Quotes by American Authors - Page 1275

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.
L.L. Barkat
My eyes moved over his face. His chiseled jaw and high cheekbones twisted in agony. Even writhing he was beautiful, muscles clenching and unclenching, revealing his strenght, his body's fight against its impending collapse, rendering his torture sublime. Desire to help him consumed me.I can't watch him die.
Andrea Cremer
We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other wordsa complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers.The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Do not make children cross-eyed, by having hair hang about their foreheads, where they see it continually.
Lydia Maria Francis Child
Standing there at the stage door to the rest of your life. Time to dip your toe into the deep end. Try things. Say hi already. Laugh a lot. Mess up. Apologize. Mess up again. Hug people. Take chances. Trust yourself. Lose things. Get over it. Hold your friends close. Gather your strength. Gain wisdom and beautiful stories. Be brave, and you'll have the time of your life.
Taylor Swift
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
Edith Wharton
Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.
A.W. Tozer
We don't forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive them becausethey need it--because we need it. I'm sure you felt much better after forgiving your son.
Bree Despain
I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.
Ursula K Le Guin
Guilt is basically one of my superpowers. It’s been programmed into me from the moment I was old enough to know what it was.
Paula Stokes
We tend to think that refusing to exalt Christ is staying true to our self-will and personal freedom when really we are condemning ourselves. Sure, we can pretend to stay true to ourselves, but if you want to talk about reality, all of that is completely trivial if this life is an island and He's the only pilot with a plane and a flight plan.
Criss Jami
The ultimate aim of learning knowledge is to gain wisdom.
Pearl Zhu
It is not, in Calvin’s view, that we sin because we believe the wrong things; it is, rather, that we believe the wrong things because we sin.
Russell D. Moore
The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn't matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn't win the lottery.
Meg Jay
Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
H.P. Lovecraft
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.It was just where I went.
Robert Penn Warren
But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.
Anna Quindlen
When we convene a group for gender healing and reconciliation, we are collectively taking similar action. We stretch ourselves to a larger consciousness and grace that is beyond our capacity, but within our reach.
William Keepin
All that mattered was that Boyd was there. He was there for Sin, and when Sin opened his eyes to look at Boyd once more, Sin ignored all the self-doubt and paranoia. Because at that moment he somehow knew that Boyd always would be.
Santino Hassell
Writing is my dream. From romance to dragons; fairies to fantasy worlds, this is where I live and play. Thanks be to God!
Lisa Hannah Wells
Just so you're clear, that wasn't a pity kiss.
Lisa Brown Roberts
The world is your mirror...love what you see and you love YOU!
Liz Hester
But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.
Ann Patchett
The rate of delay is in direct proportion to the urgency of arrival.
Doug Prebble
The mind is like a circuit ofChristmas tree lights. When thebrain works well, all of the lightstwinkle brilliantly, and it’s adaptableenough that, often, even if one bulbgoes out, the rest will still shine on.But depending on where thedamage is, sometimes that oneblown bulb can make the wholestrand go dark.
Susannah Cahalan
This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism.
David Brooks
Loving someone is sticking a pin through a voodoo doll and not hitting any vital organs
Josh Stern
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
Philip Roth
Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
Susan Patron
Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
James Thurber
The ability to dream, be brave, and love, is never guaranteed, but must always be assumed.
andrea T Goeglein
The spirit of arrogance most definitely makes you shine. It paints a bright red target on your own forehead.
Criss Jami
So, a little advice. Relax. You're not filling a job position. You're looking for a pleasant acquaintance.. who might become a good friend... who turns out to be attractive to your senses... and a rewarding lover... then a committed partner whose heart will not stray. If you don't see those signposts and in that order, then you're probably on the wrong road and getting more lost with every step.
Anthony D. Ravenscroft
I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself.
Martin Sheen
I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.
Laurie Halse Anderson
Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.
Tad Williams
There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.
Aleksandar Hemon
Wisdom plus knowledge equals understanding.
Reid A. Ashbaucher
...there is nothing you possess that wasn't given to you by God. It's His prerogative to give. And it's His prerogative to take away. But there is one thing that can never be taken from you, and that is Jesus Christ. And if you have Jesus, then you have everything you will ever need for all of eternity.Everything - Jesus = NothingJesus + Nothing = EverythingIt's that simple.
Mark Batterson
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
Steven Magee
Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.'Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.
Pamela Paul
Life seems to be fashioned and formed best out of the obstacles that seem unbearable.
John Paul Warren
Are there moments when our brains are not exercising?” I questioned. “That would be almost like being brain dead...
Vann Chow
Jose: Do not drop me senorJeff:i wont drop you,joseJose:then i be jose jalapeno on the floorPeanut:do a little tap dance and we got salsa!Jeff:Thats terrible!Peanut:not with the right chips its notJeff:stop it! im sorry josejose:its okayjeff: okayJose:ill kick his ass laterpeanut:i'll turn ur ass into guacamolejeff: stop it!peanut: i will stir u with ur own stick!jeff:stop it!peanut: this is the way we stir the guac stir the guac stir the guac. OLE!!
Jeff Dunham
OMG, RAYNE! THAT’S SO CRAZYPANTS! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU OF ALL PEOPLE ARE NOW THE SLAYER! YOU’RE LIKE SOME SUPERHERO OR SOMETHING! DO YOU GET POWERS LIKE BUFFY? AND MORE IMPORTANT, DO U GET TO HOOK UP WITH SPIKE? YUM!
Mari Mancusi
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
Erich Maria Remarque
Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.
Frank Lentricchia
What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence.
Susan Griffin
Of course, of course. Mr. Buzzby, did it ever occur to you that a god may live, figuratively, a dog's life?''Eh?''Gods are transfigured, you know. They go up in smoke, as it were. In smoke and flame. They become pure flame, pure spirit, creatures with no visible body.'("A Visitor From Egypt")
Frank Belknap Long
I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
Joe Hill
We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.
Frank Herbert
In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
H.P. Lovecraft
I was just turned last week. I'm a librarian."He stilled, as if I'd just told him I was the inventor of the tube top. "I watched a movie about a librarian once. Well, she was a librarian by day, a call girl by--"I stopped him with a quick lift of an eyebrow. "If you finish that sentence, we cannot be friends.
Molly Harper
It is a good man who stands up for his friends, but an honorable man who stands up for his enemies.
Violet Haberdasher
I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste.
Charles M. Schulz
There’s calm in the mind of the humble. An unmistakable peace of not having to prove anything to anyone.
Ron Baratono
The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.
John Green
You’ll only fall if you doubt your balance.
Willa Okati
I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.
Hillary Jordan
What was the point in satin and lace if it didn't make a man struggle to speak?
Alexandra Ivy