Quotes by American Authors - Page 1577

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
Jodi Picoult
Each person’s journey is different. If something—anything—does not feel right to you, then you alone get to decide whether you will honor it or not. The choice of how to respond to your situation is yours—and will always be yours.
Susan Barbara Apollon
You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role - perhaps the largest role - in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. 'We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Lyndon.
Robert A. Caro
Tell me to stop, Sugar, or I'm going to start a firestorm of emotion neither one of us will know how to handle."tShe smiled. "I've always loved storms."tHe jerked her face closer and her heart rate kicked up. "Then it's time you were introduced to a Florida hurricane.
Vonnie Davis
For you, that tree is dead.
Richard Stark
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú Americanus, or more colloquially, fukú-generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World.
Junot Díaz
Talent is only cream in your coffee. There is no reason to rest on your talent. If you don't present it, then it gets nowhere.
Mies Van Der Rohe
The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.
Rob Bignell
If you're reading this book, there is probably an artist or band whose music you have an intense personal relationship with. I would also guess that this artist or band came into your life during a time when you were highly vulnerable. if this is the case, this artist or band might be the closest thing you had to a confidant. in fact, he, she, or it was better than a confidant, because his/her/its music articulated your own thoughts and feeling better than you ever could. This music elevated the raw materials of your life to the heights of art and poetry. It made you feel as if your personal experience was grander and more meaningful than it might otherwise have been. And naturally you attributed whatever that music was doing to your heart and brain to the people who made the music, and you came to believe that the qualities of the music were also true of the music's creators. "If this music understands me, then the people behind the music must also understand me," goes this line of thought.
Steven Hyden
It’s been a long time. How have you been doing?”I’m fine. How are you? You’re looking very handsome today, Addolgar the Handsome, lord of my loins.At least that was what she’d like to say to him, but instead she came out with, “Yeah, hi.
G.A. Aiken
For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.
Henry Miller
Let your love be the light of your life. Now enlighten the whole world with the brightness of that light.
Debasish Mridha
The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one’s linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go.
Darrell Calkins
The touch of your fingersgrazing minedelicate asa single drop of winein a crystal goblet.Rolling it round,I savor it on my tongue,try tomake it lastforever.The words Iloveyouform in the airand melt. Your palm againstmy cheek,light asa snowflake.
Eve Merriam
Following Jesus is a verb.
Mark Batterson
Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
When I was your age I knew nothing about the world or my place in it. I figured I'd be someone's wife, then someone's mother. It never occurred to me to be someone myself.
Wendy Mass
An enlightened life can be so powerful that it can illuminate the whole world.
Debasish Mridha
Here we have baby. It is composed of a bald head and a pair of lungs.
Eugene Field
Sometimes I can’t tell if you hate this place or love it.”“I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don’t like what it is.” She hugs her knees close to her chest. “The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family.”“How’s that?”She thinks about it for a long time. “Like isn’t the same thing as love.
Robert Jackson Bennett
Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.
Criss Jami
I'm going to take care of you. I gotcha. Because that's my job, right? Taking care of my pain in the ass little brother.
Eric Kripke
I don't believe what you believe," I yelled, "and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I'm struggling with? I don't want to live by the things you live by, I don't want that kind of life and I don't see why I should be judged by its standards.
Erica Jong
If you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you'll end up miserable.
Brandon Sanderson
As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.
Aphrodite Matsakis
The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.
James Baldwin
The looters comes with the carrion crows after every battle.
George R.R. Martin
Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.
Steven Ramirez
Every journey begins with the first step of articulating the intention, and then becoming the intention.
Bryant McGill
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
Amy Tan
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.
Dean Koontz
When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....
Alice Mattison
After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.
Eve Ensler
In about the same degree as you are helpful you will be happy.
Karl Reiland
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.
Gabrielle Zevin
...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.
Rob Bignell
You attract who you are being. When you work at being the type of person that you want to attract, you attract those kinds of people into your life.
Roy T. Bennett
A project goal like a joke. If you have to explain it, it is not good / fun.
Gerry Geek
The integrity of one's own mind is of infinitely more value than adherence to any creed or system. We must choose between a dead faith belonging to the past and a living, growing ever-advancing science belonging to the future.
Luther Burbank
Life baffles me most days. Maybe that's why I write. To try and make sense of it all.
Christy Hall
We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you use too many profanities, that will often get you barred from many arenas, no matter what you’re trying to say. On the other hand, polite, formal language is allowed almost anywhere even when all it is communicating is hatred and violence. Power always privileges its own discourse while marginalizing those who would challenge it or that are the victims of its power.
Junot Díaz
The ripple effect. You throw a pebble into the water and it creates ripples. Your action was to throw the pebble—the representation of your choice. That’s all that you can control. But not the ripples—those are the consequences of your choice. And that you cannot control.
Michele Bardsley
I usually know almost exactly how I feel. The problem is, I just can't tell anyone.
Meg Cabot
God doesn't act like the Church. No, instead, the Church must act like God.
Kim Clement
When nothing worked, he decided the least he could do was pick the yam bits out of his beard. But even the proved fruitless since the bits seemed to find their way into the deepest recesses of the beard, and the just small enough boy quickly grew squeamish. Judge if you must, but if you've ever had to pick yam bits out of an old man's bushy beard, I'm sure you'd forgive him.
Jason Carter Eaton
Love is a cheap word. Anyone can say it, and few truly know what it means.
Julianna Scott
Closing your eyes won't make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head - doesn't this feed the monster? You can't close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
Barbara Kingsolver
Most people spend less time outside than prisoners.
J.R. Rim
In any relationship in which two people become one, the end result is two half people.
Wayne W. Dyer
By the power of Steven Wright's Beard!
Craig Ferguson
Being in a wheelchair has made everyday things difficult. Things you wouldn't imagine. Like the looks I get at high school basketball games when they tell everyone to stand for the National Anthem.
Travis J. Dahnke
I have so much hate that it has turned into love.
Margaret Cho
Life is for living.
Laird Hamilton
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
Erich Maria Remarque
My father is using me as a message of hope. My sister is using me as a message of fear.I don't want to be used by anybody.
Clara Kensie
The blade sings to me. Faintly, so soft against my ears, its voice calms my worries and tells me that one touch will take it all away. It tells me that I just need to slide a long horizontal cut, and make a clean slice. It tells me the words that I have been begging to hear: this will make it ok.
Amanda Steele
..Thirty's the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.
Stephen King