Quotes by American Authors - Page 150

[Talking about ancient Greece](...) the great institutions (...) were created by older males who then trained younger males. They all had a strong homoerotic element. (...) This thereby increased the "rightness" of masculinity, never mind that half the world was feminine. That other half was also interested in philosophy, the arts, the law, religion, and athletics, but they had this other task -bringing children to term and nurturing them through the early years of their lives. And doing it again and again. Not that this gave status to women. On the contrary, the man's seed made the child. A woman was simply the receptacle provided by nature to carry the child until it was ready to come out. (...)
Tina Packer
If God gave it to me," we say "it's mine. I can do what I want with it." No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of - if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory.
Elisabeth Elliot
Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
Marisha Pessl
He gave Dancer one last pat. 'You're luckier than you know, pal. Living without a set of balls makes life a lot less complicated.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
I decided to throw out everything I thought I knew about following Christ, being a woman, being a godly wife, masculinity, and marriage.
April Cassidy
A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.
Sterling Lord
She smiled, and there it was again, that aching pressure in his chest. Love, or a heart attack. Kind of the same thing.
Kristan Higgins
I swallowed hard and said as calmly as possible, “There’s been a murder. I don’t know what happened. The address is two-two-zero three Devonshire Court.
Andrea Heltsley
The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
Cormac McCarthy
It wasn't right. Evil should look evil. It should reek like rotten flesh, not smell like pine cleaner and fabric softener
Sydney Croft
I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country
Louisa May Alcott
She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.
Sarah Addison Allen
When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.
Alice Hoffman
It's not courage so much as stubbornness," Alice said frankly. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a grim smile. "I don't like to lose.
Django Wexler
Hey Susie Derkins, is that your face, or is a 'possum stuck in your collar?
Bill Watterson
Dear Father, I already forgave you once. I read all your letters, which fed me crumbs of love and admiration. LIke Hansel and Gretel, I followed their trail to your door. But you have left me again. I have the whole summer ahead of me to re-read your letters, and to try to understand.
Susie Morgenstern
There is only one invitation it would kill me to refuse, yet I'm tempted to turn it down all the time. I get the invitation every morning when I wake up to actually live a life of complete engagement, a life of whimsy, a life where love does. It doesn't come in an envelope. It's ushered in by a sunrise, the sound of a bird, or the smell of coffee drifting lazily from the kitchen. It's the invitation to actually live, to fully participate in this amazing life for one more day. Nobody turns down an invitation to the White House, but I've seen plenty of people turn down an invitation to fully live.Turning down this invitation comes in lots of flavors. It looks like numbing yourself or distracting yourself or seeing something really beautiful as normal. It can also look like refusing to forgive or not being grateful or getting wrapped around the axle with fear or envy. I think every day God sends us an invitation to live and sometimes we forget to show up or get head-faked into thinking we haven't really been invited. But you see, we have been invited -- every day, all over again
Bob Goff
The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I will die, however,” he said quite seriously, “if you leave me again. Just watch me.
Julie Anne Long
A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev's searching fingertips. Win's heartbeat...the pulse that sustained his universe.
Lisa Kleypas
It is not your talents that make you great, but your decisions.
Shannon L. Alder
Very few people that have installed solar photovoltaics (PV) on their home have realized that by spending an additional five thousand dollars that they can completely disconnect from the electrical utility.
Steven Magee
It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.
Thomas Jefferson
There's no point in being committed to a vision if you're not equally committed to making it a reality.
Tim Fargo
You frighten me, when you say there isn't time.""I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.""But it keeps not ending.""So far, so good.
Orson Scott Card
Leaders inspire the people around them to become better.
Jim George
That's the problem with lying. You can never remember what you've said.
Jane Green
Here and there a man respected the operator. Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.
Sherwood Anderson
Show me a person who is not an extremist about some things who is a "middle-of-the-roader" in everything and I will show you someone who is insecure.
G. Aiken Taylor
A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.
Charles Fort
I preferred a hard truth to a well-meant lie.
Jacqueline Carey
An enemy sees his attackers laughing? It is better than all the insults. A man who laughs as he goes into battle is a man who has confidence, and a man with confidence is terrifying to an enemy. “For the whore!” I shouted.
Bernard Cornwell
The dark-haired clothes horse, who generally meant well, was a dufus, but he was family
Tina Folsom
Everything gets better with the touch of love.
Debasish Mridha
You've got to keep fighting-you've got to risk your life every six months to stay alive.
Elia Kazan
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
Anne Lamott
The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.
Hampton Sides
What's your problem?""I don't have problems. I solve them.
John M. Cusick
A doctor may know more than a peasant, but a peasant and a doctor know more together.
Dan Buettner
I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
Irwin Shaw
If there was no fear, how could there be comfort? Or courage?
Veronica Rossi
I might be bluffing, you miserable, vomitous mass!" Bran yelled. Oh, for heaven's sake. Really? He's quotin' The Princess Bride?
Julie Ann Walker
The things that most deserve our gratitude we just take for granted. Without air we cannot live for more than a minute or two. Everyday we are breathing in and breathing out, but do we ever feel grateful to the air? If we do not drink water, we cannot survive. Even our body is composed to a large extent of water.But do we give any value to water? Every morning when we open our eyes, we see the sun blessingfully offering us light and life-energy, which we badly need. But are we grateful to the sun?
Sri Chinmoy
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,And Mourners to and froKept treading – treading – till it seemedThat Sense was breaking through – And when they all were seated,A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thoughtMy Mind was going numb – And then I heard them lift a BoxAnd creak across my SoulWith those same Boots of Lead, again,Then Space – began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,And Being, but an Ear,And I, and Silence, some strange RaceWrecked, solitary, here – And then a Plank in Reason, broke,And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge,And Finished knowing – then –
Emily Dickinson
Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.
Paul Bowles
Make no mistake, Lucas. You chose Pedro over your fellow Hunters. I'm coming for you and you will pay for your betrayal. I'm coming for everyone in that house and no one will survive.
Amber Belldene
We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.
Holly Black
Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind. Withering my intuition leaving all these opportunities behind. Feed my will to feel this moment urging me to cross the line. Reaching out to embrace the random. Reaching out to embrace whatever may come. I embrace my desire to feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human. With my feet upon the ground I lose myself between the sounds and open wide to suck it in. I feel it move across my skin. I'm reaching up and reaching out. I'm reaching for the random or what ever will bewilder me. And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been. We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been. Spiral out. Keep going...
Tool
Every devil used to be an angel
Joe Hilley
Rise to the occassion which is life!
Virginia Euwer Wolff
I'm electric with vertigo, even though I'm on the ground, vertigo like I felt once when I stood on the edge of a high cliff in Arizona and looked straight down.
M.T Anderson
I am just turning 40 and taking my time about it.
Harold Lloyd
In any miracle, chase the causation back far enough and eventually you'll find yourself irrepressibly singing in praise of the marvelous goodness of God's creation.
Matthew Lee Anderson
What women want is what men want. They want respect.
Marilyn Vos Savant
We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.
Bell Hooks
I’ll take her home. You guys finish … whatever … you were doing.” She glances to me, a slight blush on her face. I tug Cash’s borrowed shirt down, hiding my red ass cheek. The spatula is still in his hand. He’s only wearing boxers. Dear Lord.
Pella Grace
The only thing worse than not knowing where she belonged...was knowing where she didn't.
Tessa Shaffer
It's not so much what you accomplish. But what's more important is how far you've come to accomplish what you have.Success is the measure of not mere achievement, but also how hard one had to work.
Therone Shellman