Quotes by American Authors - Page 1471

For a moment his eyes locked onto me with an intensity that left me breathless.
Richelle Mead
Anne tried to bite her tongue, but she was finding her mouth bloody too often.
Janice Lane Palko
I would like to have a dollar for every person in a courtship who knew he or she had felt the guidance of the Lord in that relationship, had prayed about the experience enough to know it was the will of the Lord, knew they loved each other and enjoyed each other’s company, and saw a lifetime of wonderful compatibility ahead—only to panic, to get a brain cramp, to have total catatonic fear sweep over them. They ‘draw back,’ as Paul said, if not into perdition at least into marital paralysis. I am not saying you shouldn’t be very careful about something as significant and serious as marriage…Yes, there are cautions and considerations to make, but once there has been genuine illumination, beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it and trusted it and lived for it, it is right now. Don’t give up when the pressure mounts.
Jeffrey R. Holland
If no one has boundaries…how can there be any transgression?
David W. Earle
Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
Christopher Hitchens
WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.
Larry McMurtry
Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
Tony Robbins
Stay hungry on the path you trod to overcome all odds though fate & the gods seem to pepper your plate with a barrage of sabotage.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light.
Meat Loaf
For femmes, that evolving feminist thought reacquainted us with something we kind of knew already: men and women might mistake us for “just girls” when they see our makeup and fashions, but we were/are actually guerrilla warriors, fighting undercover in the war to save women from the continuing campaign to make us irrelevant fluff.
Jewelle L. Gómez
Every universe I’ve created lately, your face keeps popping up in it.
Adam Silvera
I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication sympathy and service.
George E. Woodberry
It's a waste of time worrying about something that worry won't fix. It's about as useful as trying to feed your pet rock.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore.
Lorrie Moore
There is a deeper reason why the café was so precious to this town. And this deeper reason has to do with a certain pride that had not hitherto been known in these parts. To understand this new pride the cheapness of human life must be kept in mind. There were always plenty of people clustered around a mill – but it was seldom that every family had enough meal, garments, and fat back to go the rounds. Life could become one long dim scramble just to get the things needed to keep alive. And the confusing point is this: All useful things have a price, and are bought only with money, as that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
Carson McCullers
If everyone in New York took sides over these petty, insignificant arguments, no one would have any friends at all.
Candace Bushnell
They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.
Joshua Ferris
All love that has not friendship for its base is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?
Therese Anne Fowler
Advice," Doña Vorchenza chuckled. "Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage.
Scott Lynch
Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.
Becky Cooper
He discovered in his heart the first faint whispering of pure Christianity, and in some way he continued to keep his virtue intact by keeping his vices active.
Thorne Smith
...But would that be enough? Because at the moment it felt like it could never be enough. People needed more than a place to stay, more than a porch to sleep on. They needed a home, right? They needed love.
Jennifer Brown
Dominic reached behind his head and tugged on his T-shirt. The rising fabric revealed his abdomen. And yeah, he liked the way her gaze followed the hemline. But his arm stilled, his bicep taut and his T-shirt covering his hair. If he kept going, she’d see the damaged skin on his chest from where the bullet had entered.“Are you sure about this?” he asked. “My scars aren’t pretty.”“I promise to focus on your abs,” she murmured without looking up. “And lower.
Sara Jane Stone
I loved him, but he didn't want me anymore.I suffered, and he laughed at my umanity.This desire will be my end.
Sabrina Benulis
Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.
Jan Karon
When two men in business always agree one of them is unnecessary.
William Wrigley
Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture. I want to use the word 'liturgy' to refer to this intent and practice of the church insofar as it pulls everything in and out of the sanctuary into a life of worship, situates everything past and present coherently as participation in the revelation written for us in Scripture. Instead of limiting liturgy to the ordering of the community in discrete acts of worship, I want to use it in this large and comprehensive way, the centuries-deep and continents-wide community, spread out in space and time, as Christians participate in actions initiated and formed by the words in this book - our entire existence understood liturgically, that is connectedly in the context of the three personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and furnished with the text of the Holy Scripture.
Eugene H. Peterson
You totally need to watch the news.""Can't.""Why?""It's too depressing.""Right, because hanging with dead people isn't.
Darynda Jones
What if it's as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I'd kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I'd stayed with him Friday night, what if I'd been with him… wherever he was?
Kristina McBride
...this was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed.
Chris Bohjalian
We must be present enough and receptive enough to “hear” with our whole being beyond just the words that are being spoken.
Henry Kimsey-House
Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.
Elbert Hubbard
Take the risk, and just be.
Dean Del Sesto
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.
Barbara W. Tuchman
All right, we need a way to get inot the palace. Any ideas?""Ask nicely? Charge in? Fly? Wait, do you mean reasonable ones?
Noelle Crawford
Knowledge is the ultimate key to open the door to freedom.
Debasish Mridha
Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.
Neal Stephenson
I call the Change of Life "Orchids" because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.
Lisa Jey Davis
Your intended?" Dakota demanded. "You mean to say he already had a mate staked out and he's been encroaching on my preserve?
Madeline Montague
This is the best possible way to retain important details that you wish to remember in any unified field of knowledge, whether it be the field of economics, science, history, or any other--link them up with related items which you already know or wouldn't mind knowing.
Ralph Alfred Habas
Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.
Michelle Tea
Every beautiful thought adorns your life with beauty and love.
Debasish Mridha
Racing is about discipline and intelligence, not about who has the heavier foot. The one who drives smart will always win in the end.
Garth Stein
The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.
Téa Obreht
Real life is just another stage.Just another stage where I have to look and actLike I have everything put together;everything neat, perfect, and in order,when in reality I’m slowly dying,Slowly decaying, screaming and clawing,at this little box I’ve been put into, Trying desperately to escape.
Justin Wetch
If your life is not an adventure then you are not truly alive.
Toni Sorenson
The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.
Anita Diamant
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great.
Willa Cather
Lips are the fingerprints of love.
Tyler Shields
What do you call it when you end up right where you’re supposed to be?” Foster simply replies, “The perfect chemistry.
Renee Ericson
Humanity's savageness is what makes it civilized. Technology, trade, computers, space travel. All are products of competition and conflict.
Adam Burch
Four Characters in Consciousness—How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.
William James
Broken things can be made whole again. Perhaps not as they were before, but maybe stronger this time.
Carrie Ryan
If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.
Esther M. Friesner
You know, it would be much less trouble if you were willing to bat your magic eyelashes.
Jamie Le Fay
In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.
Gloria Steinem
Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski
Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.
Laird Barron
When it comes to meeting new people, playing well with others, and connecting on deeper levels, there are inherent gaps which can be closed only by being brave. When is bravery needed?
Susan C.Young