Quotes by American Authors - Page 1514

You're all trying to figure out what went wrong inside my head. Fucking idiots. You'll never crack the code that's inside my head. You'll never get into my castle. You'll never even get past the gate.
Brent Runyon
If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.
Dustin Lance Black
Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.
Joanne Woodward
Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
Catherynne M. Valente
If you prefer smoke over firethen get up now and leave.For I do not intend to perfumeyour mind's clothingwith more sooty knowledge.No, I have something else in mind.Today I hold a flame in my left handand a sword in my right.There will be no damage control today.For God is in a moodto plunder your riches andfling you nakedlyinto such breathtaking povertythat all that will be left of youwill be a tendency to shine.So don't just sit around this flamechoking on your mind.For this is no campfire songto mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.Jump now into the spacebetween thoughtsand exit this dreambefore I burn the damn place down.
Adyashanti
Let them see that you trust them & let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions.Do that & they will commit their lives to you. Bully the, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, & after a while you'll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, & stifling their resentment.
Octavia E. Butler
Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting
Dean Koontz
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
As Buckingham talked, I couldn't help but remember that there's a reason they call us Gallagher Girls. It's not just because the youngest of us are twelve. It's also because our founder was under twenty. From the very beginning we have been discounted and discredited, underestimated and undervalued. And, for the most part, we wouldn't have it any other way.
Ally Carter
Food shouldn't be half-bad. It should be all good.
Katie McGarry
Friends who love us know that motherhood is about transitioning--and adjusting, constantly, to those changes. We must become masters of change because that is what life demands of us.
Meg Meeker
An Underground Railroad story with a distinctive flavor. –Booklist
Sharon Lovejoy
I felt his other hand sear hot against my cheek. He bent his head, and in a voice that Jack couldn’t hear, said, “When you came down the stairs, and fell into me, that was the moment.” Then his lips pressed against mine.
Sarah Alderson
Maybe I’ll never be able to do what I hope to, but at least I have hope.
Marilyn Monroe
Don't let the guilt of the past keep you from the victories of the future.
Todd Stocker
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D.YALOM
If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.
Orson Scott Card
Life is a weirdly themed party
Emily Lloyd-Jones
Mackenzie glanced through the glass doors. It was dark outside, except for the dim light from the front entrance. A night breeze swooshed leaves throughout the parking lot.
Yawatta Hosby
There's a little known virtue called magnificence: an unostentatious liberality of expenditure in doing good. You would deny me the practice of it. Mierda! I should have left you on the comet.
Julian May
They moved as a unit, a first for her. The madman and the nightmare.
Erin Kellison
If we don't fight, we've already lost. Without hope, without trying, there's no point.
Heather Anastasiu
I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and it’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.
John Cassavetes
Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality. If you want to photograph God, focus your lens on Hamakom, The Place, anyplace where you see divine light illuminating reality. Let your camera collect the light reflecting from the reality shaping your everyday life and you will find yourself photographing God in action." (From the Introduction to the book Photograph God)
Mel Alexenberg
Perhaps the ultimate test of a leader is not what you are able to do in the here and now - but instead what continues to grow long after you're gone
Tom Rath
Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.
Lauren Wolk
What messes us up a lot in this life is setting our expectations way too high and then being ashamed when we fail. What is worse is when we allow other people to make us feel ashamed for failing. What is worse than that is hiding and lying about our failure. It’s ok to fail, especially when it’s a significant life change and you gotta stand up for that right in this life.
Tanya Masse
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Lucille Ball
He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.
S.E. Hinton
Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.
Robert L. O'Connell
The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.
Will Rogers
One person's disapproval shouldn't make you quit. If it's your passion, a thousand people screaming 'No!' still won't stop you!
Tammy Ferebee
We’re always all alone,” he said, his voice cracked and worn.Tamsin shook her head. She knew that wasn’t true. She had years of proof to the contrary. “No,” she said. “Not always. Noteven often.”“Oh,” the old man said, with a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his being. “I forget you’re still young yet.” Hecoughed then, a dry, rattling sound. “Sometimes we get a little bit of a facade. We think we have people. Family, friends . . . butin the end, it’s just you and the darkness. Everyone leaves eventually, my young friend. It’s better, really, to learn it early. Thisway, you can save yourself some disappointment.” He sighed then and slumped back against the wall once more. “Becausebelieving you’re not alone is the cruelest trick of all.
Morgan Matson
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
Fran Lebowitz
You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.
Emilie Autumn
And human will is the strongest force ever created. There are those born to succeed and those who are determined to succeed. The former fall into it, and the latter pursue it all costs. They won't be denied.Nothing daunts them.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
She glanced around at the tombstones. “You’re surrounded by death here. Way too depressing. You really might want to think about getting another job.”“You see death and sadness in these sunken patches of dirt, I see lives lived fully and the good deeds of past generations influencing the future ones.
David Baldacci
For I was sure of one thing, it wasn't always the hero who saved the world. It was the person most willing to die first.
R.K. Ryals
Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals.
David Ebershoff
You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.
Ann Brashares
This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.
P. Harding
Zane," she breathed, and in the back of his mind, he thought, This woman. I want this woman to say my name on the caress of a kiss a thousand more times.
Robin Bielman
Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.
David Orr
And this is where I'll end, before I know what happens next.
Shannon Hale
Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.
Bonnie Friedman
Michelle: The dreaded elf walked into the dining room seconds after I sat down. What business of his was it if I didn't have a clan? It wasn't often I regretted my upbringing but being questioned about a clan stirred unhappy feelings. I'm a witch, but a witch without a clan. Mom had been expelled from her clan before I was born because she wouldn't say who my father was. The clan elders ruled that he must have been human. Unfortunately for my mom, she wasn't much of a witch and breeding with a human was against clan law. I'm not sure who my dad was, but he wasn't around. I've always thought he was from a clan hers didn't favor because I sure had magic and lots of it.
N. E. Conneely
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.
Harlan Ellison
Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems...""Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue.
Robin Hobb
Quit worrying so much about the boards and nails of your life. Focus on the stuff that lasts.” He glanced through the window toward the glowing light of the kitchen where Meg and my mom were laughing about something.
Laura Anderson Kurk
A person whom works exclusively for money places a price tag on his or her soul. A person whom labors to attain fame seeks a false form of adulation. The writer ignores the lure of a glamorous life by seeking to penetrate the darkness of their own being and meditate the larger issues that frame existence. A seeker knowingly follows a path that is barren, bleak, desolate, and unproductive in terms of attaining recognition and exulted social and financial status.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.
Betsy Cornwell
Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature.
Chris Matakas
Music is heard in the background. As the movemnt becomes sharper; the many dancers acting but as one. She is one with her secret. As the time draws near, the woman's body begins to push. With the rhythm of the music and the beat of the dancer's feet; her secret almost revealed.
Lisa C. Miller
You can order yourself to treasure a moment, to cling tight to a feeling and never let it fade, but it’s your brain, that three-pound lump of hamburger, that makes the final call.
Isaac Marion
Perhaps middle age is or should be a period of shedding shells the shell of ambition the shell of material accumulations and possessions the shell of the ego.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
When you can love your enemy unconditionally, that is the practice of divine love.
Debasish Mridha
Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.
Kent Haruf
The motive of grace is the infinite, compassionate love of a merciful God, but the work of grace was the death of Christ on the cross.
Billy Graham
As a general thing when a woman wears the pants in a family she has a good right to them.
Josh Billings