Quotes by American Authors - Page 1421

You don't have to know someone your whole life to know them. Not really. Lonely is the same everywhere.
Lamar Giles
I believe it is the responsibility of each of us to pass on whatever we have learned in our time here. If I reach enlightenment after meditating in a cave for 10 years, but do not pass on this teaching and it dies with me, this was a wasted life. I believe we are here to help one another, and each of us has a unique wisdom that we should do our best to convey to others.
Chris Matakas
Because they’re wet, Noah’s jeans are a bit stubborn sliding down, but he’s successful, and in the mirror I’m drawn to his naked body. I love the raw power of his shoulder blades and the curve of his back that trails lower to his...my mouth dries out...oh, crap...his butt is...how do I describe something so exquisite?Everything about Noah is sexy, and as he bends to pull the jeans off his f
Katie McGarry
CNN found that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America. Women admire her because she's strong and successful. Men admire her because she allows her husband to cheat and get away with it.
Jay Leno
For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company's 'I'd Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You' line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises.
Dexter Palmer
The truth of existence was a happiness separated from the easy happy life. There was music in the forest. There was clean air where nobody could hear him breathe.
Daniel J. Rice
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
Pat Monahan
There are so many reasons why I should not kiss you right now. Believe me when I tell you that only moments ago those reasons played out in my mind, but for the life of me, at this very minute, I cannot recall even one of them," Kathel said.
Madison Thorne Grey
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who’s who straight. So don’t be surprised if they don’t remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.
James Purdy
It's morning now, and I miss the soft rasp of her voice already. Ugh. I'm in trouble, aren't I?
Pat Shand
It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.
Pat Conroy
Sometimes I hate it so much,” she said. “Always having to pretend.” Paul gripped her fingers tighter. “This is America,” he said. “We’re all pretending.
Graham Moore
Got it!" Mike announced. The GE record player slowly whirred to life, creaky as an old carousel."Nice," John said, raising a beer in salute. "What'd you do?""It wasn't on," Mike said.
Eric Spitznagel
Ever wanted more. After all, women weren’t equal to men. They were better. Certainly not in strength or their skill in killing things, but when it came to propagation women absolutely trounced men. Men could bring some chips to the party, but that shindig was always going down in the belly of a woman. And considering that the hardest part of gathering food now was finding a parking spot, strength and killing things were significantly less high on the list of key survival traits.
Matt K. Turner
For many of us, the job-hunt offers a chance to make some fundamental changes in our whole life. It marksa turning point in how we live our life.It gives us a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go deeper into the subsoilof our soul.It gives us a chance to wrestle with the question, “Why am I here on Earth?” We don’t want to feel thatwe are just another grain of sand lying on the beach called humanity, unnumbered and lost in the billionsof other human beings.We want to do more than plod through life, going to work, coming home from work. We want to findthat special joy, “that no one can take from us,” which comes from having a sense of Mission in our life.We want to feel we were put here on Earth for some special purpose, to do some unique work that onlywe can accomplish.We want to know what our Mission is.
Richard N. Bolles
Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.
Nancy Mairs
All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.
Ada Limon
I'm so tired of people who can't be honest. "Beauty is on the inside" Really?? Then why do rich guys & successful guys always end up with beautiful women but they have lousy personalities?.
Colin Cowherd
My life got happier when I trusted my gut to tell me when to open the door or close the door. There is joy to be found in keeping away from people & situations which could harm my self-respect my peace my worth.
Karen Salmansohn
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we're stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It's not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
Stephen King
I was out of salt so I threw pepper over my left shoulder for luck and the poor guy behind me almost sneezed himself to death.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something
G. Willow Wilson
That tank," Bucktooth pointed at the gas gauge on the dashboard of the decidedly unfredneck-like '65 Dodge Dart, "is almost empty. We ain't going much farther."t"Indeed it is." A solemn Phosphate agreed. "I suggest we stop the car and weigh our options."t"What options?" Professor Buckley asked. "Why do-that is- we've been traveling up and down this path for over an hour without seeing anyone or encountering anything. Even the doughnut shop cannot be relocated. In light of this, what options do we have?"tIt was difficult to argue with the ex-history teacher's typically alarmist position. Brisbane's reliable old automobile had indeed been expending its remaining fuel supply in what seemed to be a hopeless effort to exit the unnamed dirt path. After leaving the doughnut shop and the blonde presidential descendant who worked there, they'd been unable to find DeMohrenschildt Lane again, or any other side street.
Donald Jeffries
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
Steven Weinberg
Truly, there is magic in fairy
Richelle E. Goodrich
This was not uncommon in government-run operations, where a request that someone do their job often induced a catatonic state that might last anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour.
Matthew Polly
We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect.
Bernie Glassman
Fine! I'll throw on some clothes. Turn around. I'm in my pj's""I'm a guy. That's like asking a kid not to glance at the candy counter.
Becca Fitzpatrick
One day I'll be as strong as people think I am.
Ashley Boyd
There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.
Madeleine L'Engle
Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?
Amy Reed
The problem with parents is that they're adults.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Time and again the sun sets like a bedimming curtain before my eyes, taking with it all illumination, warmth, and color.  I am overwhelmed by night and the monsters that lurk in shadows of despair.  But alas, stars twinkle from afar, shedding the tiniest rays of lighted hope.  I am reminded that the sun also rises and that morning's glory shall restore beauty to my world.  The realization of this dream is only a matter of waiting out the dreary night.  So, I shall persevere.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.
Maggie Georgiana Young
To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy or to pursue any excessive desire diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.
Eric Hoffer
I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't.
Dean Koontz
Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras keeping them warm.
Jennifer Donnelly
Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
Tana French
If you want to change the world, first change yourself.
Debasish Mridha
Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.
Lauren Oliver
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
Joan Didion
It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.
Kim Edwards
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.
Michael Chabon
If someone doesn't care to accept you, respect you, believe in you, don't hesitate to move on and let them go. There are many who love and appreciate you just the way you are.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The grandeur that was Rome.
Edgar Allan Poe
If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre." [Running Scared, p. 111]
Edward T. Welch
I was limited by stories that came before mine.We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?
Kameron Hurley
Playing to passion when you can will keep students motivated and working toward mastery.
Starr Sackstein
When we sacrifice our own well-being in the hopes that our sacrifice will help someone else, we just get two people who are living sub-optimal lives. Here's the truth: Getting sick does not help those who are suffering of illness. Being sad does nothing to pull someone out of their own depression. And being hungry doesn't feed the starving. The universe simply doesn't work that way.
Kate Northrup
And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
Anaïs Nin
Acknowledge, accept, and honor that you deserve your own deepest compassion and love.
Nanette Mathews
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston
A person’s tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.
Amy Poehler
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
Theodore Roosevelt
More people continue to be and do exactly the things in life that prevent them from getting what they want or from waking up excited about their day.
Susan C.Young
When you focus on someone's disability you'll overlook their abilities, beauty and uniqueness. Once you learn to accept and love them for who they are, you subconsciously learn to love yourself unconditionally.
Yvonne Pierre
We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.
Sammy Davis Jr.
Sometimes you just have to step outside the box and take a leap of faith. You may not be able to see what's on the other side, but you can't remain in the same place. Fear is what keeps you there. If you want something badly enough you'll take the steps to get there. If you believe it, then you can achieve it.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana