Quotes by American Authors - Page 1369

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.
Zoë Heller
Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have two natures within us, both struggling for mastery. Which one will dominate us? It depends on which one we feed.
Billy Graham
I don't know where we are, but we'll soon find our way home!" Le avventure di Pinocchio
Nancy B. Brewer
Political problems ruin meals. Let it be known as Eric’s Law of Lunch henceforth.
Garon Whited
Error sometimes supplies the surprise that makes life interesting.
Aimee Liu
Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.
Maxwell Maltz
A shared table is the supreme expression of hospitality in every culture on earth. When your worn-out kitchen table hosts good people and good conversation, when it provides a safe place to break bread and share wine, your house becomes a sanctuary, holy as a cathedral. I've left a friend's table as sanctified and renewed as any church service. If you have a porch, then you have an altar to gather around.
Jen Hatmaker
The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Don’t wait for things to happen. Make them happen.
Roy T. Bennett
When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.
Leif Enger
All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.
Dan Simmons
She crossed her legs and kicked out her feet, clad in thick wool socks and boots big enough to house a little old lady.
Drew Magary
Roland glares at Connor and Connor glares back. Then he says what he always says at moments like this."Nice socks."Although Roland doesn't look down right away, it derails him just enough for him to back off. He doesn't check to see if his socks match until he thinks Connor isn't looking. And the moment he does, Connor snickers. Small victories are bet­ter than none.
Neal Shusterman
When all the fights stop, so does the passion.
Crystal Woods
I don't get it - how you can feel like there are no consequences for living with your feelings on your sleeve.
Julie Murphy
I bring the girl to a museum, try to show her a little culture, and she turns a Chihuly into a giant phallus.
Nicki Elson
Renewal of the mind is good for the soul because it allows you to be focused and gain understanding of your life choices. It allows you to renew your spirit and become uplifted filled with hope. Take a moment to transform those negative thoughts into something more positive. And, you will discover anything is possible when you believe.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
....though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often utterly without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership....And that statement is equally valid for all relationships.
Leo Buscaglia
Tonight they granted at least one wish,” I whispered, and I lowered my head so our lips drifted over one another. “I love you Adam, no matter how lost you are…or I am…I will only ever love you.
Cassandra Giovanni
Building a family is an entrepreneurial experience.
Richie Norton
I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.
Chris Howard
If we allow our American mindset of consumption to spill into our understanding of what a Christian is, we are in danger of living irrespective of world family.
Holly Sprink
My one true love remains my self... I dump myself occasionally to keep it interesting
Cassandra Clare
Tell me again about the girl whose handshave no color. Whose hands are completelywhite. This time make them damned, oruntouched, or have her open a red umbrellaor point at some maple leaves and damnednear cry. Those hands. As freakish goes,I wish I had a tail. Maybe then you’d knowhow much I like you. It shakes me through,damn through. It shakes me. When she carriesa peacock feather. When she touches her neckor thighs. You’re a person. It’s not so bad.You have hands. You are a person with handsto hold things. Things you like. Tremendousthings. Tell me what you will hold today. Iknow there is room for everything. There is noneed to be ceremonious. Tell what gets let go.
Rebecca Wadlinger
Both of you be safe," Nessa said, looking to Turner. "Welcome to my messed up home, by the way.""Messed up?" Turner asked. "They seem like a loving bunch, all willing to kill each other off. What's family if there isn't any drama?" Turner winked at Nessa, and she nodded in reply. Drama was what the sidhe were all about.
B. Kristin McMichael
He didn't want to take advantage of her? Fine, she'd take advantage of him.
Katie Reus
When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.
Mae West
You are the artist, and your days the canvas. Will you create an original masterpiece, or live a paint-by-numbers kind of life?
John Mark Green
It was best to appreciate what you had and not yearn for more.
Rick Riordan
So we baked and sweated together. I like punching the dough. I told myself it was the moon and punched it senseless.
Susan Beth Pfeffer
You change our world for the better by changing our world for the better.
Scott Stabile
I happen to be partial to humans - most, anyway. Clowns, not so much. Those evil bastards never stop smiling.
Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
Remember your grandpa’s saying: kill them with kindness.
C.B. Cook
Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman, Even the more repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The sunken grave would fade away, probably in my lifetime. If I could avoid killer zombies for a few years. And vampires. And gun-toting humans. Oh, hell, the hot-spot would probably outlast me.
Laurell K. Hamilton
We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.Without them, we are empty.
Daisy Whitney
Maybe love was different for everyone, sometimes soft and gentle, other times a slap in the face—a doe-eyed vixen that called you out on your shit and set every inch of you on fire.
Keira Blackwood
Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal.
Jeff Lindsay
And Daniel?" She asked."Daniel was a player-""Hey!" "That's what they called the actors." Bill rolled his eyes.
Lauren Kate
My mom has since confirmed that my overeager go-to response - when I was going anywhere or had anything planned for me - was, "What's everyone else going to do?
Connor Franta
Marriage should liberate, not incarcerate. Real love shouldn't limit a person's potential, it should expand it.
Seth Adam Smith
There remains a natural career progression even though the tougher job climate seeks to delay it.
Miles Anthony Smith
I am angry. It is illegal for me to be angry. Remember: Don't get angry. It is illegal to be a black man and be angry. Right. Got it. I will remember this next time.
Kara Lee Corthron
The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you’ll achieve more. At the same time, we’ll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals. We’ll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness.
Leo Babauta
India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified.
Erin Reese
The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun.
Robert M. Pirsig
We gardeners are healthy, joyous, natural creatures. We are practical, patient, optimistic. We declare our optimism every year, every season, with every act of planting.
Carol Deppe
It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.
Anne Lamott
Now I feel free, and hope is creeping back. Maybe because I'm paying attention to what I have rather than what's missing.
Doug Cooper
If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff
Derek Sivers
At some point, while you were roaming the globe, making treaties and dividing the spoils of war, I quietly declared my own independence. I am the sovereign nation of Clio now. And there will be no terms of surrender.
Tessa Dare
Say that you don’t love him!” Amarantha shrieked, and the blood on my hands became the blood of that rabbit—became the blood of what I had lost.But I wouldn’t say it. Because loving Tamlin was the only thing I had left, the only thing I couldn’t sacrifice.A path cleared through my red-and-black vision. I found Tamlin’s eyes—wide as he crawled toward Amarantha, watching me die, and unable to save me while his wound slowly healed, while she still gripped his power.Amarantha had never intended for me to live, never intended to let him go.“Amarantha, stop this,” Tamlin begged at her feet as he clutched the gaping wound in his chest. “Stop. I’m sorry—I’m sorry for what I said about Clythia all those years ago. Please.
Sarah J Maas
He said he loved more than any other women he's ever loved and I had a black eye to prove it.
Crystal Woods
If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.
William H. Gass
There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too—unexpected—when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.
Elizabeth Strout
When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
Peter Thiel
Gratification comes when you help someone else.
Trenice Carter
Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.
Maurice Sendak
The feel of her skin as she struggled beneath, the life inside, the death without. The breaching of life and death, of survival uncaged inside him: a dark beast with violence and sex in its soul. In his soul.
Mav Skye