Quotes by American Authors - Page 133

You don't think he's crazy now?""Crazy, nah," Nicky said. "Soulless, perhaps.
Nora Sakavic
To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.
Patrick Ness
I bet you to believe me when I say again that we do not need a great house, Sarah. We only need a great love.
Stephanie Grace Whitson
With tact, exit from the world I’ve created, and we never have to speak of those good times again.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If asked for an opinion we’ll say what we think. And by “what we think” I mean the answer that comes to our mind first, seems most logical and requires the least amount of effort to articulate, while getting us in the least amount of trouble. Really that’s what our communication boils down to.
Aaron Blaylock
Building confidence is an ongoing process and something that can be accomplished over time.
Susan C.Young
For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.
Flannery O'Connor
CONTROL MYSELF?!! I'm a MONSTER! Monsters don't control themselves! That's the whole IDEA!
Jeff Smith
Things will get easier, people's minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.
Ellen DeGeneres
Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.
Sara Zarr
To me and the rest of the world your poetry is a gift.
Delano Johnson
A lot of childhood effort, worry, and whispering goes into cracking the codes of adult life. Children have to be accomplished spies.
Vera B. Williams
The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.
Raymond Chandler
There's no time to be modest. Reason will not work here. Without warning, I kiss Kartik. His lips, pressed firmly against mine, are a surprise. They are warm, light as breath, firm as the give of a peach against my mouth. A scent like scorched cinnamon hangs in the air, but I'm not falling into any vision. It's his smell in me. A smell that makes my stomach drop through my feet. A smell that pushes all thought out of my head and replaces it with an overpowering hunger for more.
Libba Bray
What kind of country has this become? Decent people can’t do anything without being watched.
Dan Groat
Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle.
Jim Butcher
My dreams had to be His dreams, the ones He placed in my heart. They couldn't be the ones I thought I should have, or needed for the purpose of making other people like me.
Stormie Omartian
I'll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won't be.
Francesca Lia Block
Every posting, message, or email creates an impression, a public persona, from which other people make judgments. We make judgments about others, but how often do we turn that critical analysis on ourselves?
Kent Alan Robinson
Temptations don't appear nearly as harmful as the roads they lead you down.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I don't understand how I can know so little about love and how it works. How I can be so bad at it when it's all I've ever wanted.All I've ever known is about leaving or being left.
Carrie Ryan
When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves.
Jack Kornfield
We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century. A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling. But that is precisely what I believe postmodernism best represents - a mood.
Ravi Zacharias
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I write books that I want to read. I write books that feature curvy heroines because I'm a curvy woman myself and it gets tiresome to read books about skinny women all the time. There's nothing wrong with skinny women, I just don't relate to their lives, and it would be really hard for me, as a writer, to fully inhabit that character otherwise.
Seraphina Donavan
I believe the stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save usto save us...Won't you look at the sky?They're driving from heaven into our eyes. And though final words are so hard to devise, I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes.
David Berman
Build a tangled bank.
Steven Johnson
I'm silent when there is a war inside me. There's a need to keep the people outside intact.
Darnell Lamont Walker
The hardest thing to do in life is to be yourself.
Debasish Mridha
And what of Nature itself, you say--that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life--all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain.
Henry Beston
To ask, 'How do you do it?' is already starting off on the wrong foot. When reaching for the stars, there does not have to be a 'how' if there is a big enough 'why'.
Criss Jami
To be a success, follow your love but not the process.
Debasish Mridha
Don’t pass along the beliefs and actions you disapprove of to your children. Loving-kindness is potent even when displayed during the so-called mundane tasks of daily existence. It’s so potent that if everyone could get into that mindset for a minute or even less, they would blast into a great ball of light. Even the newest (smallest) energies would blast through,”-Kuan Yin (from "Oracle of Compassion: the Living Word of Kuan Yin")
Hope Bradford
I bet the very first piñata was surprised. “Oh, hey a party! Cool! What’s the occa— HEY, WHAT THE HELL, KID?
Jessica Park
When boys unite hearts with all souls and creatures they become gentle men.When girls unite hearts with all souls and creatures they become gentle women.When humanity unites with the heart of the ONE, an era of peace and love shall return to earth.
Molly Friedenfeld
Food security is not in the supermarket. It's not in the government. It's not at the emergency services division. True food security is the historical normalcy of packing it in during the abundant times, building that in-house larder, and resting easy knowing that our little ones are not dependent on next week's farmers' market or the electronic cashiers at the supermarket.
Joel Salatin
Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.
Libba Bray
I fear for the safety and well-being of our children.
Chris Mentillo
Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.
Orson Scott Card
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Saying thanks to the world, and acknowledging your own accomplishments, is a great way to feel good and stay positive.
Rachel Robins
It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.
Chuck Klosterman
Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.
Billy Graham
If we believe in what God made and what God said, we will believe in the One whom God sent.
Billy Graham
Ethan was loyal and funny and protective. When we were little, he was the brother most likely to make me cry—and mostly likely to wipe away my tears.
Rachel Vincent
There is something deeply satisfying in shaping something with your hands. Proper artificing is like a song made solid. It is an act of creation.
Patrick Rothfuss
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
Rebecca Solnit
Life can seem like a gloomy wait in the thick of black shadows.And still there are those who smile at the darkness, anticipating the beauty of an eventual sunrise.
Richelle E. Goodrich
When you've prepared, practiced, studied, and consistently put in the required effort, sooner or later you'll be presented with your own moment of truth. In that moment, you will define who you are and who you are becoming. It is in those moments where growth and improvement live--when we either step forward or shrink back, when we climb to the top of the podium and seize the medal or we continue to applaud sullenly from the crowd for others' victories.
Darren Hardy
The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else--a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention--no longer the static concept of failure.
Sarah Lewis
Set the standards for what you expect of people and the correct ones will join your cause.
Shannon L. Alder
Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.
Bell Hooks
A full moon is poison to some; they shut it out at every crevice, and do not suffer a ray to cross them; it has a chemical or magical effect; it sickens them. But I am never more free and royal than when the subtile celerity of its magic combinations, whatever they are, is at work.
Harriet Prescott Spofford
Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
Jon Krakauer
Do you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates... which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
Jodi Picoult
When I was in school, I wanted to be W. Eugene Smith. He was a legendary staffer at Life, a consummate photojournalist, and an architect of the photo essay. He was also kinda crazy.That was obvious when he came to lecture at Syracuse University and put a glass of milk and a glass of vodka on the lectern. Both were gone at the end of the talk. He was taking questions and I was in the front row, hanging on every word.Mr. Smith, is the only good light available light?” came the question.He leaned into the microphone. “Yes,” he baritoned, and paused.A shudder ran through all of us. That was it! No more flash! God’s light or nothing!But then he leaned back into the mic, “By that, I mean, any &*%%@$ light that’s available.”Point taken.
Joe McNally
I want to try with someone who loves me enough to try with me. I want to grow old looking at the same face every morning. I want to grow old looking at the same face every night at the dinner table. I want to be one of those old couples you see still holding hands and laughing after fifty years of marriage. That's what I want. I want to be someone's forever.
Rachel Gibson
I'd heard that if you saw a Reaper, you saw what you expected to see, what you thought the agents of Death would look like. Personally, I wanted to see little, fuzzy pink bunnies, but apparently my subconscious visualized tall, scary, and skeletal. My subconscious and I needed to have a long talk.
Lisa Shearin
I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air you can kiss - and palms.
Jack Kerouac
It is easy to conform, but it takes great courage to stand up for peace.
Debasish Mridha