Quotes by American Authors - Page 1562

When I am alone and my skull is ripsaw I want to jump into the womb of any bonfire, I want to leap into the ceiling fan head first, but I need that fan this coming summer.
Derrick Brown
Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation.""What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?""An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked."Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.Achillese handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it."You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly."I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong.
Orson Scott Card
Jordie and I tried to have sex in the kitchen and almost caught it on fir. I was cleaning smoke and burned shit off my brand-new stove all afternoon."Lacey's face twisted in confusion and she sputtered with laughter. "Do I even want to know how this happened?"Kacey grinned. "He threw my shirt on the stove, and I had forgotten to shut it off. Boom! Flames, fire
Toni Aleo
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
Jeffrey Eugenides
We want them to see their home planet," Mrs. Whatsit said. The Medium lost the delighted smile she had worn till then. "Oh, why must you make me look at unpleasant things when there are so many delightful ones to see?"Again Mrs. Which's voice reverberated through the cave. "There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do something about the unpleasant ones.
Madeleine L'Engle
When you reframe problems as projects or opportunities, they will cease to bother you and begin to stimulate you.
Alan Cohen
Death is Peaceful, Life is Harder
Stephenie Meyer
A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.
Maira Kalman
Those who can create, will create. Those who cannot create, will compete.
Michael F. Bruyn
The cruelest thing you can do tosomeone is force them to hurt alone
Chris Colfer
I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
Sherman Alexie
Faith is the feather that can let us fly.
Debasish Mridha
Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.We are one long frightening climax.
Gillian Flynn
Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.
Henry David Thoreau
Shine like a candle of love to enlighten the world like the moon.
Debasish Mridha
Twinkle tiny star.Oh, how great you truly are!God's sign from afar.
Richelle E. Goodrich
As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.
Jeannette Walls
We made a successful, last-minute effort to get the French Open many years ago, when the USA network bailed on it. I remember, four of us jumped on a plane on the spur of the moment to cover it. I think we had someone draw up a sign (by hand) that we could hold up in front of the camera to tell viewers that it was ESPN coverage.
Patrick McEnroe
The highest happiness on earth exists in the donation of self for the betterment of others.
Debasish Mridha
You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.
Kellie Elmore
In that instant, Gogolov feared death. He could feel himself falling through the dark void of space. He was flailing and terrified and utterly alone. He braced for impact, but it never came. He cried for mercy he would never see. He felt the searing heat and the demons ripping at his eyes and face with claws like razors. And then, in a terrifying flash of clarity, he realized it would never end.
Joel C. Rosenberg
The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.
Erica Lorraine Scheidt
As long as I keep fighting every day, I know my dreams will happen. Most often, our dreams will not unfold exactly the way we expect them to, but if we keep working hard, our dreams WILL happen as long as we BELIEVE in them and in ourselves. This is called having faith, and it is a very important component of success!”-Naima Mora
Naima Mora
If you haven't failed you haven't tried anything new...
Reshma Saujani
Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.
Richard Gunderman
If I could give you just one thing, I’d want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it.The truth is simply this:No one owes you anything.
Harry Browne
Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.
David Allen
Sometimes a person has to go back really back-to have a sense an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.
Paule Marshall
That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection and human life. This is the force that feels, and thinks and gives us consciousness at all. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.
Marya Hornbacher
I stayed, to love you.I left, to love myself.
Scott Stabile
The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do.
Victor LaValle
Peace will be there when you will be looking for it and ready for it.
Debasish Mridha
What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences.
Jess Row
Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)
Charles Baxter
They’ve kept the truth about Persephone a secret,burying it deep below Hercules’s murdered wifeand all of Zeus’s affairs.It’s dangerous, you see, a spark threatening to ignite a long dead flame.Power.She loved her power,the Queen of the Dead,to forever reign in the fires of hell. She wore her crown like a beacon;a beautiful queen,plotting against her king.They never wanted youto know the hunger of Persephone,how she starved for something other than pomegranates.Control.The primal thirst that burns all women’s throats,denied by eons of men.Listen closely to the voice from hell, sweetheart. “You are a queen;don’t wait for a king.
Emily Palermo
The old saying that, "you are what you eat" extends beyond the body, and includes experiences.
Bryant McGill
Drake, her sexy mate, just lifted a big shoulder. "Bo clearly does not know how to act around his female. Once he figures out how to, they will be mated soon."t"No doubt," Finn murmured.
Katie Reus
Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.
John Green
A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands
George R.R. Martin
I want you. I want you so badly I can’t stand it. When you left, it felt like the world got darker. Like I couldn’t truly see anything. Couldn’t feel anything.
Rachel Vincent
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.
Robert M. Pirsig
Can you put your hands on my crot
Jennifer Echols
What is with these guys? Where's the thrill in watching snakes eat?I certainly didn't thrill in watching humans eat.
Patrick Jennings
Christ alone makes possible everything you are as a Christian.
Jim George
Though I am weak yet God when prayed Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
None of us need ever fear that we don't have an active imagination, because imagination is mostly a willingness to entertain a strange idea now and then.
Bert Dodson
If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.
Nicole Krauss
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
Through no-fault divorce, one parent can now declare unilaterally that the marriage has "broken down" and invite the state in to take control and remove the other parent without the parent having committed any legal transgression. What the government then offers to the parent who invites it in is the promise that her invitation will be rewarded; the state will establish her as a puppet government, a satrap of the state within the family. This requires that not the faithless but the faithful parent be punished.
Stephen Baskerville
Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves', allowing 'joy and grief to be measured in define, quantitative unit.' Ultimately, he concluded, 'a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.
Nicholas Carr
The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Anna Quindlen
It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.
David G. McAfee
Don’t be a half-Christian. There are too many of such in the world. The world has a profound respect for people who are sincere in their faith.
Billy Graham
Any friend of my cousin's is a friend of mine, sir. How exactly do you know Lady Zoe?"Before Tristan could answer, Zoe jumped in. "We met at some party, did we not, Mr. Bonnaud?""Yes." Tristan forced a smile. "Clearly a very dull one, since neither of us can remember which one it was.
Sabrina Jeffries
You are not your emotions and they are not who you are, only how you feel at the moment.
Toni Sorenson
There is a fine line between stubbornness and stupidity as well as intensity and insanity.
Brittany Burgunder
Oh, the best dancers know/what grace/every stumble/contains.
Em Claire
We imagine that things come into existence, endure for a while, and then pass out of existence
Steve Hagen
Gestalt means whole, and so are you.
Jan Deelstra