Quotes by American Authors - Page 1455

I never violate my oaths or my codes... Only international laws.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock--his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown--but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max's team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use all the weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them.
Dave Eggers
BRODIE:Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA.
Kevin Smith
I went to public school but kept to myself. When you live in a brothel, you don't want anyone coming to your home.
Eric Jerome Dickey
It's not happening to you, it's happening through you. Check your thoughts and your energetic output for the answers.
Sanjo Jendayi
It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
Always think about how you can contribute and never think of how you can receive a contribution.
Debasish Mridha
aren't you, uh... reproducing?"sure, we love reproducing it's one of our favorite things.
Cassandra Clare
If she has six good points and you have one semigood little point, place all of the emphasis on your one semigood little point.
Sherry Argov
If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
Brad Szollose
She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.
Henry James
I always have my reasons, even when I don't know what they are.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others' choices make us.
Richie Norton
{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.
Michael Knight
The jinni sighed. 'I'm less grateful to him than I should be. He's a good and generous man, but I'm not accustomed to relying on someone else. It makes me feel weak.’'How is relying on others a weakness?''How can it be anything else? If for some reason Arbeely died tomorrow, I'd be forced to find another occupation. The event would be outside my control, yet I'd be at its mercy. Is that not weakness?''I suppose. But then, going by your standard, everyone is weak. So why call it a weakness, instead of just the way things are?
Helene Wecker
Never mix negative thinking with negative people. Multiplying negatives, in this instance, won't make a positive.
Richie Norton
Most of us would rather risk a catastrophe than read the instructions.
Mignon McLaughlin
While I knew him, he made me see--Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance.It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate.
Norman Lock
Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.
Mary Karr
Then Cynthia looked at him and smiled, and he knew he couldn’t possibly resist her, no matter what she had done. It felt as though the two of them had just stripped naked and dived off a high cliff over a beautiful river. The water below looked cool and inviting. But what if it was only six inches deep?
Robert Burton Robinson
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great people will always be mocked by those who feel smaller than them. A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena. A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song at the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker. Whenever you should doubt your self-worth, remember the lotus flower. Even though it plunges to life from beneath the mud,it does not allow the dirt that surrounds it to affect its growth or beauty.
Suzy Kassem
The glory that was Greece.
Edgar Allan Poe
No guilt or anger or longing changes that.
Ava Dellaira
Does biblical psychology, then, merely ask us to value good things a little less? Does the Bible seek a reduction of guilt by an overall deflation of the currency of moral ideals, so we can live more comfortably with an uneasy conscience? That would exaggerate a valid point. Although the Bible holds that no finite relationship is of infinite value, it does not embrace an extreme ascetic view that the source of happiness lies essentially in the reduction of desire. Some ascetic strategies try to diminish desire and reduce all valuing so as not to allow any loss to become an overwhelming disappointment. According to this view, the less one values created goods, the happier one is.In contrast, life-affirming Christianity hopes that love, desire, and appreciation of limited values can be increased or decreased to the measure of their real proportional value. Jesus does not call for a stark reduction of all finite valuing merely as a preventative measure against disappointment. He calls for a love of good things with an awareness that they exist within the boundaries of birth and death, and are therefore under the judgment of the giver and source of all value (Matt. 6:19-21).
Thomas C. Oden
If your hogs have warts, call us. Hogwarts Wart Removal. 555-HOGWARTS
Kate Klise
The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland
His mouth captured hers, trying to show her with his kiss what he was still learning to express in words. He loved her.He worshipped her. He'd walk across fire for her. He——still had the audience of her three brothers.Slowly breaking the kiss, he turned his face to the side. Anthony, Benedict, and Colin were still standing in the foyer.Anthony was studying the ceiling, Benedict was pretending to inspect his fingernails, and Colin was staring quite shamelessly.
Julia Quinn
The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter.
William J. Bennett
Evangelicals sometimes expect too much or, to put it more precisely, we look for a kind of change God hasn't promised. It's possible to expect too little, but under-expectation is usually a cynical reaction to dashed hopes for too much. We manage to interpret biblical teaching to support our longing for perfection. As a result, we measure our progress by standards we will never meet until heaven.
Larry Crabb
The pain of an injury is over in seconds. Everything that comes after is the pain of getting well." He gave her a heartfelt look, full of apology. "I'd forgotten that you see. Coming back to life ... It hurts.
Tessa Dare
Acknowledge and voice the positives LOUDER than the negatives.
Tanya Masse
In the event that everything goes wrong and I’m not here tomorrow, there’s not enough time to fuck around. Why make art? Because it beautifies the world. It’s above people. It’s idealistic. It’s something to strive for that is not the mundane. It gives people peace of mind. It’s something you reach for that you can barely tickle but not quite get a hold of. And this [outpouring] makes that idealistic beauty so bright that you’d have to be a bitter asshole to deny its existence.
Josh Homme
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
Gore Vidal
Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.
John Ferling
A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young - not her face.
Billie Burke
No one believes you’re serious until bodies start to fall. -Vlad
Jeaniene Frost
You don't get to turn someone's sanctuary into an unsafe space.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately.
H.L. Mencken
Baby, the tumbleweeds can wait.
Samantha Chase
Success takes many forms. Most people strive for something unattainable without realizing that it's already theirs.
Lada Ray
It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.
William Zinsser
His father had always said, Son, the most important thing in life is to make a contribution. Who would have thought Kittridge’s contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse?
Justin Cronin
In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.
Amy Bloom
The happiest people are not always the richest, but they are always abundant with kindness and content with their richness
Debasish Mridha
The truth is, most people who do what you'd call 'wrong' do it for what they call 'right' reasons.
Brandon Sanderson
The greatest risk is not taking one.
Tim Fargo
The deception of others is almost always rooted in the deception of ourselves.
Bill W.
How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism!
Howard Zinn
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.
William Faulkner
Dare to love and get lost in yourself.
Debasish Mridha
Staring over him in the dim light of a side lamp, my tired eyes traced along the path of faint, yet emerging, lines etched around his equally-tired eyes. They'd become a permanent reminder of his ever-smiling face, and I wished–even after all of these years together-that I could absorb some of his contentment.
Jodi LaPalm
When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics.
Siri Hustvedt
A safe and inclusive society is worthless if a person cannot speak their mind. Censorship and manufactured outrage are the problem and not the solution.
Carmine Savastano
...Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you've ever been there, you know the signs don't tell you the exit you're coming up to, they only point out the exits you've just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods--and since you're probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with.
Neal Shusterman
As a leader it is your job to protect the missional integrity of the Jesus gathering to which you have been called. It is your responsibility to see to it that the church under your care continues as a gathering of people in process; a place where the curious,the unconvinced, the sceptical, the used-to-believe and the broken, as well as the committed, informed and sold-out come together around Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Andy Stanley
all the time complaining at me that she could have had a career dancing topless at the Orbital Grill and Rendezvous Parlor. Her and her perky breasts. Yasmin, I told her, all the girls have perky breasts in zero-g, you were nothing special, you’re lucky a good man took you away from all that.
Anne McCaffrey
Under my bed was a note folded up in half. I smiled as I opened it and read, " I don't know how long it took you to find this but whatever day it is right now I promise you I love you a thousand times more than when I wrote this. That's the beautiful thing about us, no matter what the day brings, no matter the time or place, our love grows exponentially everyday.
Hope Alcocer
The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat.
Wendell Berry