results. This is an easy trap to fall into.
Billy Graham
when he was afraid to changed he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there
Spencer Johnson
Write the words "The FIve Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.
Dani Shapiro
The Sparrow Sisters' roses still bloomed on New Year's Day, their scent rich and warm even when snow weighted their petals closed. When customers came down the rutted road to the small eighteenth-century barn where the sisters worked, they marveled at the jasmine that twined through the split-rail fence, the perfume so intense they could feel it in their mouths. As they paid for their purchases, they wondered (vaguely, it must be said, for the people of Granite Point knew not to think too hard about the Sisters) how it was that clematis and honeysuckle climbed the barn in November and the morning glories bloomed all day. The fruit trees were so fecund that the peaches hung on the low branches, surrounded by more blossoms, apples and pears ripened in June and stayed sweet and fresh into December. Their Italian fig trees were heavy with purple teardrop fruit only weeks after they were planted. If you wanted a tomato so ripe the juice seemed to move beneath the skin, you needed only to pick up a punnet at the Nursery.
Ellen Herrick
I say looking on the bright side of life never killed anybody.
Jenny Han
We are our stories.
Barry Veret
To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)
Pearl S. Buck
Lady, I do not make up things. That is lies. Lies are not true. But the truth could be made up if yo know how. And that's the truth.
Lily Tomlin
The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.
Christopher Isherwood
Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.
Elvis Presley
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.''We take a beatin' all the time.''I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.
John Steinbeck
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
P.J. O'Rourke
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Living is a risk,' I snapped at him. 'Every decision, every interaction, every step, every time you get out of bed in the morning, you take a risk. To survive is to know you're taking that risk and to not get out of bed clutching illusions of safety.
Maria V. Snyder
This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.
Susan Freinkel
We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
David Mamet
Nana always said the rain was Nature's way of adding sparkle to the outdoors.
Evangeline Duran Fuentes
A great leader has to be flexible, holding his ground on the major principles but finding room for compromises that can bring people together. A great leader has to be savvy at negotiations so we don't drown every bill in pork barrel bridges to nowhere. I know how to stand my ground — but I also know that Republicans and Democrats need to find common ground to stand on as well.
Donald J. Trump
One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home ... With this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.
John Green
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W.H. Auden
Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80% of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!
Andy Rooney
Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears
Adrienne Rich
Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.
Christopher McDougall