Quotes by American Authors - Page 1518

Fear is the paralyzing emotion that inhibits or restricts normal feelings of love, confidence, and well-being.
Tim LaHaye
For me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device. In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us . . . In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.
Andrei Linde
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.
John O'Hara
My doggy ate my homework.He chewed it up," I said.But when I offered my excuseMy teacher shook her head. I saw this wasn't going well.I didn't want to fail.Before she had a chance to talk,I added to the tale:"Before he ate, he took my workAnd tossed it in a pot.He simmered it with succotashTill it was piping hot."He scrambled up my science notesWith eggs and bacon strips,Along with sautéed spelling wordsAnd baked potato chips."He then took my arithmetic And had it gently fried.He broiled both my book reports With pickles on the side."He wore a doggy apronAs he cooked a notebook stew.He barked when I objected.There was nothing I could do.""Did he wear a doggy chef hat?"My teacher gave a scowl."He did," I said. "And taking itWould only make him growl."My teacher frowned, but then I said As quickly as I could,"He covered it with ketchup, And he said it tasted good.""A talking dog who likes to cook?" My teacher had a fit.She sent me to the office, And that is where I sit.I guess I made a big mistake In telling her all that.'Cause I don't have a doggy. It was eaten by my cat.
Dave Crawley
What would you do if you saw something nobody else could see?”The tape gun fell out of Luke’s hand, and hit the tiled hearth. He knelt to pick it up, not looking at her. “You mean if I were the only witness to a crime, that sort of thing?”“No. I mean, if there were other people around, but you were the only one who could see something. As if it were invisible to everyone but you.”He hesitated, still kneeling, the dented tape gun gripped in his hand.“I know it sounds crazy,” Clary ventured nervously, “but…”He turned around. His eyes, very blue behind the glasses, rested on her with a look of firm affection. “Clary, you’re an artist, like your mother. That means you see the world in ways that other people don’t. It’s your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn’t make you crazy—just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.
Cassandra Clare
Poison!" Grover yelped. "Don't let those things touch you or...""Or we'll die?" I guessed."Well...after you shrivel slowly to dust, yes.""Let's avoid the swords," I decided.
Rick Riordan
Fishing is much less about the fishing, and much more about the time alone with your kid, away from the hustle and bustle of the everyday.
Dan Pearce
You're causing the world to spin again, Keirah," Wharick teased about her druid gift with nature. "You out of control? Do you need something to settle you down? he asked.
Madison Thorne Grey
the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.
Charles Bukowski
The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.
Oscar Handlin
While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world.Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.
Kevin D. Mitnick
There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided.
A.E. Samaan
In this world, it is too common for people to search for someone to lose themselves in. But I am already lost. I will look for someone to find myself in.
C. JoyBell C.
The more positive you are the more people want to be around you and the less positive you are...well, just reverse it!
Germany Kent
New Rule: America has every right ot bitch about gas prices suddenly shooting up. How could we have known? Oh, wait, there was that teensy, tiny thing about being warned constantly over the last forty years but still creating more urban sprawl, failing to build public transport, buying gas-guzzlers, and voting for oil company shills. So, New Rule: Shut the fuck up about gas prices.
Bill Maher
-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.
Aleksandar Hemon
Are you being obedient, or just martyring yourself for another good cause?
Janine Mendenhall
Not to alarm you or anything, but I think you just made a deal with a Mexican gang." I've read Simone Elkeles books. I know how this whole garage as a front thing works.
Tammy Blackwell
This dissociation from the body extends to emotional disengagement. Without access to his feelings a man can’t help but lose track of who he is, what his priorities are and what is normal for him.
Mary Crocker Cook
Give me a meaningful love or a beautiful death!
Renee Ahdieh
Get off me, Bran!" she howled, her sweet breath brushing his lips when she turned her head to look at him. "If you get yourself killed bein' all heroic and brave, I swear on my granddaddy's grave, I'll murder you!
Julie Ann Walker
The wilderness is a place that every believer has to experience to be molded for their divine purpose.
E'yen A. Gardner
Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
Vera had also hated lipstick, Marzipan and Lutherans - excluding her husband, but not her late mother-in-law. Most of all she hated being governed by anyone or anything.
Victoria Dougherty
Never lose hope. Never forget the power of intentions and desires.
Debasish Mridha
It is easy to create a memory, but it is almost impossible to forget.
