Quotes by American Authors - Page 1316

I want a faith that's so alive, it can be seen. I want a hope that cannot hide, even when I'm weak.
Building 429
He smiles at her before ever opening his eyes. The innocence in his face ensnares. Wraps her heart in a cocoon.They did this to him. The Society. Constructed that smile with malicious expectations. Now she must rip it off his face. Because she doesn’t deserve his love. Or Gage’s. This madness coils around her throat, darkening every inch of her soul.
Laura Kreitzer
Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!
Margaret Mitchell
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.
Sarah Ruhl
It’s perhaps more laudable to simply keep heading out into the world, than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.
Chang-rae Lee
And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.
Anne Lamott
I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period home room listening to the teacher divide up our activities into purposeful sections. I got a grip on her process, at last, by picturing it in the following way: A cow stands in clover. When she is milked, that is her work; when she is merely eating, that is her play. But the problem lay, then as now, in the realization that, in any case, she is standing in clover. Not a handsome or elegant analogy, but it approximates for me the habit of reading - standing in a world of clover, the eating of which is occasionally utilitarian, usually nourishing, because that's what one does
Toni Morrison
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.
Sally Mann
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
Here, her hand in mine was the one reality that severed us from the cold click-clack of Hell. I rubbed her hand and she sighed; wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary. In Hell there was no sense of place, because all places were the same. Uniform monotony. A place without place. A place without context. But, here, now, I could rub her hand and she would sigh. She was a difference. Perhaps each person was the only difference in all these halls of unchanging ranks of books, kiosks, clocks, and carpet, and that, and that, at least, we had to hold to.
Steven L. Peck
There are those who say that seeing is believing. I am telling you that believing is seeing.
Neale Donald Walsch
Who was to know what went on in a person's heart? A wise woman kept her own counsel.
Donna Woolfolk Cross
I don’t want anyone to hold back who they are. It’s not okay… it’s not a good thing
Connor Franta
But she didn't want to recall things. She wanted to live things — or as a compromise, relive rather than reminisce.
Betty Smith
One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.
Ashlee Vance
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
Carl Sagan
Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.
Frank Herbert
Screwing up is hardly a major mistake. Sometimes your wrong choices bring you to the right places.
Shannon L. Alder
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde
The spirit of Christmas is a sweet, internal peace that testifies of the power of kindness and charity.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Give everything away. Create an emptiness to fill again and again with love.
Debasish Mridha
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.
Amy Chua
Nature is self-renewing as it adjusts to maintain balance. Nature becomes even more vibrant as it yields to allow recycling. It is best to align with success and become nature with your health, wealth, and relationships.
Franklin Gillette
If you enslave me with fake money, and I realize enslavement is fake. Its in your best interest to set me free!
Tice Davids aka David T. Parker
Joel, lad, school is about learning to learn. If you don't practice studying things you don't like, then you'll have a very hard time in life.
Brandon Sanderson
No one wants to be entrapped by his or her addictive habit...
Asa Don Brown
Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
Brian Christian
Lest anyone dispute that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God but rather the direct and dictated Word of God, let us consider the uniqueness of the 66 books of the Bible. Why is it that we can tell that a certain book of the Bible was written by one author rather than another? Why do the different books of the Bible use different languages (e.g., Greek, Hebrew) and different vocabularies? Why are the styles of books like Proverbs and Chronicles so different from one another? It is because people were vessels for the inspiration of God, but they were not empty vessels; God did not bypass their humanity. The way in which these people recorded their encounters with God bears the indelible stamp of their place in time, their culture, and their individual personalities.
Aaron R. Yilmaz
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn't try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist.
Stephen Chbosky
Knowing what I know today about how deeply the word feminist threatens the existing social compact, to say radical feminist now seems to me almost redundant. (Robin Morgan)
Clara Bingham
You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
Nina Simone
The author emphasizes the importance of self-forgetfulness when his statistics were marred by a bad outing. He forgot all of that outing to such an extent that he quipped, "What was my name?
Jim Bouton
Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.
