Quotes by American Authors - Page 1223

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe
Brian Greene
Traction equals satisfaction
Dave Ramsey
The world will see true peace when there are no boundaries of religion and the religion of all will be pure unconditional love.
Debasish Mridha
She exuded sexuality almost tangible, like ink obscuring the waters around the octopus before it strikes.
Travis Luedke
The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.
Michael J. Behe
When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.
Clark Zlotchew
Peace, Love, and Happiness, are the priceless treasures of life.
Ellen J. Barrier
Political corruption works by having an equally corrupt legal system to protect it.
Steven Magee
This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.
Lemony Snicket
Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope.
Jeffrey Eugenides
And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; an if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
Carl Sagan
She breathed in the crisp autumn air, hoping the loveliness of nature would somehow cleanse her soul and overshadow her sorrow.
J.E.B. Spredemann
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.
Susan Sontag
For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.
Gary Kamiya
It is impressive to see how people work hard to transform their lives, their bodies, and their relationships to become the best version of themselves. Release the layers that weigh you down and hold you back. Release the past and re-emerge to begin your next chapter.
Susan C.Young
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Joyce Carol Oates
I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book.
Debasish Mridha
My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.
Flannery O'Connor
Pardon me for not being willing to commit my entire future to you based on two kisses and a blueberry muffin.
Laura Lee Guhrke
By the time they arrived, the snow was coming down fast...."It's beautiful," she said, pausing outside the door. She thrust out her hands and let the snow land on her palms."Yes, yes..." Reid seemed in a mighty big hurry to get her inside."How long did you say the storm would last?" she asked, thinking it would be so beautiful. The snow -- not being trapped with Reid Jamison.Reid hesitated. "Longer than either of us is going to like," he muttered, looking miserable.Jenna was afraid of that.
Debbie Macomber
Mercy is a contingency plan, devised by the guilty in the eventuality that they are caught. Justice is the domain of the just. - Richard Rahl
Terry Goodkind
Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.
Brodi Ashton
The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself. - Ulrich Beck
Richard Swift
Sex swims in marriage, while sex sinks in sin of being single.
Anthony Liccione
The public never appears to tire of endless courses of strawberries and cream, and the theory that you run the risk of boring people with endless photo montages of the Chelsea Pensioners in their dress reds, or close-ups of a Pimm's Cup sprouting all kinda of flora, has yet to be proven. People like Wimbledon in the same way they like blue jeans or even their own spouses: for the pleasure yielded by their reliable sameness.
Peter Bodo
You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.
Henry James
Let us try to heal the mind first before we heal the body.
Debasish Mridha
Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.
Connie Willis
One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?
Will Schwalbe
A life I didn't choose chose me.
Wally Lamb
Christmas is a time of sharing, and joy and grace. There's no better time to entertain family and friends than now.
Shelley Shepard Gray
It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.
Steve López
She held my face in her hands as if I was the treasure.
Kelly Moran
ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN BUT IT TAKES A GODDESS TO GET OUT OF ONE.
Jack Spicer
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Jane Green
Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
Jack Vance
Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.
Mike Stackpole
Thank you, I think. And what is your name?" Keirah called out a bit more loudly, as she watched Darius retreat..."His name is of no consequence." A male's loud, booming voice came from behind the two men who remained. The sound of his voice was gritty, husky, and the sound brought a spark to Keirah's blood.
Madison Thorne Grey
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them inpractical fashion.
Theodore Roosevelt
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
Jon Stewart
It took me years to realize that I could do all kinds of drastic acts like quitting jobs, relationships, towns (or all of the above), but what showed up at the next job, relationship, & town was still ME.
Summer Pierre
EdgesI am a child throwing rocks into the stream.Challenging the rushing water.Raising my fist and daring fate to do it worst.I am a dancer in the waves of the ocean.Swaying in time with the tide.Pirouetting, the current my only friend.I am the sun, rising across the canyonAscending, and shinning down.Giving the illusion of perception and motion.I am thoughts like a rolling river.Water cascading over the rocks of my soul.Shaping, forming, conforming.I am the peace of the rain forest.Basking in solitudeTranquil, serene, transfixing angles.Reflecting from within.Dripping and dropping. Shaking it off.I am the dust of the galaxy.Yearning to know itself.I am the wind.Wandering. Searching.A storm brewing from within.
Tosha Michelle
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Thomas Jefferson
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
John Steinbeck
Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.
Gloria Swanson
What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.
Ira Levin
Consciousness of unconsciousness
Philip K Dick
I review my three boyfriends, the three men I slept with in my twenties, searching for a common thread. Nothing. No consistent features, coloring, stature, personality. But one theme does emerge: they all picked me. And then dumped me. I played the passive role. Waiting for Hunter and then settling for Joey. Waiting to feel more for Nate. Then waiting to feel less. Waiting for Alec to go away and leave me in peace. And now Dex. My number four. And I am still waiting. For all of this to blow over. For his September wedding. For someone who gives me that tingly feeling as I watch him sleeping in...
Emily Giffin
People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.
Kent Nerburn
Did your parents care that he was white?""They never met him." I couldn't imagine taking him to meet my dad. Watching them talk to each other would've been tortuous. Also, I never wanted him to see how small our apartment was. In the end, I guess I really didn't want him to know me.With Daniel, it's different somehow. I want him to see all of me.
Nicola Yoon
In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.
David Halberstam
Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.
Lauren Oliver
All mountain people are like that. No matter where you go, the mountains call you back.
Karan Bajaj
Many animals flourish not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but because they are "animals"—or even more precisely, perhaps, because they are felt to be members of our families and our communities, regardless of their species. And yet, at the very same moment, billions of animals in factory farms, many of whom are very near to or indeed exceed cats and dogs and other companion animals in the capacities we take to be relevant to standing (the ability to experience pain and suffering, anticipatory dread, emotional bonds and complex social interactions, and so on), have as horrible a life as one could imagine, also because they are "animals."Clearly, then, the question here is not simply of the "animal" as the abjected other of the "human" tout court, but rather something like a distinction between bios and zoe that obtains within the domain of domesticated animals itself.
Cary Wolfe
Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.
Pat Schneider
Our beliefs are the lens through which we see the world. They are the glasses we put on in the morning, which provide the patterns we see. As we become more self-aware, we can identify our patterns, and then, to the extent we desire, change our lenses.
Patrick Sweeney
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
Barbara Kingsolver
I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.
Javan
Go home, and let all your relatives off the potter's wheel. You are not the potter!
Joyce Meyer
You may look tough, but being weak-hearted still makes you weak.
Sandra Swartz