Quotes by American Authors - Page 1392

Truth is like poetry.And most people fucking hate poetry.
Adam McKay
When she walks in that first Monday, of course I am awake - I am always up these days - I decide to lay it down. “Look”, I say, “I snort Ritalin. That’s what I do. I snort it all day long. I crush up the pills and inhale them like cocaine. I’m up to about forty a day. I can’t stop. I am planning to get help, to check into rehab or something like that, as soon as this book is finished. In the meantime, I can’t stop, and I am not going to.” She looks at me impassively. “I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t have to see. Either way, it’s going to happen, so it’s just about how bad it’s going to make you feel to watch.”She doesn’t seem to know what to say. She stares. I think she is going to cry. I think she wants to give me a hug, maybe, but there is an invisible cage, a delicate netting of glass, an ice sculpture surrounding me that no one can walk through. I’m cold. I’ve frozen into someone who just can’t be touched. I dare you to try.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth...
Sinclair Lewis
When focusing only on one's credentials one boasts his own incompetence in his capacity for discernment of the individual.
Criss Jami
Are you destitute for the Fire of God? Nothing else matters! Possess ye God's Fire! All else is void!
Pazaria Smith
The young princess was as beautiful as daylight. She was more beautiful even than the queen herself
Marissa Meyer
If you want to change anything or your surroundings, change your perception; it will change everything.
Debasish Mridha
Don’t let your idea of God be limited to the imagination of others. Don’t let them define your God and don’t let them tell you how to express your faith.
Steve Maraboli
If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.
Richard Rohr
Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone.
Shannon L. Alder
Just as some of Jesus' first-century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of constant fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday lives. We may think that it would be a great deal easier to believe if the world erupted around us, if some savior came down and offered as evidence the bloody scars in his side, but what the Gospels suggest is that this is not only wishful thinking but willful blindness, for in fact the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
Christian Wiman
I would have run awayInto the forestTo live in a nestMade of dreamsAnd green leaves
Margarita Engle
Simon stepped forward and clapped him on the shoulder. "Nothing better than making a maid happy, is there?""Aye, there most assuredly is." Simon cocked a puzzled brow."Skewering my meddlesome brother would definitely be better."Simon laughed. "Then I'd best go pack so that I won't be directly in your sight for the next few minutes.""You do that, Simon, and while you're at it, make sure to find your common sense and bring it along as well.
Kinley MacGregor
The wisest man is he who is kind to all, compassionate to many, and rude to none.
Debasish Mridha
When you're feeling down...SmileStand tall, shoulder backCompliment someoneHelp someone in a big or small wayListen to musicClean your spacePlan your dayDo what your brain tells you can’t or shouldn’tPray (or meditate) with a focus on gratitudeBreathe
Charles F. Glassman
Her occupation was the worst that anyone could think of. No guest in the park had to think of it because, unlike the wandering dwarf women, her job had no bearing on paper.
Pam Jones
If it wasn't for flash backs, I wouldn't remember anything at all.
George Clinton
It is my conclusion that the human mind and body is essentially a single cell rechargeable battery that is charged from the atmospheric DC voltage and the Earth.
Steven Magee
In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners
Starhawk
We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning.
Bryant McGill
It's hard to get enough of something that almost works.
Vincent Felitti
I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see …
Henry James
The sales process should be as natural and fluid as a well choreographed dance.
Butch Bellah
The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. ... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science.
Philip Abelson
I wouldn't want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely
Patricia Cornwell
Whaaaaaat is going on?" May whispered out of the corner of her mouth."I'm sort of comforted by the fact that I can't figure it out," Jack responded.
James Riley
The Ten Commandments are just as valid today as they were when God gave them. They reflect the moral character of God, and they also provide the foundation of right living with others.
Billy Graham
Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?
Laura Dave
When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and breaks her.
Mary E. DeMuth
Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.
Woody Allen
His jaw was clenched. His breathing became labored, like he was carrying something heavy. She watched the muscles in his throat working, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed, hard.Victory.At that moment, she knew he wouldn’t try to stop her. She stepped forward, raised herself up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. Softly. Then she pulled back, challenge unspoken.Come on, Sam. Fight for me.
Isobel Irons
A shame. As promising as a sky full'a rainbows but as useful as a bag'a dirt.
Quoleena Sbrocca
There's a difference between being alive and living.
Gabrielle Zevin
You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.
Cormac McCarthy
It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.
Alfred Hayes
I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.
Catherine Lacey
A lot of who you were in middle age was determined before you had a chance to manipulate, control, or eve understand the things around you. It was no mystery, he thought, why some old people's minds returned to their youth; the wonder of those years, the discoveries, the first experience with the dirty secret of death, and the first stirrings of lust and love were indelible, drawn in luminous colors on clean canvas. Indeed, the first sex act was so mind-boggling that most people could still remember it clearly twenty, thirty, sixty years later.
Nelson DeMille
Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.
Dinaw Mengestu
Beauty is harsh.
Cassandra Clare
The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.
Mitch Albom
The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
Walker Percy
I wish people had as much enthusiasm about unfucking the planet as they did about sports. Who wins on Sunday is pretty goddamned trivial compared to just about anything else.
Michael Brewer
All right," Mom said. She gave Samuel a stern look,"Now I don't know what's going on between you and my daughter and Adam Hauptman-""Neither do we," I mutteredSamuel grinned "We have it pretty well worked out as far as the sex goes. Adam gets it-someday-and I don't. But the rest is still up for negotiation.
Patricia Briggs
Authentic empowerment is the knowing that you are on purpose, doing God's work, peacefully and harmoniously.
Wayne W. Dyer
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
Brenda Ueland
There’s always people looking the other way when the miracles take place, people who want only a good night’s sleep when the stars are dancing, comets falling, the angels leaning low out of midnight with their trumpets, their cantatas of longing.
Paul Russell
Don’t care about day to day things, don’t care about the mundane, but care about what matters.
Debasish Mridha
If I read our story backwards, it's about how I un-broke your heart, and then we were happy until one day, you forgot about me forever.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Beauty is being who God made you to be. Make the most of what you have. He gave you what you are. Nothing about you is by accident. The right people will love you unconditionally, just as He does.
Kate McGahan
I have found that the morning is far more accessible when a good book awaits you.
Chris Matakas
It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.
John Steinbeck
So,” he said, as he continued to pull on her arm, bringing her closer. “Do you accept my apology?”Viola opened her mouth to say not yet,’ because she couldn’t afford to give up the power she currently held over him.That was when he kissed her.
Isobel Irons
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.
Chuck Klosterman
Hire new field systems maintainer" was near the top of my to-do list, right under "uncover massive political conspiracy," "avenge Buffy's death," and "don't die.
Mira Grant
Two years ago, she had inherited The Milked Duck Ice Cream Shoppe in downtown Bliss from Great Aunt Agnes. After gettingher degree in sociology and then bouncing around the country, waffling from job to job and one relative’s couch to another, she’d finally found where she fit: creating and serving happiness to the locals and the destination wedding tourists in Bliss.
Jamie Farrell
And she was well-enough acquainted with loneliness to understand that the worst part wasn't having nobody caring for you - it was having nobody to care for.
Tessa Dare
As a kid, snow served the useful purpose of closing schools. As an adult—it shuts down any activity a decent, suntanned person over the age of thirty-five enjoys. I don’t do snow forts, snowballs, snow angels, snowmen, snowmobiles, or snowshoes. I don’t like to walk in it, drive in it, ski on it, or sled on it. Other than that, snow is just ducky.
Michael Holbrook