Quotes by American Authors - Page 136

It is vital to see not only what Christianity asserts, but where its precepts came from – how they evolved from primitive, superstitious metaphysical claims into “Gospel Truth”.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic and above all survivors…we’re not that way from perversity, and we cannot just let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.
Piers Anthony
Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens.
Madeleine L'Engle
I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
I know, I'm an idiot!" Leo moaned. "A brilliant idiot, but still an idiot.
Rick Riordan
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.
Louise Erdrich
It is inconceivable that any form of intelligence would waste so much time and effort to make such an inferior piece of life—with all the 'ills that flesh is heir to,' and with all the misery and suffering that is so essential a part of living.If man is a 'fallen angel,' by the commission of a 'sin,' then disease and sorrow are part of God's inscrutable plan as a penalty imposed upon him for his 'disobedience,' and man's entire life is devoted to the expiation of that sin so as to soften the indictment before the 'Throne of God.'Man's atonement consists in making himself as miserable as possible by praying, fasting, masochism, flagellations and other forms of torture. This sadistic delusion causes him to insist that others—under pain of punishment—be as miserable as himself, for fear that if others fail to do as he does, it will provoke the wrath of his tyrant God to a more severe chastisement.The inevitable result is that Man devotes his life, not to the essentials of living and the making of a happy home, but to the building of temples and churches where he can 'lift his voice to God' in a frenzy of fanaticism, and eventually he becomes a victim of hysteria.His time and energy are wasted to cleanse his 'soul,' which he does not possess, and to save himself from a future punishment in hell which exists only in his imagination.
Joseph Lewis
He smiled and as his lips parted, little bits of solid waste fell from them. Hellelujah, we can only be what we are, I thought and wondered if I was as repulsive to him as he was to me. I don't think so, because even though he literally wore a shit-eating grin, I sensed he was genuinely happy to see me
R.E. Vance
Surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Laughter is to the soul what sunshine is to a flower.
Peggy Toney Horton
She gets on her tippy-toes and kisses him. Long, slow, deep. The kind of kiss where you can feel little pieces of your soul trading places as mouths open and breath mingles.
Chuck Wendig
Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T.S Eliot
Hope replaced fear. Light subsumed darkness. Strength, born of the power of this presence, mingled with Kathryn's own determination and reordered the last of her mangled body and soul, realigning them into all that she had once been.What she would now be was once again an open question.
Kirsten Beyer
Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.
Judith Viorst
Quem pausa para admirar a beleza se torna tambem belo.(One who pauses to admire beauty becomes, himself, beautiful.)
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
J.D. Salinger
Fights begin and end with handshakes.
Cameron Conaway
There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.
Eric Metaxas
Love must have wings to fly away from love And to fly back again.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith.
J. William Fulbright (Senator)
It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
Jonathan Safran Foer
He looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? DO we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.
Ved Mehta
I invited him over and he stayed forever. I feed him all my bread, the old peppers turned to mush & fluorescent mold, the chicken thighs unthawed & boneless. He ask for more so I give him my left leg. He ask for more & I give him my lungs & lips. More still, and there goes my bladder. He eats it all, all of me, eats the whole damn house, & I live forever in him or maybe it's the other way around. I swallowed. I swallowed him whole & didn't even notice him thrashing inside me.
Danez Smith
Regardless of your lot in life, build something beautiful on it.
Zig Ziglar
The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.
Michael Meade
Real ballplayers pass the stuffing by rolling it up in a ball and batting it across the table with a turkey leg.
Tom Swyers
Double-no triple-our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth.
Ronald Reagan
I don't know why they call them Cheerios, I ate an entire box and didn't feel any happier!!
Neil Leckman
But the power in this case is real indeed. You doubt the mystery and power of these aircraft and their markings? They are aeons old and yet they still operate!” t“You’ve seen them fly? Where do they go? I am wondering if there is a city we can reach.” t“Before you woke from your coffin, they flew indeed. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. What does that suggest?” t“Um. Some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born, maybe?” t“No doubt the spirit of prophecy escapes your lips! It must be prophecy because I cannot grok what you are saying.” t“Sorry. Won’t happen again. It suggests a search pattern.
John C. Wright
I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true thing that lay languishing there—that is, proceeded to propel that trueness, that felicitous trularity, from its place inside my head out into world life. The certain man stood waiting to receive it. His face reflected an eager accepting-ness. Everything was right. I propelled, using my mind, my mouth, all my muscles. I propelled. I propelled and propelled. I felt trularity inside my head moving slowly through the passage provided (stained like the caves of Lascaux with garlic, antihistamines, Berloiz, a history, a history) toward its debut on the world stage. Past my teeth, with their little brown sweaters knitted of gin and cigar smoke, toward its leap to critical scrutiny. Past my lips, with their tendency to flake away in cold weather—
Donald Barthelme
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When you are living the best version of yourself, you inspire others to live the best versions of themselves.
Steve Maraboli
There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.
Anne Lamott
Shit works out.
Scott Stabile
I trust that everything happens for a reason, even if we are not wise enough to see it.
Oprah Winfrey
One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered.
Criss Jami
You learn to ride on the path and keep your eyes open so you can see what is there, not what you wish were there.... And then after all you might discover that what is there is what you wished for all along.
Kate Elliott
In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I’d seen weirder things than a haunted shoe, but not many.
Richelle Mead
Somehow life had become a story problem, and William was horrible at math.
Jamie Ford
Life is not about control. It’s not about getting. It’s not about having. It’s not about knowing. It’s not even about being. Life is eternal, perpetual becoming, or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known, commanded, or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced.
Dee Hock
You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.
Peter S Beagle
The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.
Criss Jami
A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.
T.S Eliot
In my opinion, all boyfriends should turn out to be secretly wealthy.
Claudia Gray
Never eat anything bigger than your ass.
E. Lockhart
Sometimes things have to go wrong in order to go right.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
I think if you had been born a boy, perhaps you would have been satisfied with what the world offered you. That is how we are alike. We saw everything that was not ours, and we hungered. Do not lose that hunger. You will always have to fight for everything. Even when you already have it, you will have to keep fighting to maintain it. You will have to be more ruthless, more brutal, more everything. Any weakness will undo everything you have accomplished. They will see any crack as evidence that they were right that a woman cannot do what you do.
Kiersten White
Laboring toward distant aims sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best.
C. H. Parkhurst
Visualization is a process when we try to see the imaginative creation as a real future manifestation.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Trees, O trees, why can't you hold on to your leaves?
Marty Rubin
Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It's hard to imagine a more biblical definition of devil worship than an exaltation of the self, an exaltation of the ego, and a tearing down of that countercultural sign of the cross," Moore argued. This pride – doing things our way instead of following God's plan
Russell D. Moore
I am only yours, my Luna. I was yours from my first breath and I will be yours until my last.
Quinn Loftis
Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.
Junot Díaz
I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Mark Twain
Without honesty and integrity, success is nothing but a terrible failure.
Debasish Mridha
You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldn't go to heaven because, you know, I thought she wouldn't and I thought about God forgivin people and I thought about if I could ask God to forgive me for killin that son of a bitch because you and me both know I ain't sorry for it and I reckon this sounds ignorant but I didn't want to be forgiven if she wasn't. I didn't want to do or be nothin that she wasn't like going to heaven or anything like that.
Cormac McCarthy