Quotes by American Authors - Page 1313

And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.
Beth Revis
I am happy that I can aid those admirable men, both living and dead, who by their pens or their tongues have aided the great cause of human liberty and universal happiness.
James Watson
Cultivating an attitude of gratitude begins with counting your blessings. In simpler terms, gratitude is expressing thanks for gifts we receive. Genuine gratitude helps us to see the little things in life that are often overlooked, yet so precious.
Dana Arcuri
Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time-consuming. It’s easier to raise $1,000,000 than it is $100,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.
Timothy Ferriss
I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.
Christopher J. Nolan
Sometimes things seem good at first . . . but we learn the hard way that they weren't as good as we thought.
Melody Carlson
My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Some old-school Madonna and Beyoncé and everyone in the room went from being eighteen-year-olds to being twelve-year-olds to seven-year-olds and back again, each song belonging to an age they had all shared.
Laleh Khadivi
A Wasn’t just isn't. He just isn't present. But you… You ARE YOU! And, now isn't that pleasant!
Dr. Seuss
The universe had an odd sense of fairness; it took away things one did not want to give up, and then gave things one did not ask for.
Laila Lalami
Secrets are like plants. They can stay buried deep in the earth for a long time, but eventually they'll send up shoots and give themselves away. They have to. It's their nature. Just a tiny green stem at first. Which slowly, insidiously grows taller, stronger, unfolding itself, until there it is. A big fat secret, right in front of your face; a fully bloomed flower perfumed with the scent of deception.
Judy Reene Singer
Smart thinking is to know what you think and why you think it.
Toni Sorenson
Renew your mind by washing it with truth: God's Word.
Craig Groeschel
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught Hell for.
Earl Warren
He was a professional athlete and coach, a Ferrari who lived his life in the fast lane. She was a girl-next-door kind of girl, closer to a golf cart than a sports car.
Emily March
Then, only then would she realize that the life that she created will extinguish with nothing to offer but the sorrow that she harvested in our souls and the holes that she dug in our hearts.
A.P. Sweet
With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.
J. Courtney Sullivan
When a man is small he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.
M.F.K. Fisher
If you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came. because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same.
Bob Dylan
A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there.
Laura Miller
Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.
Jeffrey Eugenides
We are not the passive victim of others' opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.
John Ortberg
The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.
Lois Lowry
In order to benefit fully from the education provided in the Theocratic Ministry School, you, the student, must make a personal effort.
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society
That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
Anne Sexton
Creativity bleeds from the pen of inspiration.
T.N. Suarez
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits
...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
George R.R. Martin
Negative actions cannot create a positive life.
Debasish Mridha
Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?
Dave Eggers
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.
Sharon Olds
Jesus told you all that I hid the spiritual wisdom from the mind and thus it could only be accessed from the heart. And yet men become “learned” in the Bible and study and pull it apart and attempt to put it back together again. Just like the old nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty, “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” My words cannot be put together again. My word cannot be “put together” by the mind of any man. This is why I gave the New Covenant. It was and is My promise to guide those who wander, home again unto My heart.
Debra Clemente
Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again
Og Mandino
Yeah," Chris said. "I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero.
James S.A. Corey
You'll have the right to be angry about Vault 7 only after you boycott dragnet surveillance data providers like Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and LinkedIn. The true threat is coming from the private sector surveillance profiteers.
James Scott
Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.
Lauren DeStefano
...the higher the expectations about unselected alternatives, the lower the level of satisfaction with the chosen good.
Michael R. Solomon
Life can be mysterious- particularly if your in love.
Ronald Hadrian
Of course words are magic. That's why they call it spelling.
Brian Holguin
I held back from seeing Jacob much during those weeks. He wanted only his mother, and I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing him like that. I stopped by to pick up his siblings and take them away, but I rarely went inside the house. After several days of this, I knew I must face the sight that my daughter faced daily. Inside, I approached the couch tentatively.Would I upset him? A few times when I had visited, he’d hidden his facein a blanket. I reached out hesitantly, touching his thin arm, the skin hot and dry as paper. He didn’t move, but I could see the rise and fall of his swollen chest. Suddenly, my legs gave way, and I dropped to my knees in front of the grandson that I loved so dearly. My hand shook as I lifted it to his soft, fuzzy head. I felt as though I was in the presence of someone very holy.“I love you,” I whispered, and when he didn’t respond, an even softer whisper, “Tell Grandpa that I love him and miss him.” And then, with a groan, “Dear God, don’t let him suffer.
Mary Potter Kenyon
I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.
Jodi Picoult
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate. Rather, it is something crafted hard by the hands of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Acknowledge that there is a defect in human nature, a built-in waywardness that comes from man’s rebellion against God.
Billy Graham
No one in Cattaraugus had much idea of what an artist’ colony might be. “Art” itself was viewed with suspicion, scorn. There was the sense, as people like my mother conveyed it, of a fraud, a hustle. “Art” was putting something over on someone, the way politicians did. “Art” was a sorry excuse for not being productive, useful. “Art” was vanity, pretension.
Lauren Kelly
I am Damian, the king of Antion, and no one will ever take someone I love from me again and live.
Sara B. Larson
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.
Raymond Carver
His overactive charm poured out like a lone drainage pipe after a flash flood.
Lida Sideris
Percy wakes me (fourteen)Percy wakes me and I am not ready.He has slept all night under the covers.Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter Where he is not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you Needed me, To wake me. He thought he would a lecture and deeply His eyes begin to shine.He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.He squirms and squeals: he has done something That he needed And now he hears that it is okay. I scratch his ears. I turn him over And touch him everywhere. He isWild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then He has breakfast, and he is happy.This is a poem about Percy.This is a poem about more than Percy.Think about it.
Mary Oliver
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
Anaïs Nin
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.
Michael Chabon
One of the most significant consequences of the proliferation of tests over the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21th has been this tendency of assessment to direct the curriculum. Like a huge magnet, assessment drags curriculum toward it. It should, of course, even if we accept the need for tests, be the other way round: the curriculum should be shaped independent of any consideration of tests: tests should be constructed and administered in another space, both literally and metaphorically, hermetically sealed not only form the teacher’s gaze but also – and even more importantly – from the teacher’s consideration. In practice, though, this never happens. It is inevitable that if you decide regularly to test children's performance on the curriculum, and if, furthermore, you make teacher’s careers and school’s futures depend on the result, the tests will very quickly come to dominate what is taught. Not only the content, but also the style and manner of the teaching will be influenced by the tests. Teaching will be about getting the right answer, irrespective of understanding.
Gary Thomas
A toastmaster is a man who eats a meal he doesn't want so he can get up and tell a lot of stories he doesn't remember to people who've already heard them.
George Jessel
You are the creator of your universe, and you are the destroyer of it too.
Debasish Mridha
The day you learn to be publically specific in your prayer, that is the day you will discover power.
David Wilkerson
why do I want to appear to be drinking more than I am?''Make it a habit. Men in their cups are fools, more often than not. And it can be wise to look the fool at times.
Raymond E. Feist
One of the nicest things you can do is to speak kind words about someone behind his or her back.
Molly Friedenfeld