Quotes by American Authors - Page 1199

Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks... But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.
Dorothy West
Maxon: “To be clear, no one agrees with you.”America: “To be clear, I don’t care.
Kiera Cass
Dignity is a quiet strength which reflects your deep honor and self-respect. It is a gracious pride without narcissistic projection and portrays a calm awareness and generosity of spirit regardless of the environment or circumstances.
Susan C.Young
Where we've been defines where we'll go. You can't allow your past to define you, but you can leverage it to create a better future!
Colleen Ferrary Bader
Laughter is the only medicine, without side effects.
Shannon L. Alder
A good book is a true friend who never betrays.
Debasish Mridha
She doesn't acknowledge Tucker, and there's no thank you for the cigarettes. She says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.
Peter Hedges
Don't stop talking to me, Makenna. I need your words. Your voice.""I don't know what to say is all. I want to take away your hurt."His cheek lifted into a smile under her hand. "Thank you. But sometimes I think I need it. It reminds me I'm alive. And it makes the good times that much better. Like right now, being here, with you.
Laura Kaye
One of the best times for figuring out who you are & what you really want out of life? Right after a break-up.
Mandy Hale
Accepting that life is insane, that bad things happen to good people and that you can find the courage to be grateful for the good in every situation and still move forward is hard (even terrifying), but heroic.
Richie Norton
I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them - I held them personally and individually responsible - the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and the farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine outstanding gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalist, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damn complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.
Tim O'Brien
The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.
John Crowley
The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Revenge is like waves hitting the beach, the water is drawn in and sucked back into yet another wave, pounding and smashing its shoreline!
Wes Adamson
You are most happy when you can give yourself away to others.
Debasish Mridha
He was determined to save her, to be her hero, to give her a reason why the gods had seen fit to place him inside her visions. Gods, he wanted to rescue her. After all, she had rescued him; she had become his heroine a long time ago, before his death became imminent.
Madison Thorne Grey
Do you want me to open the window?’‘No … I still have your scent on my skin.’‘And I have your taste in my mouth.
Debra Strattford
To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.
Norman Lock
To be the master of tomorrow's dreams, you must first be the servant of today's planning.
Vincent Lowry
The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.
John K. Brown
Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.
Christopher McDougall
Positive thoughts lead to positive results.
Maria V. Snyder
Everything I had to give went to my children, and though I loved them and my husband utterly, the drudgery of the day-to-day made it seem as if not love but coffee, my Toyota and sheer logistics were what propelled me through life.
Marcia DeSanctis
On October 14th, the sweetest thing happened to me. On that day at sunset, I met you by the sea. It was that day I found a great purpose and a wonderful reason to be.
Debasish Mridha
It is not enough to simply listen to student voice. Educators have an ethical imperative to do something with students, and that is why meaningful student involvement is vital to school improvement.
Adam Fletcher
Souls aren’t discrete units — or even units at all. They’re more like reflections of consciousness in a fractured mirror.
Colleen Chen
you're like a dictionary, you add meaning to my life
Shannon Dermott
Be careful of love. It'll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong.
Rick Riordan
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.
Raymond Chandler
Often times, people don't realize how much their childhood still affects them when they are an adult. Or other people don’t realize the affect things still have on those they know. Other people might even say, “Get over it” or “Move on.” But it’s usually simply not that easy.
Lisa Bedrick
A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.
Oliver Sacks
Suffering should not define you as a woman! And just because you’re a man it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect you! HELP HER to remove the taboos and the loneliness surrounding this disease; be understanding, show empathy, and don’t accuse her of being sensitive, delicate, or overly dramatic – this is a big opportunity for you guys to show that you care and to be a real
Susan Sarandon
Oh, yeah, that goatee is really unattractive. That definitely belongs on a much fatter man.
Elle Lothlorien
During the few months Troy had been back home, he’d told his friends about us, and so we quickly eased into the conversation as though we’d all known each other for many years. They embarrassed us with great thanks for having served overseas. They recounted combat events Troy had told them, and we realized by the context of their stories that Troy had made us heroes for his friends because we’d been heroes to him. At this point I was the saddest I’d yet been over Troy’s passing, because the true friend from war is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others.
Anthony Swofford
Nothing worse... nothing worse that to be stuck somewhere with some married a-hole and have to listen to him tell you about his f***in' kids... Let me tell ya something, folks... nobody cares about your children, okay?" Nobody cares about your children. I speak for everyone. I've been appointed by the rest of the group to inform you we don't care about your children – that's why they're your children, so you can care about them and we don't have to bother.
George Carlin
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 
Ernest Hemingway
The harp sounds at each passing breeze, but that does not mean the tune is masterfully played.
Jacqueline Carey
You are an honest and honorable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty and honor have won you, I understand why.
George R.R. Martin
I don't take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves.
Ani DiFranco
These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.
Sarah Dessen
Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns.
James Patterson
The life of an adoptee is like an ancient voyager who searches for the unknown. The stars guided their destiny. They had their sights on the wonders that lay ahead of them. An adoptee travels in the opposite direction.
Diamond Mike Watson
It's not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch. " He finally whispered, "We also need to forgive ourselves.
Mitch Albom
A trial, it often came down to who had the best story.
Jodi Picoult
[The] love of God that reaches to wherever man is, can be entirely rejected. God will not force Himself upon anyone against his will. It is your part to believe. It is your part to receive. Nobody else can do it for you.
Billy Graham
If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.
Louis L'Amour
YOU YOU YOUyour eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook crackling and yellow, curling at the edgesa book of myths in which i do not appear.
Clint Catalyst
Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.
Sharon Salzberg
Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.
Alison Winfield Burns
I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.
Sol Stein
That we leave our homes, that we step through our doors to the world, that we travel our whole lives not because we want to collect exotic T-shirts, not because we want to consume foreign adventure the same Western way we consume plastic and Styrofoam and LCD TVs and iPads, but because it has the power to renew us—not the guarantee, not the promise, just the possibility. Because there are places our imaginations can never construct for us, and there are people who we will never meet but we could and we might. It reminds us that there is always reason to begin again.
Stephen Markley
It's 8a.m. and time to restIt's 10a.m. and time to relaxIt's noon and time for reposeIt's 3p.m. and time for shut-eyeIt's 6p.m. and time for siestaIt's 9p.m. and time to slumberIt's midnight and time to snoozeIt's 4a.m. and time to hang upside down from your bedroom ceiling, screaming.
Francesco Marciuliano
But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.
Marisa de los Santos
In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.
Pat Conroy
From out of nowhere, Phury felt an overwhelming tide of guilt, like someone had popped the lid off allhis deepest concerns and his fears for the future of the race. He had to respond to it, couldn't bear thepressure. Riding the wave, he found himself saying in a rush, "We live and die for our kind. The species is our firstand only concern. We fight every night and count the jars of thelessers we kill. Stealth is the way weprotect the civilians. The less they know about us, the safer they are. That is why we disappeared.
J.R. Ward
You are here to feel the joy of life by empowering, enabling, enlightening humanity so that humanity may find its own joy.
Debasish Mridha
To be confident is to act in faith.
Bernard Bynion
Why’d you call, boy? What did you want from me?""The company of a friend, I think.""Always a cheap treat.
James Sallis
No one knows what goes down between a woman and her man except that woman. Only thing they know is what went down with their own men.
Kristen Ashley
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Robert F. Kennedy