Quotes by American Authors - Page 1415

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.
Louis Sachar
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.
Peter L. Berger
As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person’s shadow is embodied in a person’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Kilroy J. Oldster
...do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.
Jack Kerouac
Some of these questions don't have finite answers, but the questions themselves are important. Don't stop asking, and don't let anybody tell you the questions aren't worth it. They are.
Madeleine L'Engle
You have to let go of who you were to allow yourself to become who you are.
Stacy London
Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.
James Tiptree Jr.
Enlightenment – whether defined as spiritual awakening, liberation, or other form of illumination and attentiveness – requires inner transformation brokered by study of our limitations and application of a welcoming spirit of conscious appreciation. Self-knowledge commences by looking for the sacred light of awareness essential to spawn profound change in a person’s character.
Kilroy J. Oldster
He closed the pages and stuffed them back into his jacket. Keeping his eyes cast downwards as he sipped his wine, he pulled out and lit a cigarette – almost a post-coital gesture. from The Willow Lake Group by Kelly Proudfoot
Kelly Proudfoot
As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.
Sharon Waxman
A book was mere paper splattered with ink until a reader’s mind gave it life.
Elizabeth Langston
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. Pirsig
God is colourblind. But we are not God. God does not need to see colour and difference. God is far bigger than all of that. We are human. We are destined to grow and learn from each other and with each other and there is no growing, there is no learning, there is no wonder and no majesty in life if we were like God. We were meant to see colour and difference.To deny these is to lack respect. To blind ourselves to these is to fool one another. To shun these is to deny ourselves growth and knowledge.
C. JoyBell C.
Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous.Hi, I'm Jazz and I am addicted to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across texture paper. My eyes squint against the loss of time within the pages of story. I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers.
Jazz Feylynn
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Joseph Heller
In life, the people whom you find the most challenging inevitably are the ones who have the most to teach you.
Julie Holland
Basic Principles:1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life -- including ourselves.3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator's creativity within us and our lives.4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.5. Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction.8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.
Julia Cameron
How to uplift others. It’s not a pie, it’s a cake. It’s not a ladder, it’s a bridge.
Richie Norton
They didn't understand what they were doing.I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
Michael Crichton
Sorrow fades," he muttered as he retrieved the last fragment, "grief dies, but Art lives forever.
Kenyon Gambier
Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.
John Pipkin
In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.
Marie Arana
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
Christopher Hitchens
Authentic Christian living has its own order of priority in our lives: God first, others second, self third.
Billy Graham
The world we know is dwarfed by the worlds we don't. Why not explore them all? Being out there in the wilderness, you have no idea what'll happen, really. It could be just you and this gorgeous night sky, or maybe you are surfing and some big ass wave comes at you, and if you don't ride that sucker, it'll put you under and have you for lunch, or you might turn a corner on a hike and there's some beautiful deer and her little fawn-- now that has meaning, all of those things, and I need more of that and less of trying to make money so I can pay bills to live in a way I just don't care about anymore.
Erica Ferencik
About winning and losing: It isn't important, what really counts is how you play the game. About playing the game: PLAY TO WIN!
Robert Fulghum
To find love, joy and peace for the humanity, let us promise to build a peace loving and a kind family.
Debasish Mridha
They built a city of their dreams, with a thriving gift economy and vibrant culture that encouraged all participants to let loose their wildest, most glorious freak. They weren’t protesting; they were celebrating.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Cats never weep, she told herself, no more than wolves. It's just a stupid dream.
George R.R. Martin
Education unfolds your beauty and lets you bloom to express your beauty.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead. A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom. As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money's worth by eating the bratwurst while still hot, I heard it. "Dave? Can you hear me?
David Wong
He wasted his wishes on wishing.
Shel Silverstein
You can't escape the existential suffering of life as long as you are living. So get used to it.
Debasish Mridha
Is there something which you have lost and miss terribly? Would the quality of your life improve if you regained it? Would it make you happier or healthier? Would you be more effective, efficient, or productive if it came back? If there is something which once was and you yearn for its return, find ways to regain its presence and place in your world.
Susan C.Young
These hands are unlike any otherstrongbut gentlecaringlovingand understanding
April Nichole
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Chuck Palahniuk
Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.
Eve Ensler
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.
Peter F Drucker
Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.
Sarah Addison Allen
It almost doesn’t matter what is real or unreal. It really matters what we choose to believe.
Judy Frankel
Her husband’s suffering and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object,—the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband,—everything, as it lay in the clear, frosty starlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.
Colson Whitehead
Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work.Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book.
Bernard Schaffer
Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.
Abigail Thomas
It was all in the means of expressing himself without anyone having to ever understand it.
Lauren Lola
My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold nonfood.
Tina Fey
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Michael Cunningham
I study Astronomy because it is the loftiest form of science available. It is the highest possible reaches that we can go to with knowledge and understanding. Every day, we get to look into infinity, into the everlasting, into time, space, space-time and into both the past and the future. Every day, we redefine what exists; we dance on the borders of reality and the unreal. I hardly even dare say the word, “unreal.” We have yet to prove that word.
C. JoyBell C.
Whatever you do to the animals, you do to yourself.
Ben Mikaelsen
I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.
Kimberly Novosel
Here's to real heroes, not the ones who carry us off into the sunset but the ones who help us choose our princes." - commentary on Castles on the Sand
E.M. Tippetts
I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.
Anaïs Nin
Things are always better in the morning.
Harper Lee
the day is all about getting connected.
Judith Shulevitz
Sometimes the hardest things to believe are the only things worth believing at al.
E.J. Patten
The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to earn a living, rather than sit around in offices and wait for clients. W.A. Clark (MT Senator, 1901-1907)
Bill Dedman
Persistence is often a detective's greatest ally.
Lara Adrian
I love snow for the same reason I love Christmas: It brings people together while time stands still. Cozy couples lazily meandered the streets and children trudged sleds and chased snowballs. No one seemed to be in a rush to experience anything other than the glory of the day, with each other, whenever and however it happened.
Rachel Cohn
The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them.
Brit Bennett