Quotes by American Authors - Page 1603

You can't change laws without first changing human nature... You can't change human nature without first changing the law.
Neal Shusterman
Youth condemns maturity condones.
Josephine Preston Peabody
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.
Karen Swallow Prior
Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.
Philip Zaleski
Do your own thing. Others own their own thing. If you copy too much, you'll find yourself in late night cocktail lounge cover band limbo.
Kurt Cobain
Her short path through life had been written and it was not her right to know the meaning, only the outcome.
Stuart Land
Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” if I were the only remaining person.”What do you know? I’m in command
Andy Weir
In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.
Michael Crichton
Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Because the pure girls get rescued." Mary Lou felt something she didn't let herself feel often. She was well and truly pissed off. "Why do girls have to be all pure and innocent and good? Why don't guys have to be?
Libba Bray
And then depression set in....
Bill Murray
One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Social class positioning influences all aspects of everyday interaction – how to talk, if to talk and when, whom to trust, whether or not to plan or risk, what can or cannot be done, how to belong, and who to be. Of course, how people respond to these social interactions depends on how social class intersects with the meanings and practices associated with other significant sociocultural categories (gender, race, ethnicity, age, cohort, religion, geography, sexual orientation) that also influence psychological tendencies.
Susan T. Fiske
As they seek authenticity, Emerging Evangelicals seek freedom - from loneliness, convention, unwanted authority, dominant paradigms, the prevailing social climate, and impersonal bureaucracies. Ironically, in this sense, their preferred narrative and their desired subjectivity are just as modern as what they seek to distance themselves from: the conservative Christian subculture, including its born-again narrative of awakening and transformation.
James S. Bielo
The lust for comfort that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest and then becomes a host and then a master.
Kahlil Gibran
Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
Fran Lebowitz
God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
Ray Bradbury
There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.
David Ignatow
Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles.
Brandon Sanderson
...it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle." p28
Donna Tartt
Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?
Suzanne Finnamore
Beyond that door lies an unknown world...where we can become immortal if we choose
Linda Lappin
Be content not with your lot in life but with being here in the flow of life. The glories of creation are in your very cells; you are made of the same mindstuff as the angels, the stars, and god himself.
Deepak Chopra
Failure is temporary but hope is forever.
Debasish Mridha
Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if he did not exist, then neither would we.
Thomas Ligotti
Then you're seventy-five, friends are dead, and you've replaced at least one major organ: you have to pee four times a night, and you can't go up a flight a stairs without being little winded -- and your're told you're in pretty good shape for your age. [....], in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with.
John Scalzi
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21)
Rollo May
The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.
Nicholas Sparks
Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City." As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears. "My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph.
Sharon Kay Penman
Peter eyes his swanky and incredibly dated jacket and fluffs the frills on his sleeves. Outside the window stands a guy in a tattered grey hoodie and cut-offs that slide down to his hips, thus exposing the plaid glory of his boxers. “Damn pity. If I'd known what crimes I'd be exposed to under the guise of fashion, I may have very well stayed dead.
Diane Rinella
Now the frosty stars are gone: I have watched them one by one Fading on the shores of Dawn. Round and full the glorious sun Walks with level step the spray Through his vestibule of Day.
Bayard Taylor
She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before. And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps missing beats and my hands cannot bring her close enough to me. I taste her and realize I have been starving. I have loved before, but it didn't feel like this.I have kissed before, but it didn't burn me alive. Maybe it lasts a minute, and maybe it's an hour. All I know is that kiss, and how soft her skin is when it brushes against mine, and that even if I did not know it until now, I have been waiting for this person forever.
Jodi Picoult
Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.
Michael Cisco
The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Similarly, sexual desire is good, so if men rape for sex (rather than to express anger towards women), rape would not be as evil. Rape is evil; therefore the claim that men rape for sex cannot be correct. More generally, what people instinctively like is good, so if people like beauty, beauty would be a sign of worth. Beauty is not a sign of worth, so the claim that people like beauty cannot be correct.These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good). Feminism would lose nothing by giving them up.
Steven Pinker
I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.
Marilynne Robinson
The only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten you are divine.
Dan Brown
Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth.
Jennifer Block
Forgiveness is a choice. You control how you respond to something or someone. You can't change things that happened in the past, but you can decide how you let them affect you.
Amalie Howard
If you are still alive when you read this,close your eyes. I amunder their lids, growing black.
Bill Knott
I cannot calculate nor attempt to manage sacrifice, for to do so is to attempt to sacrifice comfortably. And it is in the attempt to sacrifice comfortably that I begin to realize that the desire for comfort is in reality the demand that I put myself first, and there is nothing of sacrifice in that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.
Dexter Palmer
This is like telling a person who has leapt off a cliff to be careful. I am already in midair.
Christina Baker Kline
The front door swung open, and Zsadist strode into the house. Wrath glared. "Nice of you to show up, Z. Busy tonight with the females?""How about you get off my dick?
J.R. Ward
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art. He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
Lauren Oliver
Life on the farm had fed his soul since he was a child. he was ever grateful to Gott for giving him a chance to work the land and live by the seasons. It was a good life...but a lonely one for a man his age, a man too old to be living with his family.
Rosalind Lauer
Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.
Louise Bates Ames
September 11… I will never forget feeling scared and vulnerable… I will never forget feeling the deep sad loss of so many lives… I will never forget the smell of the smoke that reached across the water and delivered a deep feeling of doom into my gut… I will never forget feeling the boosted sense of unity and pride… I will never forget seeing the courageous actions of so many men and women… I will never forget seeing people of all backgrounds working together in community… I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy… I will never forget seeing what love can heal…
Steve Maraboli
What could she have done? She was a heroine, and with that came certain obligations.
Emily C.A. Snyder
An evangelist is like a newscaster on television or a journalist writing for a newspaper . . . except that the evangelist’s mission is to tell the Good News that never changes.
Billy Graham
It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!
Catherynne M. Valente
A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.
Robert McKee
Be calm, be brave, it'll be okay.
Guster
About Hollywood.I feel like it’s a big ocean, full of bottom feeders, midlevel fish, the occasional shark, and some wonderful savvy whales, the elders, and the ones who guide you on your way. If you’re lucky enough, you get to be a dolphin and have your waves broken by the passage of these elders before you, but at the same time, you get an occasional shark bite in the tail and maybe one of the bottom feeders comes up and takes a little nibble. But I see myself as cresting a series of waves, dipping down, sometimes, lower than I’d like, but mainly kind of happily staying above. (smiles and takes a long drag of her cigarette) And, of course, I try to avoid the fishnets.
Anjelica Huston
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Adlai Stevenson
Little known fact: When you get really scared and too many scary things happen at once, you can leave your body. I don’t know if it’s your soul or your consciousness or what, but you can literally float up in the air over your body and watch what it’s doing.
Dinah Katt
Happiness and Peace is something we nurture from within, Cultivate yours and enjoy the sunshine, feel the warmth.
Diane Valterra
I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
When I was your age, television was called books.
William Goldman
My parents are humans too. This has been one of my greatest awakenings in adulthood: my parents being regular people, too. They have baggage and losses, grown up in imperfect homes with imperfect families just as I did. Life hasn’t been easy on either of them between the mixture of poor decisions and bad breaks; this world lacks perfection for us all.
Natalie Brenner
True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough