Quotes by American Authors - Page 1553

When you draw a line in the sand, be careful it is not low tide.
Dixie Waters
Then you do not belong here. Death holds no sweetness in this house. We are not warriors, nor soldiers, nor swaggering bravos puffed up with pride. We do not kill to serve some lord, to fatten our purses, to stroke our vanity. We never give the gift to please ourselves. Nor do we choose the ones we kill. We are but servants of the God of Many Faces.""Valar dohaeris." All men must serve."You know the words, but you are too proud to serve. A servant must be humble and obedient.""I obey. I can be humbler than anyone."That made him chuckle. "You will be the very goddess of humility, I am sure. But can you pay the price?""What price?""The price is you. The price is all you have and all you ever hope to have. We took your eyes and gave them back. Next we will take your ears, and you will walk in silence. You will give us your legs and crawl. You will be no one's daughter, no one's wife, no one's mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will not be your own.
George R.R. Martin
Your attempt was valiant, but the fight was unfair. He was a seasoned warrior, fully armored. You were a lad with a short sword. You have a brave heart. That can be more important than size or strength.
Brandon Mull
Each loss brings growth with it, and learning to handle new experiences and taking charge of your needs is part of the transformative process.
Elizabeth Berrien
He stopped walking. I stopped walking. He moved his face to mine. I stayed there. He put his mouth on mine, soft. We kissed like that, lips on lips, and I could feel the softness of his mouth and the rougher line where his lip was chapped. The shiver in my stomach was there. The way I knew it would be, only more. It was real.
Adam Berlin Belmondo Style
Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but I wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.
Megan Whalen Turner
If you don't keep moving, you'll never get anywhere.
Alicia McCalla
The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
Care to explain?” Ari asked.“Didn’t you see my signals?”“Yeah. But they didn’t make sense. Five into one and it’s an intrusion.”“It’s an illusion! Five of them are an illusion.”“That’s not the signal for illusion. This is.” Ari demonstrated the proper signal.“That’s what I did.”“No, you didn’t. You did a weird twisty thing with your pinky.”“I had a scimitar at my throat. I’d like to see you try signaling under those conditions.”-Janco and Ari bickering
Maria V. Snyder
To find peace, find the love and understanding.
Debasish Mridha
Did I just get psychically pimp-slapped by a little old lady?
Molly Harper
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. The cross was the proof of His love – that He gave that Son, that He let Him go to Calvary’s cross, though “legions of angels” might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.
Elisabeth Elliot
...maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.
Jodi Picoult
If you don't acquire the discipline to push through a personal low point, you will miss the reward that comes with persevering.
Jeff Goins
Are you there vodka? It's me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I'll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home.
Chelsea Handler
If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.
Mark Twain
[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.
Joan D. Vinge
Sometimes you have to go through the worst, to get to the best. Keep moving forward. Be patient.
Karen Salmansohn
Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?
Mark Twain
There are three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth somewhere in the middle.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.
Jonathan Harnisch
Sometimes, when he looked at me…I felt him. I didn’t know how much of his soul was intact, but he still had a heart and though it might have ached with the choices of his past, I chose to believe that it beat for me.
Christina L. Barr
I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.
Aspen Matis
Madness doesn’t get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
Benjamin R. Smith
No question, no problem, no concern, is too big or too small for God to handle!
Elizabeth George
How would your life be different if…You stopped focusing on what you didn’t want and started focusing on what you do want? Let today be the day…You establish a clear intent, make a plan, and take actions towards your intent.
Steve Maraboli
Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
Louisa May Alcott
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
John Steinbeck
Attempt to be creative for the joy it brings . . . select something like music, dance, sculpture, or poetry. Being creative will help you enjoy life. It engenders a spirit of gratitude.
Richard G. Scott
America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.
Tom Morello
Knives and candlelight,” he said, “how romantic.
Nenia Campbell
Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls.
T.F. Hodge
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.
George Saunders
We have to actually choose a name," Kane murmured above her head. "We can't keep calling him 'baby.' When he's fifteen he might resent it.
Christine Feehan
A watched pot never boils." It's the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.
Christy Hall
I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro...' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have.
Samuel R. Delany
…because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.
Louisa May Alcott
Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He's not even worth a lie.
David Levithan
I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.
B.F. Skinner
I guess what scares me the most now is the thought that I won't be able to protect you
Julia Hoban
Mindset is the “software,” and software is eating the world. Deal with changes at the mindset level.
Pearl Zhu
Fewer than one in twenty security professionals has the core competence and the foundation knowledge to take a system all the way from a completely unknown state of security through mapping, vulnerability testing, password cracking, modem testing, vulnerability patching, firewall tuning, instrumentation, virus detection at multiple entry points, and even through back-ups and configuration management.
Stephen Northcutt
Reason and Faith are not antithetical, but rather synergistic".
R. Alan Woods
Sex is like God, really. I know they're both important, but if I think about them too much my head hurts." -The Best Kept Secret
Wendi Nunnery
The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam." Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful." I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
Most often simplicity defines the true beauty of a great life.
Debasish Mridha
...I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people. - Roy Gates
Marcus Brotherton
God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be. It is the message of grace.~Quote by Brennan Manning
Tullian Tchividjian
Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.
Laurie Garrett
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities
Stephen R. Covey
Before you enbark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
Sara Shepard
I don’t know why it’s not universally acknowledged that looking back is a terrible idea. It only makes going forward that much harder.
Amanda Bouchet
It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.
Erica Lorraine Scheidt
The mind is the only level at which any lasting change can occur—it is the soil in which we plant our hopes and fears, habits, and patterns. What we plant in the mind will grow and bear fruit. Just as it would be pointless to complain about a carrot seed failing to produce a tomato, it is equally pointless to look at the garden of your life and complain about what you see growing there. We have to be willing to plant different seeds.
Darren Main
One thing yo learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.
Neal Shusterman
Let us talk about our love, joy and happiness. Let us forgive and forget talking about misery and sadness.
Debasish Mridha
Living is the act of continuous creation moment by moment, day by day.
Gary M. Douglas