Quotes by American Authors - Page 1357

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.
Kris Kristofferson
I know nothing I’m doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I’m doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look out the window and know what I’m seeing, and I know some people I like to be with, and I like what I do all day long, and maybe that’s all that realness is, anyway
Robert Penn Warren
I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.
Gregory Maguire
Surrounded by darkness yet enfolded in light
Alan Brennert
Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.
Yaa Gyasi
My friend Julie was cooking dinner in her kitchen one night. Her expression was blank as she stood alone working by herself. Her daughter walked in and gasped, “Mom! What’s wrong?” She said “Nothing. I’m fine.” In response, her daughter added, “Then tell your face! You scared me!” Emotional expressions can easily be misinterpreted when we are not aware of what people are seeing. Being deep in thought can look that way.
Susan C.Young
Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.
Santino Hassell
The roadmap to a rich, rewarding life is to follow your passion, to be willing to deviate, to never dull to the dawn of a new day and all of the possibilities it holds for adventure and discovery.
Toni Sorenson
Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.
Tom Hanks
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Today is such a lovely day, my heart is dancing with joy.My mind is flowing with timeand my soul is longing for your soul.
Debasish Mridha
We're both so into it, neither of us hears the footsteps until a snarl breaks us apart. We turn to find Morpheus standing there with enough rage in his black eyes to send the Devil packing for heaven.Jeb tugs his fingers from the rings in my belt but keeps a hand at my lower back. I touch my lips; they're throbbing and gluttonous, hungry for
A.G. Howard
Because—truth?—on the scale of significance, that stuff doesn’t even register. What has me pushed past the boiling point...what has me really, really upset is learning the woman I thought was so incredibly strong I married her on the spot...is actually a quitter who runs from challenge, a coward too afraid to even try, a liar who makes promises she won’t keep and a cynic too bitter to believe what’s right in front of her face. Is that real enough for you?
Mira Lyn Kelly
I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.
R. Buckminster Fuller
For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
Ursula K Le Guin
I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.
Thomm Quackenbush
NEVER BE SO BUSY BEING THE LIGHT FOR OTHERS THAT YOU NEGLECT TO SHINE ON YOURSELF
Qwana Reynolds-Frasier
Communication, collaboration, and creativity are the keys to run IT as a better business partner.
Pearl Zhu
We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true Mormons.
Joseph Smith
There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.
Diane Duane
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories.
John Adams
Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.
Andrew Solomon
I suppose,” continued Nate, “it’s not Bertie’s fault that he lacks the physical stature to carry a delicate young woman such as yourself a good distance. I believe he did not care to see you within the folds of my arms which were reluctant to release you, for I thought I would never see you again...
Margie Bayer
When you find a man you wish to marry, Tessa, remember this: You will know what kind of man he is not by the things he says, but by the things he does.
Cassandra Clare
The Gospel is entirely objective. The Gospel is completely outside of ourselves. The Gospel is not about the change which needs to be made in us, and it does not take place within us. It was completed in Christ, quite apart from us, almost two thousand years ago. The Gospel is not dependent on man in any way. The Gospel is distorted when we turn people's eyes to what is to be accomplished in them. We were not and cannot be involved in any part of Christ's historical, finished, redemptive work. The sinner must be taught to look completely away from himself and trust only in Christ and His work of salvation.
Trevor McIlwain
As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the ‘bathroom’ law. HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace.No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments.Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.
Bruce Springsteen
What was his place? he wondered. Where was his world? He had sometimes stood on the riverbank and told himself: Deep down in the cold water is your world; a rock lashed to your feet is your clothing for that world. To enter it you need only to climb to the place above the rapids, where the pool is, where it is always calm, so it must be deep, and there bury yourself and leave a world that is not your own and find a garden, long fields already cleared and cribs already filled, a new place in which a weakness in a man is a matter for a word or chide, not a break through which the terrors of the world flow in.
John Ehle
Good luck belongs to those who know how and are not afraid." John Hay to President Theodore Roosevelt
John Taliaferro
The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.
Ludwig von Mises
It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen.
