Quotes by American Authors - Page 1404

I guess when someone's gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments.
Beth Revis
I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?
Robert M. Gates
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
Ray Bradbury
The nonessential employees, the type of workers whom remain at home when it snows, are the quickest to complain about how the talented persons of an organization behave.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The past gave us experience and made us wiser so that we can create a beautiful and brighter future.
Debasish Mridha
Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
Ursula K Le Guin
When we realize every moment is sacred, we understand that every footstep is sacred, too.
Molly Friedenfeld
Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it
Thom Hartmann
The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.
Arlene Raven
Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.
Pamela Paul
You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.'Risa closes her eyes. She knows the dance...'It's the way of the world,' Divan continues. 'Look at unwinding, society's grand gavotte of denial. There will, no doubt, come a time when people look to one another and say, 'My God, what have we done?' But I don't believe it will happen any time soon. Until then, the dance must have music; the chorus must have its voice. Give it that voice, Risa. Play for me.'But Risa's fingers offer him nothing, and the Orgao Organico holds the obdurate, unyielding silence of the grave.
Neal Shusterman
Blame is the coward’s retreat.They think it frees them, but it confines them… Blame is also the coward’s warden.
Steve Maraboli
We're Human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill, today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill, today.
Robert Hamner
Everything human beings can imagine has been thrown at injustice, and injustice just absorbs it, and enlarges.
Greg Baxter
Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.
Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Observe the behavior of your environment carefully for clues as to what is acceptable and rewarded.
Bonnie Marcus
If God created great things with a point of vulnerability, it would lie in the reality that great things die in the hands of great ignorance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Percy Jackson," Hermes said, "because you have taken on the curse of Achilles, I must spare you. You are in the hands of the Fates now. But you will never speak to me like that again. You have no idea how much I have sacrificed, how much—"His voice broke, and he shrank back to human size. "My son, my greatest pride . . . my poor May . . ."He sounded so devastated I didn't know what to say. One minute he was ready to vaporize us. Now he looked like he needed a hug.
Rick Riordan
You have always known they exist. Everyone feels their presence. Few know the truth. The world of Real Immortals is about to be revealed!
John T. Montgomery
There is one experience that brings joy or happiness to every living being. The experience of love.
Deepak Chopra
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
Aldo Leopold
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
We can fly!“We can become butterflies!“There’s nothing at the topand it doesn’t matter!”As he heard his ownmessage he realized howhe had misread the instinctto get high.To get to the “top” hemust fly, not climb.
Trina Paulus
I think that wherever your journey takes you there are new gods waiting there with divine patience-and laughter.
Susan M. Watkins
The sensation Ihad experienced vanished like smoke from a snuffed candle, leaving behind wisps of namelesslonging.
Julianne Donaldson
Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.
Kevin Wilson
A person must claim the meaning behind his or her existence. How we live is our final testament to what we believed in and our journey through the corridor of time determines our decisive character.
Kilroy J. Oldster
What an optimistic animal man is!" said Rumfoord rosily. "Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years - as though people were as well-developed as turtles!" He shrugged. "Well - who knows - maybe human beings will last that long, just on the basis of pure cussedness. What's your guess?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Cormac McCarthy
Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.
Tom Wolfe
Words were the bane of her existence. She drowned in them when all she wanted was silence, only to have them recede when one desperately-sought phrase would be the key to her salvation. Most things were like that: excess in times of abundance, and shortages in times of dearth. Life, she realized, was an unbalanced scale, and would never weigh in one's favor, struggle as one might.
Nenia Campbell
Pain had a way of breaking time down. I thought about the next minute, the next hour. There wasn't enough space in my mind to put all those pieces together, to find words to summarise the whole of it. But the "keep going" part, I knew the words for.P151
Veronica Roth
The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.
Juliette Lewis
Would it really be so bad if you slowed your life down even a teensy bit? If you took charge of the ingredients of your food instead of letting corporations stuff you and your family, like baby birds, full of sugar, corn products, chemicals, and meat from really, really unhappy animals?
Catherine Friend
There's no such thing as the middle of nowhere. Something is happening everywhere. You just have to find the story in it.
Daryl Farmer
The sun, rising and setting in splendid colors, never grows tired of its admirers―much like a lady, aglow with grace, never grows tired of chivalrous acts or pretty flowers.
Richelle E. Goodrich
He must have stood there for a long time, making a list of all the terrible things he had done—almost killinng me was one of those thingss—and another list of all the good, heroic, brave things he had not done, and then decided that he was tired. Tired, not just of living, but of existing. Tired of being Al.
Veronica Roth
Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees. ... Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.
A.W. Tozer
I loved Duncan and I loved being his mother but I wasn't sure I was prepared to be only his mother. Before we were even married, when Russell and I had gotten our dog, Humbert, I had walked him early one morning, and as I stood on a line for coffee, someone had offered him a dog treat. "I always ask the mommy first," she said, looking at him expectantly. "Oh, I'm not his mother," I said, "I'm just his...friend," and she looked at me with complete contempt. "You're his mother," she had scolded, "Poor dog.
Jennifer Belle
Either we are running ‘from’ what we fear, or running ‘to’ what we fear. The former is a choice driven by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Anything you do, do with love and enthusiasm.
Debasish Mridha
An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.
Harlan Coben
I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.
Harold Geneen
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.
Ursula K Le Guin
Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
Flannery O'Connor
The man was a bully. A bully who'd elevated himself to a high-level position, but a bully just the same. No amount of flattery would change how I saw him.
Gwenda Bond
I understand that for beginners it isn't that easy to sit down, close your eyes, and settle into stillness. Your thoughts have gotten used to making SO MUCH NOISE! They have enjoyed too much influence over you to simply fade the first time you try.
Russell Simmons
So I fight. I fight the only way I know, with thinking of Ky, even thought the pain of missing him is so strong I can hardly stand it... I think of him, I think of him, I think of him.
Ally Condie
I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art. The best art are those dime novels. People will put those books in a museum one day. Artists will make paintings of them. They're beautiful. And for everyone. That's how I want my art to be.
Andy Warhol
I had to admit the man looked amazing in jeans. The ancient denim clung lightly to his hips and followed the long lines of some remarkable thigh muscles. And although I made a point of not checking out his rear view, my peripheral vision was having a very good day.” ~ Haven Travis on Hardy Cates
Lisa Kleypas
The most beautiful thing in the world is a heart that is changing.
Anasazi Foundation
Hilary peered over her shoulder at Cam, letting her eyes lazily take him in, "See you soon, tiger."tThey both watched as the door closed behind her. tCam made a moaning sound with a wild expression across his face. "She's going to be fun to tame.
Stacey O'Neale
If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirtin her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit.Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.
Jalina Mhyana
He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede.
Thomm Quackenbush
No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.
Sonia Sanchez
Sunny held Kit, and Violet held Klaus, and for a minute the four castaways did nothing but weep, letting their tears run down their faces and into the sea, which some have said is nothing but a library of all tears in history.
Lemony Snicket
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues.
Paul Goodman
If Luce had to rank the worst moments of his existence, Abaddon's betrayal would be up there with the day he was cast into the pit by his own brother.Neither came close to the sting of losing Serah, though.
J.M. Darhower
Always have there been great numbers of individuals who were very much eager to fight for good causes. Always there were these, but then there were even greater numbers of trendies who would then become wholly and completely misguided in the efforts.
Criss Jami
We're like America's little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.
Evan Wright