Debasish Mridha
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide ... And the choice goes by forever t'wixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
And that, she thought as he left her, summed up the miracle of her life. She had a home with him, and he'd be there.
J D ROBB
As a leader, you are always going to get a combination of two things: What you create and What you allow.
Henry Cloud
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
Michael Cunningham
It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
Don Marquis
Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.
Mira Bartok
Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
Andrew Boyd
Smoke, rain, abulia. What can the concerned citizen do to fight the rise of capitalism, in his own community? Study of the tides of conflict and power in a system in which there is structural inequality is an important task. A knowledge of European intellectual history since 1789 provides a useful background. Information theory offers interesting new possibilities. Passion is helpful, especially those types of passion which are non licit. Doubt is a necessary precondition to meaningful action. Fear is the great mover, in the end.
Donald Barthelme
Fox-TrotBy the stream the fox and she-fox stoodNose to nose beneath the starsDancing the music of the woods.The deer rapped a beat with their hooves,The ravens sang from raven heartsAs by the stream the fox and she-fox stood.The great owl called as a great owl would,The squirrels all shimmied in the dark,Dancing the music of the woods.Then from the north a fierce wind blewAnd broke the starry dance apartBy the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.
Beth Kephart
Zane brought her hand to his chest, over his heart and she felt the strong rapid beat through his shirt. “Feel that?” His throat worked as he swallowed. “It would break if I fell for you and anything happened that would take you away from me.”--Zane to Willow in 'The Edge of Sin' in the Real Men Last all Night anthology
Cheyenne McCray
Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Frequently, people confront us who seemed to be egging the world into calling them on their miserable actions so they can have the pleasure of angry vengeance or an excuse to attract attention. Our compassion cannot be giving them what they think they want, since it is unreasonable to want to be hateful.
Thomm Quackenbush
A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal.
David McCullough
To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.
John Warwick Montgomery
To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.
Benjamin Franklin
I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here.
Bill Watterson
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.
Mary GrandPré
Being with him made me want to make my own dreams, discover my own path. I was my best self when I was with him.
Heather Anastasiu
caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable "no"s and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet.
Lindy West
Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves.
Saul Bellow
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions aspirations dreams! Book of Beginnings Story without End Each maid a heroine and each man a friend!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It’s nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn’t trapped in a hovering prison in the men’s bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is.
Cecil Baldwin
My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world.
George H. Hepworth
I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true…it’s like finding a river of gold when you haven’t even got a cup to save a cupful…you’ve but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness.
Jack Kerouac
Okay?” Even if she deserved to be punished, he always let her know he cared about her.
Starla Kaye
I don't care what they say, we are only to love those who deserve our love and love them to the degree that they deserve it! You see, we are not God. Only God can love people undeserving without spoiling them. Us, on the other hand, can love someone so undeserving, and actually turn the person into someone so vile who is convinced that they were always entitled to every bit of it! Mamma mia! And what about giving? Yes, they all want us to give and expect nothing in return, they all have many scriptures to lay on our tables when it is they who are at the receiving end! But when the tables are turned and we are the ones at the receiving end, suddenly all the scriptures mean something else! And all the times they were on our end and we gave to them- suddenly are all forgotten!
C. JoyBell C.
Life is an illusion. Don’t forget to enjoy the magnificence of magic.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Victor, back there in that basement, when the zombies were… were… moving around on those tables…. Twitching? And dead? You didn’t even blink.This is nothing like those zombies.No shit. Because this time, you’re scared—beyond scared. You’re terrified. And whatever’s got you scared? I don’t want any part of it.
Jordan Castillo Price
We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
Roman Payne
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.
A. Lee Martinez
College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
Jeffrey Eugenides
When the momentum of mindfulness is well developed, it works like a boomerang; even if we want to distract ourselves, the mind naturally rebounds to a state of awareness.
Joseph Goldstein
The driver got out smiling. He looked about seventeen or eighteen, and for a second, I had the uneasy feeling it was Luke, my old enemy. This guy had the same sandy hair and outdoorsy good looks. But it wasn't Luke. His smile was brighter and more playful. (Luke didn't do much more than scowl and sneer these days.) The Maserati driver wore jeans and loafers and a sleeveless T-shirt."Wow" Thalia muttered. Apollo Is hot.""He's the sun god," I said."That's not what I meant.
Rick Riordan