Scott Belsky
..and when he let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn't realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in.
Laini Taylor
A crisp roast chicken would set the world aright.
George R.R. Martin
On the one hand you had people constantly fighting Hell; on the other, you had people constantly fighting Hell on earth.
Criss Jami
See, I didn’t turn into a monster. You’re safe here with me, Daisy. I control that part because I don’t allow it like he does.
Nancy Glynn
We can react with bitterness and hate God, as some do, or we can accept suffering as a natural part of life and a condition that comes with living in this world. We cannot avoid suffering, but we can determine our response to it.
Billy Graham
The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.
Robert A. Caro
School should be the best party in town
Peter Kline
What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.
Frank Herbert
The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.
Todd Strasser
Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America.
Bryant McGill
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
Niall Ferguson
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure..... Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?
Herman Melville
The way you live your day is a sentence in the story of your life. Each day you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point.
Steve Maraboli
It may be a cat, a bird, a ferret, or a guinea pig, but the chances are high that when someone close to you dies, a pet will be there to pick up the slack. Pets devour the loneliness. They give us purpose, responsibility, a reason for getting up in the morning, and a reason to look to the future. They ground us, help us escape the grief, make us laugh, and take full advantage of our weakness by exploiting our furniture, our beds, and our refrigerator. We wouldn't have it any other way. Pets are our seat belts on the emotional roller coaster of life--they can be trusted, they keep us safe, and they sure do smooth out the ride.
Nick Trout
Your opinion is not my reality.
Steve Maraboli
When you step up to success, use hard work and excellence as your rocket for winning and achievement.
Mark F. LaMoure
these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.
Khaled Hosseini
As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.
Robin Hobb
I am not sure if women are attracted to genius. Can you imagine the wise wizard winning the woman over the gallant swordsman? It seems rather otherworldly in more ways than one.
Criss Jami
Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
James Russell Lowell
Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269
IRVIN D.YALOM
All right. They’re on our left. They’re on our right. They’re in front of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time’.
Jeff Shaara quoting Colonel "Chesty" Puller
Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you'll never run out.
Ann Brashares
Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.""They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library.""Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.
Ann Patchett
So she looked upon the wolves, who were dwindling in number, and back at the humans who no longer cared for their own, and combined their spirits. She took the loyal, protective, possessive natures of the wolf and took the intelligence, emotions, and love of the human and brought them together. She designed us to be a pack.
Quinn Loftis
Frank didn’t drop you on purpose,” she said. “He’s not like that. He’s just a little clumsy sometimes.”“Oops,” Leo said, in his best Frank Zhang voice. “Dropped Leo into a squad of enemy soldiers. Dang it!
Rick Riordan
Just as there’s usually a space or interval between people passing on the street, even if it sometimes seems very small, a space also exists between thoughts. In your meditation, see if you can perceive this gap between thoughts. What is it, and does it belong to the realm of time? If it does not, then it’s unborn and undying, beyond all conditioning, which is a psychological carry-over from the past to the present.Whatever thoughts or internal conflicts come up—do nothing. Do not try to force them to cease or change. And don’t “do nothing” to still the mind, quiet fears, or resolve conflicts—all of this is doing something. It only leads to more struggling and prevents you from seeing the actual nature of thought and internal conflict. Genuine attention has no motive.This observation or listening doesn’t involve effort. Effort merely distracts you from what’s taking place in the instant. A kind of concentration exists that’s not forced. We’ve all experienced listening or paying attention to something we truly enjoyed. At that moment, was effort required for concentration to take place?
H.E. Davey
Live. For Now. For the time being.
Ruth Ozeki
Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?
Heather Choate Davis
I meditate, and when I do, Prince Harry appears in my subconscious and meditates with me. It's a little strange but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. Sometimes he's not the only one; the other day it was me, Prince Harry, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Coco the gorilla, and George Clooney. We were all floating above the earth looking down at the continents as they passed. George Clooney suggested I visit Providence, Rhode Island. The Dalai Lama sighed deeply and said he'd like to visit Tibet.Poor Dalai Lama.
Kristin Cashore