Quotes by American Authors - Page 1250

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
John Steinbeck
Some days I wake upand all I feelare the fracturesin the flesh that coversthe only meI've ever known.Some days,it's those exact fissuresthat let the lighthiding inside mepour outand coverin goldeveryonethat found enough beautyin the cracksto standclose.
Tyler Knott Gregson
More often than not, rejecting rescue is in reality rejecting our need to be rescued. And it may very well be that is why so many reject Christmas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I see it as symbolic. The label no longer fits. His emotional parsimoniousness just got sucked away by the beautiful blue sky. I lean forward and reach my hand behind my back, then take my sign off, and I toss it out the window, too. I am no longer an ex-stripper's daughter, either. I have gone from invisible Vera Dietz to invincible Vera Dietz.
A.S. King
Human beings are consistent with regard to codes of honor, but endlessly fickle with regard to whom those codes apply. E.N. Wilson
Andrew Zolli
—the longer you silence a violin, the harder it is for it to find its true voice again.
Alexandra Bracken
No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes, hope is even harder to bear than grief.
Claudia Gray
He breathed a deep ahh and said, “Where did you learn to do that?”“Los Angeles High School of Performing Arts,” I said. “They taught me how to open my throat to sing. Then Kevin Wainwright taught me how to put his dick down it.”He laughed. “I’d like to thank LA Unified and Kevin Whatever for this moment.
C.D.Reiss
You won't change anything significant in the world if you try to be like it. Change comes when you do something different.
Shannon L. Alder
God’s ways and His will come in His own perfect time.
Elizabeth George
Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.
Geoffrey O'Brien
My happy place, huh? Well, yeah, I guess that's what music is for me.
Rachel Harris
Sexuality, like creativity, is a gift from God.
Lauryn Doll
Time changes, that's why our lives change.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
So, what if, instead of thinking about solving you whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.
Rainbow Rowell
I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.
Anne Lamott
It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.
David Brooks
If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Happiness is a warm puppy.
Charles M. Schulz
...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were...For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since.
Ralph Ellison
My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle.
Richard Brautigan
It felt important to be able to pick up and go whenever this endless stirring and inevitable craving for a change of scenery would bubble over because I didn’t want to die someday yearning for something else when it was only “something else” worth living.
Jackie Haze
Ranger cradled my face in his hands, using his thumbs to wipe the tears from my eyes. "The ceremony is over. Can you make it back to the car?"I nodded. "I'm okay now. Am I red and blotchy from crying?""Yes," Ranger said, brushing a kiss across my forehead. "I love you anyway.""There's all kinds of love," I said.Ranger took me by the hand and led me back to the SUV. "This is the kind that doesn't call for a ring. But a condom might come in handy.""That's not love," I told him. "That's lust.
Janet Evanovich
Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.
Catherynne M. Valente
Advertisements contain the only truth to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
Chris Hedges
The arm of flesh will fail you," Bridie's grandmother had been fond of reminding her, especially after she'd started dating, bringing home this one and that one, going on and on about them. "Love with all your heart, . . . but don't look to anybody but the Lord to fill up your empty spots. There's never been a man born . . . who can do that, and I don't care if he's the finest thing since store-bought pickles.
Linda Nichols
My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away as long as I'm not enjoying it.
Lee Trevino
One act of betrayal can shatter a lifetime of trust.
Ken Poirot
The ultimate source of abundance is to give love for the betterment of others.
Debasish Mridha
The salty, slightly stagnant smell of the marsh filled my nose. On the other side of the bed, a French door opened to what looked like the balcony. The curtain was drawn but a silhouette moved outside the gauzy white veil.
Sandi Beth Jones
Unhappiness comes when we feel helpless. Hope comes the minute we decide we are not.
Toni Sorenson
Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.
Heather Brewer
Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling back and forth. Tilting freely, to and fro. One does not like to think that sometimes it is the angel that falls.
Holly Black
You see, Christ's purpose can't be derailed by your limitations or troubles. Your difficulties will not trip Him up or cause Him delays. Painful trials, which may bring you to your knees will not baffle our Creator. He has a God-sized dream waiting for you to accomplish. His majestic plan is sovereign. Ultimately, He could use anything to graciously lead you to victory.
Dana Arcuri
I may be clean cut on the outside, but make no mistake." He moved even closer, close enough to see her pulse jump at the base of her neck. "I like to get very, very dirty when nobody's looking.
Robin Bielman
Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.
Bell Hooks
Sin always overpromises and underdelivers, while righteousness pays dividends for eternity...Nothing is more illogical than sin. It's the epitome of poor judgment. It's temporary insanity with eternal consequences. And we have no alibi, save the cross of Jesus Christ.
Mark Batterson
In the three years I played ball we won six lost seventeen and tied two. Some statistician ... calculated that we won 75 percent of the games we didn't lose.
Roger M. Blough
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation hard work learning from failure.
General Colin L. Powell
Make the most of the best and the best of the worst, and keep your standards high. Never settle for anything less than you deserve or are capable of achieving.
Roy T. Bennett
At the fruit of existence, there is a single concept of anonymity. This unknown concept is well known however. All one has to do is simply look behind the mirror for the answer. Yet, the answer won't come until the right question is asked. Because the illusions of reality are dressed in endless reflections, the blind will continue to be guided by the blind. The unknown concept is recognized to those who have tasted the fruit of existence, and as distant as the woman trying to grab Heaven from the reflection of an empty pond.
Lionel Suggs
If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him.
Robin Hobb
The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.
Jodi Picoult
The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
Dallas Willard
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
Joan Didion
He's looking at me intensely now like he can read my mind. Which of course, he can. Maybe I'm an open book, or maybe love is like a magnifying glass straight into the souls of those who own your heart.
Mia Sheridan
The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness.
Miroslav Volf
I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery...
M.T Anderson
No REGRETS. Just LESSONS learned, BLESSINGS recognized and HUMOR found.
Tanya Masse
Passion + Purpose = BLISS :)
Jaeda DeWalt
When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask if I'm leaving.
Steven Wright
Congratulations, Mousey, you’ve managed to insult every marsupial in the country in just under three kilometers.
Elle Lothlorien
Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars.
Truman Capote
I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
Oprah Winfrey
You set goals in order to become the person it takes to achieve them
Linda Deir
It is true that you can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. It is also true that you can choose your partner and in doing so, you end up choosing the family you've always wanted.
J.R. Rim
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal