Quotes by American Authors - Page 1323

Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing layers on layers of clothing, eating with knives and forks. It all struck me as so pointless and contrived. It was incredibly funny. It was like they were playing a game and didn't even realize it. It was like a joke I'd never understood before.
Patrick Rothfuss
Wrapped in a mother’s love is the most beautiful and safest place on earth for a child.
Debasish Mridha
There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.
T.S Eliot
This is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people habe a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.
Lauren Oliver
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.
James A. Michener
There is going on in the world today a quiet, bloodless revolution. It has no fanfare, no newspaper coverage, no propaganda; yet it is changing the course of thousands of lives. It is restoring purpose and meaning to life as men of all races and nationalities are finding peace with God.
Billy Graham
To have regret is to be disappointed with yourself and your choices. Those who are wise, see their life like stepping stones across a great river. Everyone misses a stone from time to time. No one can cross the river without getting wet. Success is measured by your arrival on the other side, not on how muddy your shoes are. Regrets are only felt by those who do not understand life’s purpose. They become so disillusioned that they stand still in the river and do not take the next leap.
Colleen Houck
God is our final say in who and what's negative and who and what's positive in our lives. It is best not to have this so over-simplified as the illusioned superstitionists have it; an infinite being's tests may not always be so flowery, and the things we may see as positive are in many cases simply desires of our sinful nature. We are to protect our spirit without falling into the narcissistic mistake of trying to protect our selfish emotions, which the latter, in turn, is more than unlikely to bring peace and happiness. But rather guilt and emptiness. When one walks around constantly, in his mind, attempting to separate positive versus negative people, he is already controlled by something even worse than those he calls the 'negative people', and that is before he spots it soon enough to avoid it as he hypocritically tries to avoid them.
Criss Jami
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
A true believer is a danger to humanity.
Al Jaffee
I won’t claim I’ve never in my life done anything I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I’ve made, that’s fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.
Curtis Sittenfeld
We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them....Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.
Donna Leon
Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Creativity is a higher level of thinking because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think “harder” via different thought processes.
Pearl Zhu
If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.
Jessa Crispin
...the third reason [for being nice to the underdogs in life] being that the wheel of fortune is always spinning, spinning. And just because you're at the top today doesn't mean it'll always be so. When you're at the bottom, you'll want someone to be there for you too.
Lauren Baratz-Logsted
...creative output depends on creative input.
Robert C. Martin
Going back to something is harder than you think.
Mitch Albom
When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.
Fred Rogers
You are my beautiful forever... a connection so deep that even an eternity doesn't seem long enough to spend with you.
Steve Maraboli
It is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. If there is a fire, please yell something else instead, like “Flames!” or “Smoke maker!” or “Bad hot!
Demetri Martin
Five GOP representative candidates this session have shocked me to my soul at how blatant they have trivialized rape. My prayers were answered in their defeat!
Diane Chamberlain
No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.
Murray N. Rothbard
If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
Sarah Vowell
The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?
William Saroyan
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.
Robin Hobb
I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I could just as easily have taken the train.”He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.
Kate Meader
God is never far from His people, even when they are far from Him.
Marcia Furrow
Sometimes wisdom came from strange places, even from giant teenaged goldfish.
Rick Riordan
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Cormac McCarthy
Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.
Tiffany Madison
When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.
Mark Twain
Sharing the same exact content, message or advertisements over and over again only showcases your limited content and a serious lack of depth in your message.
Loren Weisman
The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.
Ryan Boudinot
The sky is NOT the limit. Beyond the universe is.
Suzy Kassem
He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!
David Sedaris
self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
Stephen King
I'd never heard of them, but at that moment, it was the best song I'd ever heard. I went out and bought Ten and listened to it on repeat. When I listened to track five, "Black," it was like I was there, in that moment all over again.After the summer was over, when I got back home, I went to the music store and bought the sheet music and learned to play it on the piano. I thought one day I could accompany Conrad and we could be, like, a band.
Jenny Han
I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.
Annie Dillard
Falling in love is easy. Fools fall in love all the time. Staying in love is the test of time and the gift you give to one another daily….
James A. Murphy
The Light Fae. As a race, they were supposed to be all about good and decency, but there wasn’t a shred of either emotion within the walls of Usaeil’s castle.Neve observed Talin examining everything around him – from the castle, the Fae walking outside, the trees, and even the sky. His pale silver eyes missed nothing. She wondered what he saw, and how he catalogued things.His long, black hair had the barest hint of a wave to it as it hung to the shoulders of his pale blue shirt. He shoved one side behind an ear and tilted his head as if listening.She didn’t think he realized she was still beside him, not that she minded. It gave her a chance to fill her gaze with his sharply chiseled features.The hard planes of his jaw and chin were in direct contrast to his wide lips and thick eyelashes. It was difficult to look at Talin and notice anything but those beautiful eyes.Except when she did look down, she saw a body that made her hands itch to touch him. His shirt barely contained wide shoulders that tapered to narrow hips where navy pants encased his legs. Every muscle was honed and defined.As eye-catching as Talin’s personal package was, it didn’t hold a candle to what drew her interest – his bearing. The way he stood, walked, talked.In a castle full of Light who believed themselves above others, the only one who had the attitude and demeanor to carry it off was Talin.
Donna Grant
Are you able to proclaim that you have been through some things and you survived it? You are a survivor. And if you are a survivor you are not a victim. You have to change the language that you give to yourself and then you have to change the conversation that you give to others.
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
Cormac McCarthy
They were just so different, and she kept wondering if he'd realize this was a mistake at some point; if, once she stopped being the novelty, the random American, he would recognize who she really was -- a nerdy bookworm, a happy loner -- and move on.
Jennifer E. Smith
selflessness is the only antidote to evil. It provides the light that destroys the dark.
Michael A. Stackpole
I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home...
Juliann Garey
We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.
Teresa R. Funke
Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol's vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you're alone.
James Sallis
Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.
Dean Koontz
I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.
David Foster Wallace
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life.
James Wood
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Anaïs Nin
Here, I stole it for you. Why don’t you tell me what it’s for.”“Aw, Sophronia, how thoughtful. You brought me a present!
Gail Carriger
Parents believe that their greatest responsibility is to provide....its not...it is to prepare!
Regina Peacock
In 2030 we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever. 2030 is a dream and a goal.
FM-2030
Nafsha is so concerned with my virginity. I am beginning to think she would wed me herself. Alas, the only tool she might use to make me a woman is her tongue -- and it is far too sharp for me to allow it beneath my skirts.
Libbie Hawker