Quotes by American Authors - Page 1299

Any expert will tell you that if you want emotionally committed relationships then people must be allowed to be true to who they are.
Stan Slap
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Joan Didion
Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.
George Packer
Throughout the course of the day, Bobby Tom's irritation over his artificially oiled and dirt-smeared chest and his unzipped jeans had flared into righteous indignation. They were treating him like a sex object! It was damned demeaning, that's what it was, being reduced to a set of oil pecs and a tight ass. Shit. A dozen years in the NFL, and this was what it had all come down to. Pecs and ass.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard.
Edgar Watson Howe
You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.
Richelle Mead
Home. Wow. I’m already calling it home.Well, isn’t that what any place is? Any place that you share withsomeone you love, I mean?
Meg Cabot
It is understandable why a person might shirk a brutal self-assessment until the unforgiving talons of a reckless life rips their thin skin covertures into shreds leaving a person ensnared in their destructive thoughts and lacerated with bolts of self-incrimination.
Kilroy J. Oldster
But should you ever come to a time when you need to say something upon my behalf, say this, 'The last truth is that there is no magic.
Raymond E. Feist
Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.
Rosemary Clement-Moore
The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.
Aldo Leopold
So . . . what is this fire river called?”“The Phlegethon,” [Annabeth] said. “You should concentrate on going do
Rick Riordan
The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
Herman Melville
Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.
Elizabeth Graver
Who knew hitting my head and passing out would be so much fun?
P.C. Cast
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
Vladimir Nabokov
Omitting the truth is its own kind of lie.
Ted Sanders
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
Susan Ertz
A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good mor
Christopher Isherwood
I have a past, okay? And you really don't want to get involved with it.''Everybody's got a past,' he said. 'That doesn't mean you can't have a future.
Meredith Russo
You cannot “disrupt” without incremental innovation being part of the process.
Pearl Zhu
The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
What's your happy place?""With you.
A. Meredith Walters
I can't get his bonesto go down the fucking drain.I try to stuff the tiny holes,too tiny for this pain.I can't get his bonesto break any way for my gain.Break them back a little too far,never too far for the sake of sane.
Casey Renee Kiser
She shot out of her seat, tired of waiting, at last ready to create her future.
Scott Stabile
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
Flannery O'Connor
You are always looking at people like this.” And then she made a face, one he couldn’t possibly begin to describe.“If I ever look like that,” he said dryly, “precisely like that, to be more precise, I give you leave to shoot me.
Julia Quinn
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
Carl Sagan
I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.
Shana Abe
When nothing is at stake, everything's a waste.
Crystal Woods
Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.
Joe Meno
The ocean-blue bowl won’t refuse to bruise, won’t hold it back from the gaping earth-wounds.There will still come water, chill wind and happy goosebumps, and in the utmost corners of oaks, leaves laughing.
Bryana Johnson
I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, "Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.
Ruby Wax
If money management isn't something you enjoy, consider my perspective. I look at managing my money as if it were a part-time job. The time you spend monitoring your finances will pay off. You can make real money by cutting expenses and earning more interest on savings and investments. I'd challenge you to find a part-time job where you could potentially earn as much money for just an hour or two of your time.
Laura D. Adams
My life of conversation leads me to reimagine the very meaning of hope. I define hope as distinct from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholeheartedly with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.
Krista Tippett
Sometimes you feel as though you've slandered yourself, but the joke's on them.
Criss Jami
There are three ingredients in the good life learning earning and yearning.
Christopher Morley
Consider the simple hedgehog, and his neighbor, the opossum...do they waste their energy trying to throw one another into chasms when they face a common enemy, the winter? No!
Ransom Riggs
Me and Katy look adorkable in extraterrestrialhighway shirts. You would just look stupid. You can thank me later.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
Meditation is an excellent habit and tool for transformation, however your ‘practice’ should eventually evolve into your natural primary state of being.
Gary Hopkins
We have, as a nation, made choices that by all reasonable expectations should have put us in harm's way. There is little doubt that we continue to make choices that are likely to make the danger even greater. And yet, by dint of an accident of geography and economics, we have so far been spared the worst consequences of our actions. And even as those consequences begin to take hold in other places, here, in the parts of America where most of us live, at least for the moment, we can hear the winds roaring over our heads like that coal train, but somehow the worst of the danger still seems removed. What is our responsibility? (164)
Seamus McGraw
Kindness always leaves a timeless deposit on the heart.
Molly Friedenfeld
If your plan is not working, pivot. If it is working, do more of it!
Amber Hurdle
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.
Dakin Williams
Don’t stay because you think you can change him.You can’t change him.Maybe work on changing yourself so you don’t feel compelled to stay with menlike him in the first place.
Scott Stabile
I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.
Stephen King
For Courtney’s whole life, seeing the world had only been a dream, but now, as Adrian Diamond’s daughter, it could be a reality.
Michelle Madow
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.
Charles Petzold
For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.
Jennifer Armstrong
Did I have the courage to forge a path
Terry Tempest Williams
A firm's income statement may be, likened to a bikini-what it reveals is interesting but what it conceals is vital.
Burton G. Malkiel
You can still go home a loyal wife.” - Warren Brown
T.M. Williams
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
Andrew Vachss
The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion.
Allan Lokos
This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless.
Tucker Elliot
When a bully is held accountable for his actions, his future actions will change. Bad behavior only continues for those who allow it.
Gary Hopkins
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.
Ken Keyes Jr.
I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.
Jennifer Elisabeth
I didn't have that kind of friendship, the forever kind of friendship that will last your whole life through, no matter what.
Jenny Han
If she's really psychic," Zack said when he saw Tanisha's photo at school, "why does she need a doorbell?
Joan Bauer