Quotes by American Authors - Page 1318

We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments - that is, the sacrifices - to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.
William Deresiewicz
Thoughts guide you everyday. They become your choices. If you're not happy with your life, change your thoughts. Think more positive.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
When you think of someone with love, your heart dances with joy.
Debasish Mridha
When a person thinks you are too good for them, they create a wall without even taking a chance. The best life that God has in store for a person is often thrown away because of what he or she thinks they deserve. True love is not the life you had, but the life you never realized you could have.
Shannon L. Alder
Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
Ben Marcus
Every woman feels. It just takes the right man to make things combust.
Barbara Delinsky
In order to honor God with your wealth, you first have to admit that you are rich. Most people won't do that. It's not normal.
Craig Groeschel
Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain
Henry Ford
So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so. them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'In balance.'.'And what is the deal?' I asked.We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.
Barbara Kingsolver
So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum.
Steven Soderbergh
Reincarnation?”He shrugged. “I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s real. But I’ve never seen anything that disproves it either. I believe the afterlife is better than what we have here—and it would take something extraordinary to make someone willing to come back.
Patricia Briggs
The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.
Hunter S. Thompson
All things are accomplished by the meditative act of releasing illusions and simply becoming.
Bryant McGill
I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.
Chaim Potok
I'm a competitive person but I have never understood people's competitiveness at the expense of their colleagues.
Geraldine Ferraro
Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.
Donalyn Miller
One—about cigarettes—I was pleased to see that anticigarette ad on the back issue of Hustler. I'm more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life—and I think that's an important difference.
Paul Krassner
There’s a power I only feel when I’m with Isaiah. A boldness I’ve never possessed in my life. Never in a million years would I have imagined I’d be the girl who’d say she was falling fast for a boy before he did. Never in a million years did I think I’d be lying in bed with a totally ripped guy that has his shirt off. But Isaiah has this effect on me. He makes me feel stronger than I really am.
Katie McGarry
And thanks to Christina McMullen, who has taught me that common sense and intelligence need not have any correlation whatsoever.
Lois Greiman
The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.
Stephen King
The soft, fluttering cry of a barn owl rose over the churchyard. Silent men flowed out of the dark.
Parke Godwin
Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.
Nathaniel Tarn
Don’t throw good ideas away until you’ve considered all of your options.
David Eddings
Everyone loves a goddamned trainwreck, after all.
Carolyn Drake
Someone was recently telling me how inspirational he is to his team - apparently he mistook whether that was a good thing or bad. Turns out - they were inspired to keep him busy so he stayed out of their hair!The morale of the story - we all think we're inspirational, a great leader, know what's right, etc... If we didn't, we'd act differently. It's a true leader who listens to the real message and recognizes what they aren't.
Colleen Ferrary Bader
I don't care who he is. He needs to disappear." Ransom turned and called out the window. "For the love of G-d man. I have England's sweetheart bent over the desk and panting for me. Go away and come back tomorrow.
Tessa Dare
As Christians we are constantly bombarded with attitudes and values which are contrary to biblical teaching.
Billy Graham
The thing is to sift outthe important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bringhints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil forthe life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragmentfor the sentence.
Richard Jackson
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
Robert A. Heinlein
The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? … To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.
Robert Haas
Either help or give up. Right now devil's advocate is just another name for asshole.
James S.A. Corey
I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky.
Dave Eggers
I don't want adventure.""I think you do. I think in a moment of weakness, you might surprise yourself.
Lisa Kleypas
Making a dream into reality begins with what you have, not with what you are waiting on.
T.F. Hodge
to hell with literaturewe want something redblooded
E.E. Cummings
It will be impossible to catch all the rats, my love,” he says. His hand brushes against mine. “Sooner or later, one will squeeze through the cracks. You need to be more careful.
Marie Lu
Silos build the wall in people’s minds and tie the knots in their hearts.
Pearl Zhu
Beautiful princesses and beautiful, strong queens are brainwashed into thinking ho’s and B****’s are virtuous titles.
Delano Johnson
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
Clay Shirky
In the future he would remember to be kinder to her clothing... provided that she didn't look so damn good in them.
Jacquelyn Frank
These religious types were the fans that Jesus seems to have the most trouble with. Fans who will walk into a restaurant and bow their heads to pray before a meal just in case someone is watching. Fans who won’t go to R-rated movies at the theater, but have a number of them saved on their DVR at home. Fans who may feed the hungry and help the needy, and then they make sure they work it into every conversation for the next two weeks. Fans who make sure people see them put in their offering at church, but they haven’t considered reaching out to their neighbor who lost a job and can’t pay the bills. Fans who like seeing other people fail because in their minds it makes them look better. Fans whose primary concern in raising their children is what other people think. Fans who are reading this and assuming I’m describing someone else. Fans who have worn the mask for so long they have fooled even themselves.
Kyle Idleman
A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there.
J.R. Ward
Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
Robert Henri
SHIT, OR GET OFF THE POT
Rupert Murdoch
Sometimes cheap is inexpensive. Sometimes it's cheap.
Charles Fishman
At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.
Robert G. Ingersoll
When you enter a room, a social situation, or a business meeting, be mindful of cues; read between the lines to better understand people and events. What do these things tell you?
Susan C.Young
Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.
Sam Tanenhaus
Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores.
Criss Jami
I'm impressed when men go the distance to show they give a damn. That says nothing about the woman and everything about the man.
Donna Lynn Hope
Greatness comes with patience.
Suzy Kassem
Cheap booze is a false economy.
Christopher Hitchens
Success goes to the ones who do. Get up. Show up. Throw up if you have to. Do it afraid, but do it no matter.
Toni Sorenson
People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)
James Baldwin
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
Anaïs Nin
Sometimes she could swear that she saw, in Joe Grey's eyes, a judgment far too perceptive, a watchfulness too aware and intense for any cat.Charlie didn't understand what it was about those two [cats]. Both had a presence that set them apart from other felines.Maybe she just knew them better. Maybe all cats had that quality of awareness, when you knew them.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.
Jodi Picoult
It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free.
Rachel Held Evans
And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.
Maurice Sendak