Quotes by American Authors - Page 1290

Still, the car started, so we drove off to the movies. Popcorn happened. Previews, ads, and an annoying kid all went down like clockwork. The picture started and then ended a while later, the world unchanged by its passing.
Adam P. Knave
Just as the world spun us into existence, it will spin on long after we are gone.
Crystal Woods
Find your own joy within and then greater joy will be added to you.
Bryant McGill
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Do you really believe that the moon isn’t there when nobody looks?
Albert Einstein
Are you joining a conversation or taking it over? Stay aware of how you join a conversation and of your effect on a conversation.
Loren Weisman
May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.
Kimber Simpkins
And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse.
Erika Johansen
Find an opportunity to serve and success will be yours.
Debasish Mridha
A true home is one of the most sacred of places. It is a sanctuary into which men flee from the world’s perils and alarms. It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary retire to gather new strength for the battle and toils of tomorrow. It is the place where love learns its lessons, where life is schooled into discipline and strength, where character is molded.Few things we can do in this world are so well worth doing as the making of a beautiful and happy home. He who does this builds a sanctuary for God and opens a fountain of blessing for men.Far more than we know, do the strength and beauty of our lives depend upon the home in which we dwell. He who goes forth in the morning from a happy, loving, prayerful home, into the world’s strife, temptation, struggle, and duty, is strong--inspired for noble and victorious living. The children who are brought up in a true home go out trained and equipped for life’s battles and tasks, carrying in their hearts a secret of strength which will make them brave and loyal to God, and will keep them pure in the world’s severest temptations.
J.R. Miller
A successful presentation needs to be both buttoned up (orderly) and free-flowing (a conversation). The tension between the two, the fact that both things are happening at once, defines the process.
Dale Ludwig
I could never hate you as much as I love you.
Rachel Van Dyken
A warrior doesn’t worry. He or she evaluates the situation, investigates the source, calculates the risks and benefits, formulates a plan then puts it into action.
Shannon L. Alder
I hope that I’m a good man ... it would be enough.
James Qualls
Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.
Carmen DeSousa
As you know, I have always been curious about our immortality... how it feels to live on and on through time....I need speculate no longer, I have sampled eternity in Miss Campbell's fifth period "social studies" class. Three days on the concept of "manifest destiny," Vasile. THREE DAYS. I yearned to stand up, rip her lecture notes from her pallid hands, and scream, 'Yes, America expanded westward! Is that not logical, given that Europeans settled on the Eastern shore? What else were they to do? Advance vainly into the sea?
Beth Fantaskey
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
I avoid the looming visitor,Flee him adroitly around corners,Hating him, wishing him well;Lest if he confront me I be forced to say what is in no wise true:That he is welcome; that I am unoccupied;And forced to sit while the potted roses wilt in the crate or the sonnet coolsBending a respectful nose above such dried philosophiesAs have hung in wreaths from the rafters of my house since I was a child.Some trace of kindliness in this, no doubt,There may be.But not enough to keep a bird alive.There is a flaw amounting to a fissureIn such behaviour.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.
Joseph Campbell
For each of us, there comes a time when we must awaken and become what we were born to become.
Seth Adam Smith
The only real escape from hell is to conquer it.
Scott Hawkins
Nothing to me feels as good as laughing incredibly hard.
Steve Carell
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
John Adams
If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked
Richard Clarke
They know that tragedy is not glamorous. They know it doesn't play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person. Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.
E. Lockhart
I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go?
Jessica Maria Tuccelli
:Do you trust me?: Wareska quietly linked.:To stay alive? No. You and the monster will get lost in riddles and philosophizing. Then you will make some grand, heroic gesture, poorly thought-out and overestimating your own strength, and when the creature has roasted you alive, I will be the one sweeping up the ashes – figuratively speaking, of course. Lest we forget, I do not have hands.:
Ash Gray
Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
Tom Robbins
There is absolutely no excuse to stay where you are at right now. If you are weak, He can make you strong. If you are timid He can make you brave. If you are a pervert, He can make you pure. If you are selfish, He can make you selfless. if you are a shepherd, He can make you a king. If you are mediocre, He can make you a Mighty One of valor.
Eric Ludy
Don't pick up hitchhikers!"- D. Adams
Robert Lynn Asprin
Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.
