Quotes by American Authors - Page 1388

They don't know the meaning of danger or fear or pain. It's only their pride that can be truly hurt.
Victoria Aveyard
For the children around the world without a home, say a prayer tonight.
Third Day
Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.
Margot Datz
Through Compassion and Care we are compelled to random acts of kindness and demonstrations of love.
Jean Hamilton-Fford
If you want to live in a state known for its corruption, come to Arizona!
Steven Magee
In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.
David Graeber
It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
Lev Grossman
If you often feel alone, ignored, or forgotten, think about this: closing the door and locking yourself in won't change anything—literally and figuratively.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgment will be implicit, and that when we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don't live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is a Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.
Flannery O'Connor
Volumes could be written on the problem of [drug] addiction. Millions of barbiturates are swallowed every night to help the nation sleep. Millions of tranquilizers keep us calm during the day. Millions of pep pills wake us up in the morning. The Bible warns that these flights from reality bring no lasting satisfaction.
Billy Graham
I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
Chuck Palahniuk
Personal integrity is about honoring yourself. Shifting from people pleasing and honoring your time, keeping your word to yourself, taking care of your needs, honoring personal and professional boundaries, honoring your goals and commitments that you made to yourself. Staying true to who you really are. Doing the right thing. Being kind and compassionate to others, being kind to you.
Eileen Anglin
The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The sexes in each species of beings . . . are always true equivalents-equals but not identicals.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
Listen, murderer, I don’t want to hear anything you have to say!” Jackson growled loudly.
Shakuita Johnson
The closest I’d ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful.
Tana French
I didn't know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.
Veronica Roth
Wendy Belle wasn't the type of model foreign princes married. Yes, tall and graceful, but she didn't radiate a Grace Kelly-like cold beauty. Her lips were too sensuous for that, her eyes too mysterious. Her face was beautiful and perfect in its own way. More than beautiful - interesting. She was the type of woman a man could look at for a lifetime and not get bored.
Dana Marton
They asked a wise man: Why don’t we ever hear you backbiting and slandering?He said: I’m still not happy with myself to start with others.
Ahmad Musa Jibril
Staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as…amazing somehow.
Nicholas Sparks
Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective.
Tommy Wallach
Writing is hard. Writing that is good, writing that is powerful enough to evoke a change or an authentic emotion or even just an idea in another human being is about as mysterious as an alchemical recipe, but there are a few known ingredients. Craft? Yes, absolutely. Devotion? A load - yes! Humility? Not vital, I suppose, but all my favorites include at least a dash. Before those can be added to the cauldron though, you must have a base of Honesty. Honesty is difficult to find in public spaces these days (and getting harder every goddamn day) but if you're quiet, and patient, you can usually find some hidden in your room somewhere. (It helps to turn off the lights, for some reason.) Problem is, Honesty is invariably bound to Vulnerability and the only thing that cuts the bitterness of Vulnerability is Courage. And Courage? Well. Courage is the hardest thing of all.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.
Anaïs Nin
Day of the Lord as all our days should be!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.
Abbie Hoffman
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of “How was your day?” try “What did you do in math class today?” Instead of “Do you like your teacher?” ask “What do you like about your teacher?” Or “What do you not like so much?” Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, “Did you have fun in school today?!” She’ll sense how important it is that the answer be yes.
Susan Cain
I am a recovering perfectionist, and like all in recovery, I do better some days than others!
Susan C.Young
The person with an itch can't understand why everyone's not scratching.
Marty Rubin
Creativity is inventing experimenting growing taking risks breaking rules making mistakes and having fun.
Mary Lou Cook
It is easy to surround yourself with people who think in the same ways, believe the same ideas, and live life in similar patterns. Many communities are made up of the same kind of people to the extent that we intentionally have to seek people whose stories are completely different from ours.
Holly Sprink
Victory's contagious" -Lorde
Jennifer Thompson
Your life is your journey. You have to enjoy it because no one can feel or see it for you.
Debasish Mridha
When one good thing happened to you, other good things seemed to follow.
Candace Bushnell
LIBERTY, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
George Washington
Tombstones and legacies are for the dead.I will live for now… Impact the world for now… Change lives for now… Laugh for now… Love for now… I will experience the length, depth, and breadth of life for now… Later will come soon enough and I will be so tired that I shall welcome the rest it offers…. But for now, ONWARD!
Steve Maraboli
I’m feeling very thin and vulnerable, in a good way.
Amy Layne Litzelman
I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.
Ursula K Le Guin
Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What's more, he's taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn't easy to believe in something after you know what it's really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code.
Linda Goodman
Mother is a humble woman. Very, very humble. She toils at a small café one hour distance from our home. She presents food and drink to customers there, and says to me, "I mount the autobus for an hour to work all day doing things I hate. You want to know why? It is for you, Alexi-stop-spleening-me! One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family." What she does not clutch is that I already do things for her that I hate. I listen to her when she talks to me. I resist complaining about my pygmy allowance. And did I mention that I do not spleen her nearly so much as I desire to? But I do not do these things because we are a family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
Jonathan Safran Foer
God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.
Thomas Merton
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.
Don Roff
God should always be our first thought, not our last resort.
Kate McGahan
The Christian life does not just evolve. It also requires specific decisions and public commitments to deepen our faith and obedience.
Mark Galli
It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.
Tennessee Williams
If it looks a bit rough, a little worn, with little splotches - those have the swetest flavor. The ones that are perfect on the outside tend to be a bit more bland. That is true about many things in life.
Jeff Wheeler
We are more likely to trust a person who is easier to read; they're easier to believe. Or we tend to think that an energetic and happy person will be more productive. Even traits such as competence, dominance, and courage can be conveyed by certain facial expressions and will stimulate unconscious bias.
Susan C.Young
People who repeatedly find career success learn to broaden their perspective and understand that there are always several roads to getting where you want to go.
Carla Harris
Just remember, the single most important thing in this world is love. You find it, you fight for it.
Laura Miller
At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.
Carl Bernstein
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.
Chris Hedges
C'mon, let's go in my room and abuse drugs and stuff!
Daniel Clowes
Resting beside her, he seemed to Ildiko a living statue, carved from dark granite into a form of supple elegance and power. He was beautiful, and the tremor change in her perception of him robbed her lungs of air.He opened both eyes suddenly, making her jump. Two shimmering gold coins stared at her unblinking. "Good evening, wife," he said in a voice raspy with the remnants of sleep. A closed-lip smile curved his mouth upward and deepened the tiny lines that fanned from the corners of his eyes. "You're staring. Do I have a fly on my nose?"Fighting down a blush at being caught gawking at her own husband, Ildiko lightly tapped the tip of his nose with one finger. "I was trying to find a way to kill it without punching you in the face. Lucky for you, it flew away.
Grace Draven
To those who, in spite of everything, still choose goodness.
Marie Lu
Courage, I realised, was not the absence of fear: it was the absence of selfishness; putting someone else's interest before one's own.
Michelle Cohen Corasanti
The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.
Shirley Jackson
Sometimes you can be touched by God, but not healed. Often when this happens, he is using your pain for a greater purpose.
Shannon L. Alder
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.
Bruce Weigl
Movies were movies, whether they were old or new. They always captivated me, pulled me into worlds where anything was possible. Worlds where there were adventures and surprises, and life was never dull. The only thing I didn't like about movies was when the credits rolled and returned me to real life.
Chelsea Sedoti