Quotes by American Authors - Page 1309

Shona thought of another question. "What does a man expect of a woman? I would have no inkling what to do." tIsobel waved a hand. "He will show you soon enough. Anyway, it will come to you as if 'twas something you'd always known. Accepting his kisses and kissing him back. Touching him. Men loved to be touched."t"Where?"t"Anywhere," Isobel snickered. "I remember one thing that surprised me the first time. Although I should have known considering how men are always staring down at my breasts."tShona felt her eyes widen again, then tried to hide her shock.t"Men love to kiss and suckle nipples," Isobel whispered. t"Heavens, you cannot be serious." Shona felt like the most naive person on earth at that moment. t"Indeed, I am. That is why they're always gawking at women's breasts, even when they're covered my layers of clothing. They also like to fondle, squeeze, kiss and stroke them."tShona cleared her throat. She had never imagined such a thing.
Vonda Sinclair
Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
Olen Steinhauer
Reality is God-centered and all human beings are worshipers, whether or not they are conscious of this reality and its implications.
James MacDonald
Happy Endings are an illusion. Real life is filled with brief moments of fleeting happiness, but ultimately every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action.
Amelia Earhart
It's all right if people think we are idiots.It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in.
Robert Bly
We choose to embrace a quest, and we choose to live for adventure.
Chris Guillebeau
Because seeing someone’s heart ripped out, presumably for the first time, is something a person should accept naturally, like finding out there’s no Santa Clause.
Katrina Monroe
It is amazing to see all that is going on around us and it is people of action who make it all happen.
John Patrick Hickey
There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES... and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bothers me the most about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.
David Z. Albert
If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn't it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?
Maya Angelou
...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.
Edith Wharton
It has been said that the body is the temple of the spirit and the mind is the altar within that temple. When we practice hatha yoga we allow ourselves to come fully into the temple of the body—not simply as a tourist wishing to admire the fine architecture, but as a seeker on a pilgrimage of deep devotion and reverence.Meditation is the devotional practice of placing on the altar of the mind that which is sacred, holy, and revered. Just as you would not place garbage on the altar of a great temple, meditation allows a yogi to place on the altar of her mind that which is noble, pure, and free from attachment.
Darren Main
Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.
Anaïs Nin
Mohammed took his tribal customs and traditions and injected them into his new religion. Many of the ideas and traditions he implemented were already contained in the tribes he conquered, so in many cases, no major changes were required of his new followers. For example, most, if not all, of the tribes were polygamous. Women were seen primarily as chattel and under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. The communities of the new Islamic religion in the 600s CE often converted en masse. With minor modifications, they kept practicing their traditions. Mecca was already a major pagan religious shrine; Mohammed conveniently changed it into a place of worship and pilgrimage for Allah.Practically speaking, Mohammed unified a fracture region under a single religion and did it with a superior military. Conquest, war, and male predominance were the hallmarks of Islam. Despite political splits over the centuries, the tribal nature of Islam remains intact.
Darrel Ray
Do not sit still; start moving now. In the beginning, you may not go in the direction you want, but as long as you are moving, you are creating alternatives and possibilities.
Rodolfo Costa
Don't be afraid. There is no more to fear. Do not fear rejection. If you fear rejection by another you do not love the other, though you may profess it. You are only being anxious for his love of you. The free man does not seek the love of others, nor fear that his love will be rejected, for rejection - as is known from the night Christ was betrayed - does not destroy love, and it does not destroy the one who loves. Don't be afraid, you are not alone.
William Stringfellow
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
Ralph Ellison
It was so strange, the way that life moved forward: the twists and the dead ends, the sudden opportunities. She supposed if you could predict or foresee everything that was going to happen, you’d lose the motivation to go through it all. The promise was always in the possibility.
Lauren Oliver
Death like style is the removal of rubbish.
Will Durant
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell
Drab?" Soldier yelled. "I'll give you drab. Beat her, would you? Beat my wife? I'll feed your head to the vultures, you snotty little hamster with your golden pelt and buttery looks!
Kim Hunter
The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what interests you and that you can do well and put your whole soul into it-every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.
John D. Rockefeller III
If she had learned anything in the past weeks it was that there was enough to be ashamed of in the course of a messy human life without being ashamed of loving someone.
Shannon McKenna
And I choose to be aloneRather than wrapped in arms I could never need.
Merrit Malloy
So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
Gregory Maguire
If you going rape me, rape me already and leave me in whichever ditch you leave woman. Just stop bore me with your r’asscloth mouth
Marlon James
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
Fear and bigotry don’t need explaining. They simply are, like traffic jams and taxes.
Eileen Wilks
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
Stephen King
Great leaders get people to admit the truth because they know that dreams are buried under the lies they tell themselves, in order to feel okay with giving up.
Shannon L. Alder
Change what you can, darlin'. That's my best advice.
Dee-Williams
I survived by keeping my emotions in check – by maintaining my composure and tucking it all away. I managed to stay under the radar, skating through school without anyone truly remembering I was here. My teachers acknowledged my academic successes and my coaches depended upon my athletic abilities, but I wasn’t important enough to make a recognizable social contribution. I was easily forgettable. That’s what I counted on.
Rebecca Donovan
I refuse to stay a prisoner to my body. I am going to free myself.
Leigh Hershkovich
Seek first the kingdom of God and all other things will be added to you. Don't worry about the things. Seek Him first and watch Him work in you.
Andrena Sawyer
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
John F Kennedy
Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening.
Greta Garbo
Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise?
Anaïs Nin
When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
We sat like that for a long while, and when we stood up, all my sad things were in boxes, and Beck was my father.
Maggie Stiefvater
Reading like prayer remains one of our few private acts.
William Jovanovich
This is the part they don’t tell you about in the movies. Or in On the Road. This is not rock ’n’ roll. You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not Soho and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy and you are not spotting trains. You are not a part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself.
Joe Clifford
The work you have to do to accomplish your needs and desires is going to be a harder road than working on the needs and desires for someone else.
Kim Ha Campbell
He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.
Julie Orringer
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I didn’t want to upset my loved ones, but I couldn’t carry this alone.
Julie Flygare
…inside of a year, almost all of the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff, as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which is false.
Dexter Palmer
God is beautiful. His beauty demands a response that is shaped that beauty, and that is art.
Michael Card
This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?
Megan Abbott
Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.
Sylvia Plath
Would we not do well to have the pleasing of God as our motive rather than to try to elevate ourselves above our brother and outdo another?
Ezra Taft Benson
Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.
John Perry Barlow
Sometimes you can't speak, not because others won't let you, but because you are afraid of what you'll say.
Ally Condie
We do battle with our minds and deceptive hearts, that we may might lay our souls down upon the grace of God.
Mike Donehey
Once you choose to love yourself then everything else will be perfect.
Bryant McGill
This is going to hurt, but you will have to watch other couples be happier, richer and louder than you. Wait. No obstacle can withstand patience. Wait. You may not think so now, but there will come a time when you will be tempted to run away. Would that be right? Would that be fair? As every matriarch discovers, entire seasons will pass without reward. As your mate's peculiarities add up, what do you do? Wait!pg 45
Michael Ben Zehabe
If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.
Dave Barry
You are unique and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.
Martha Graham
Our common humanity, viewed realistically, can be as much a source of despair as hope.
Lawrence H. Keeley
Wars are won in the will.
Robert Fanney