Sherry Turkle
The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.
Abraham Flexner
The fact that you can't see how much you're worth makes you worth so much more." She opened her mouth once, her brow bunched, but nothing came out. She didn't know the words to ask. I continued. "A diamond doesn't know how much it's worth; it's just beautiful because it exists.
Shelly Crane
Textbooks are not so much wrong as they are conventional – and an entrepreneurial idea must be contrarian.
Jim Manzi
Whenever you come upon a free supply of high-quality corn, provided unexpectedly right there in the middle of the forest, be careful! The people who put it there are probably sitting nearby in a stand, just waiting to take a shot at you. Keep your eyes and ears open!
James C. Dobson
I figured that when there's no way of knowing what the future holds it's just as easy to believe it'll be good as to believe it'll be bad.
Jean Ferris
Ethical vegetarians eat only plant-based food in order to show compassion toward animals and other humans and to benefit the planet.
Sharon Gannon
Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. Forgiveness is you not letting your hate and anger rule your life. Because it will, whether you realize it or not. When you free the offender, you’re freeing yourself. Your forgiveness or lack of forgiveness has no effect on them. It’s your journey. It’s your struggle.
James Russell Lingerfelt
Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred.In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become thevictor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing then it is the eternal dance or creation. The creator and creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing...and dancing...and dancing. Until there is only...the dance.
Michael Jackson
I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
I had the most boring office job in the world...I used to clean the windows on envelopes.
Rita Rudner
There is nothing like scrubbing toilets for a living to make you question the choices you have made in life.
Raegan Butcher
I have a computer, a vibrator, and pizza delivery. Why should I leave the house? " - Tabitha
Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Awakening Land" p615What was the world coming to and what hearty pleasures folks today missed out of life! One bag of meal her pap said, used to make a whole family rejoice. Now folks came ungrateful from the store, grumbling they had to carry such a heavy market basket. Was that the way this great new country of hers was going to go? The easier they made life, the weaker and sicker the race had to get? Once a majority of the men got weak and soft, what weak, harmful ways would they vote the country into then? Well, her pap's generation could get down on their knees and thank the Almighty they lived and died when they did. How would they ever have come and settled this wild country if they said to each other, "Ain't you afeard?" How would her pappy have fetched them the long way out here on foot if he'd kept asking all the time, "Are you all right! How do ye feel? Do ye reckon ye kin make it?" No, those old time folks she knew were scared of nothing, or if they were, they didn't say so. They knew they ran bad risks moving into Indian country, but they had to die some time. They might as well live as they pleased and let others bury them when the time came. Now Libby's generation, it seemed, lived mostly to study and fret about ailing and dying.
Conrad Richter
Children always forgive their mothers. That's the way God's designed them. He gives them two arms, two legs, and a heart that will cry 'mother' until the day it stops beating.
Nadia Hashimi
Do it for the kids! The ones who look up to you — especially when they are pleading for their lives." — Bats 2015
Fred Barnett
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
Wallace Stevens
Insanity is coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.
Morgan Freeman
The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again.
Al Goodman
The only difference between a grown-up's mistake and a child's is the size of the consequence.
Teresa R. Funke
Maturity is coming to terms with that other part of yourself.
Dr. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse
The most dangerous thing in life is an incompetent that has been given a gun and a law enforcement badge.
Steven Magee
Within the scope of universal time, it seems I’ll be dead a whole lot longer than I’ll be alive. So while I’m here, I will not worship death; I’ll worship life. I’ll live life to the fullest… victories, losses, successes, mistakes, love, and hurt… I’ll live and learn to the fullest; without apology.
Steve Maraboli
My heart broke when he died, split in half and fell down into my stomach or somewhere deep and muddy, and I'm still not sure where it is now. I hear it beating sometimes in my ears, or feel its fast pulse in my neck, like I do now; but in my chest, where it should be, it mostly just feels empty.
Jen Violi
The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
To reveal your greatness, don’t wait for a great opportunity. Find a simple opportunity to care and share your great love.
Debasish Mridha