Kellie Elmore
You are great in Christ and you are powerful beyond measure!
Deaquelynn Williams
A friend is someone who accepts you no matter where you are.
Debasish Mridha
There is no debating that the effects of trauma experienced in childhood may have grave consequences.
Asa Don Brown
Hope," Frank grumbled. "I'd rather have a few good weasels.
Rick Riordan
A more fundamental questions suggests itself, however. How did the most powerful military in history come to devote its elite forces and advanced technology to the hunt for a man like Qari Munib, a midlevel Taliban figure in a remote corner of the planet, half a world away from the White House and ground zero in Manhattan, more than eleven years after the September 11 attacks?
ryan devereaux
After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.
Sandra Dallas
Once you hold the hand of Death, the only thing in life that can scare you is a sense of humor.
Lionel Suggs
I earn my own respect," I told Emilie. "I don't ride the coattails of someone else.
Ann Rinaldi
But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.
Lauren Willig
It is not in the power of governments to increase the supply of one commodity without a corresponding restriction in the supply of other commodities more urgently demanded by consumers. The authority may reduce the price of one commodity only by raising the prices of others.
Ludwig von Mises
You must be a rich man," she said. "Not much of a warrior, though. You keep letting me sneak up on you."You don't surprise me," he said. "The Plains Indians had women who rode their horses eighteen hours a day. They could shoot seven arrows consecutively, have them all in the air at the same time. They were the best light cavalry in the world." Just my luck," she said. "An educated Indian."Yeah," he said. "Reservation University."They both laughed at the old joke. Every Indian is an alumnus.Where you from?" she asked.Wellpinit," he said. "I'm a Spokane."I should've known. You got those fisherman's hands."Ain't no salmon left in our river. Just a school bus and a few hundred basketballs."What the hell you talking about?"Our basketball team drives into the river and drowns every year," he said. "It's a tradition."She laughed. "You're just a storyteller, ain't you?"I'm just telling you things before they happen," he said. "The same things sons and daughters will tell your mothers and fathers."Do you ever answer a question straight?"Depends on the question," he said.Do you want to be my powwow paradise?
Sherman Alexie
You know the real reason we celebrate Christmas, don't you? I mean, beyond Santa Claus and jungle bells and Christmas trees? You mean because Jesus was born? she asked.Yes... but did you ever think how Jesus was born? I mean, have you considered how it was such a humble birth, in a small barn...how he was laid in a hay trough...how the Son if almighty God humbled himself to be born in such lowly conditions? Have you thought about it like that? Jesus could have been born in a fine palace. After all, he was the Son of God. But for some reason God chose humble beginnings for His son. Do you ever wonder why? ... I think because God wanted to show that his love could reach to everyone, no matter who they were, from the poorest of poor to great kings.
Melody Carlson
What if we treated the ones we loved the same way we treated ourselves?
Rain Cooper
Maxim 6: If violence wasn't your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
Howard Tayler
As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Elizabeth Kostova
Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.
Garth Risk Hallberg
The only way to avoid failure is to sit in a corner and do nothing.
Kevin Leman
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
Norbert Wiener
Money is a tool we use to reach certain ends. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s hard to come by, though, so when opportunities arise, we need to make the most of them.
Michael Monroe
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
Jonathan Lethem
Do not worry yourself so much. Take joy in things that are joyful, there is no harm in that.
Josi S. Kilpack
I thought of you and how you love this beauty,And walking up the long beach all aloneI heard the waves breaking in measured thunderAs you and I once heard their monotone.Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond meThe cold and sparkling silver of the sea --We two will pass through death and ages lengthenBefore you hear that sound again with me.
Sara Teasdale
Time is passing : not leaden steppingBut sprinting on winged feet,Quick silver slipping by.
Richard L. Ratliff
What is real and what is not is for your heart to decide and for your heart to know.
Colleen Houck
Christ wasn’t only a yogi; he was an activist, carrying his message to those who most needed it.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
We played with the moon all night, painting faces on its blank cheek, shining its spotlight into sleeping people’s windows. But mostly we just ate the moon, stuck tongues to its surface and felt it dissolve, left chunks of its minty scalp on neighbors’ doorsteps.
Jalina Mhyana
From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately.
J. Don Cook
The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
Flannery O'Connor
I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.... I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.
Peter S Beagle