Quotes by American Authors - Page 1224

The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.
Dean Koontz
Life is like a cooking pot. If you cook something good, you well get something tasty. If you cook something bad, you will get something bad.
Debasish Mridha
Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face.
Mary Rakow
Licking your wounds will not stop the bleeding, but applying pressure will.
Orrin Woodward
Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.
Chuck Klosterman
It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
Stephen King
it ain't as hard as picking cotton
Wynton Marsalis
I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's
John T. Scopes
Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.
Sam Lipsyte
The woman laughed again. She was the loudest person in the cave. Eena wondered if perhaps she was talking to a female Ghengat. Curiosity got the best of her and she turned around to look, surprised to find neither a Ghengat nor a Harrowbethian woman, but a Mishmorat. A striking, cheetah-spotted Mishmorat with straight lengths of charcoal hair and the most alluring dark eyes in existence. This bronzed female was the same size as Eena but observably more muscular. She appeared to be a mix of cheetah, Arabian princess, and gladiator in tight-fitting pants. Eena paused, dropping the stone in her hands. “Kira?” she breathed.“Hmmm,” the woman grumbled. Her painted eyes scrunched with displeasure. The look was still stunning. “I see my reputation precedes me.” Eena gawked as if a legendary ghost had been resurrected. “You’re alive?
Richelle E. Goodrich
Online review sites are the slushpiles of feedback.
S. Kelley Harrell
Anyway, how can you say things like that? You don't know me at all." She wasn't really caught up in this game, but she was enjoying it, as she had enjoyed the dozens of declarations that had been made to her since she was eleven. Her earliest memories were of being told how beautiful she was. Something in her never believed the words, never felt satisfied. It wasn't modesty; it was a craving for more proof than anyone had ever yet given her. Her mind worked constantly at trying to understand for herself exactly what other people saw when they looked at her. She could never grasp it whole and living. Her deepest fantasy was to step outside of her skin and look at herself and find out just what people were thinking about. She spent her life experimenting with people to see how she could make them react, as if, in their response, she could discover herself.
Judith Krantz
Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
Rebecca Solnit
Alpha bitches are all the same underneath. Don't know how to give an inch even if their damn fool lives depend on it.
Moira Rogers
There are two words that you should use frequently in your youth: ´sorry´ and ´thank-you´. Use the first one as often as possible, so that on your death bed all that you have to say to your friends is ´thank-you!´.
Robin Jones Gunn
This is the first fall that I haven't gone to school. Maybe that's why I feel weird all the time.
Jennifer Close
I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.
Esmeralda Santiago
Why don't boys like girls as they are?' 'They bore easy cause the so deadhead. Sometimes they want you mami, sometimes sis, sometimes lovergirl. You game with boys you got to know who you are and not let them tell you'.
Jack Womack
To win, expect to win. Expectations create reality.
Debasish Mridha
In Will's experience, when someone who ought to be afraid wasn't, the reason was rarely bravery. Usually it meant that they knew something you didn't.
Cassandra Clare
When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.
Andrea Dworkin
But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.
Jodi Picoult
It's hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away.
David Levithan
I'll be the first to admit that I have no experience with relationships. But it just seems logical…a man and woman have to be somewhat equal…as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each other equally.
Stephanie Meyer
Writing is the great invention of the world.
Abraham Lincoln
Sethian began, sounding thoughtful. “As I said, last night was more than a night of pleasure. When I brought you into my bed, you became my wife.
Cristina Rayne
When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
Jack Kerouac
Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings they gradually begin to seem mild harmless rather engaging little things not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.
Margaret Halsey
After finding "God hates fags" written in Magic Marker on his locker Roan had cleaned it off and then wrote, also in Magic Marker, "I hate your God
Andrea Speed
She decided that if Lucas was gay then she was going to have to get a sex change operation. He would be so worth it.
Josephine Angelini
Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.
Michael Lewis
He was like Superman, but with fangs and oddly impaired morals.
Patricia Briggs
The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.
John Darnielle
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
Dr. Seuss
Annabeth,” he said hesitantly, “in New Rome, demigods can live their whole lives in peace.” Her expression turned guarded. “Reyna explained it to me. But, Percy, you belong at Camp Half-Blood. That other life—”“I know,” Percy said. “But while I was there, I saw so many demigods living without fear: kids going to college, couples getting married and raising families. There’s nothing like that at Camp Half-Blood. I kept thinking about you and me…and maybe someday when this war with the giants is over…”It was hard to tell in the golden light, but he thought Annabeth was blushing. “Oh,” she said…“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just…I had to think of that to keep going. To give me hope. Forget I mentioned—”“No!” she said. “Gods, Percy, that’s so sweet.
Rick Riordan
Be he the first to stand or the last, a man must stand," the father had told his adoring son. "And if there is only one man, then that man must stand alone." ~Thomas to Bruce Wayne
Andrew Vachss
It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
Richard Matheson
What you are, and who you are should provide greater clarity about where you have been and where you are headed. Although one distinguishes spiritual from physical nature, the ultimate unification of the two is the consequence of the struggle for internal, external and eternal – peace.
T.F. Hodge
I suppose it can be truthfully said that hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
Anaïs Nin
We are the directors of our own life, creating our own version of truth, which can be humorous, pleasurable, miserable, brutal, or stupid. Reconciling loss and misfortune can provide a sense of sublimity or catharsis.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The need to control others as a prerequisite for male agency presupposed self-control. That imperative, in turn, included both the physical and emotional dimensions of a man’s bodily self.
Thomas Van Nortwick
Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.
David J. Schow
Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening. Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood...
Hope Jahren
The trouble with jogging is that by the time you realize you're not in shape for it it's too far to walk back.
Franklin P. Jones
Valerik spit to one side. "We laugh at religion's brand of love, forms and rules that keep the poor feeding from the church's coffers. It is in deed." "I agree. That kind of love is porcelain-coated balls of dung.But what of true affection?...
Ted Dekker
A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.
Richard P. Denney
It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.
Betty Friedan
Three things to help keep your brain cells awake and alert ... drink plenty of clean water, get plenty of deep sleep, and let your imagination soar to places it's never dared venture.
Toni Sorenson
I'm not alone," said the boy. "I've got a puppy.
Jane Thayer
We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.
Howard Zinn
I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.
Steve Martin
I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?
George Carlin
He's barely said anything and I already know this guy is gross,' she told the girls. 'If the zombies come at us, we feed them him first.
Faith McKay
Preparing for the worst is an activity I have taken up since I turned thirty-five and the worst actually began to happen.
Delia Ephron
I did exactly as Sampson said and I conjured up a creature with rabbit ears,a wolf face, a snake body, frog feet, a pig tail, and spikes running from the top of its head to the end of its tail.“Now,” Sampson said. “This is thekind of magic that you shouldn’t do.
Jennifer Priester
The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.
John Green
I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took
Lauren Oliver
Ain't nothing more important than loving your mama. Even if you can't understand her. Love her. That's all you gotta do.
Julie Cantrell