Quotes by American Authors - Page 1609

Life is about discovering things worth dying for.
Criss Jami
There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.
Bill Murray
God will bring you a gift. However, it is up to you to stop shaking the same box and expecting something wonderful will fall out of it again. After a while, you are going to break that box and it won't remind you of that moment when it meant everything to you.
Shannon L. Alder
Do not ignore your best friend because some other friend hurt you.
Debasish Mridha
You like it in jail?""It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?
Raymond Chandler
Iz," Alec said tiredly. "It's not like it's one big bad thing. It's a lot of little invisible things. When Magnus and I were traveling, and I'd call from the road, Dad never asked how he was. When I get up to talk in Clave meetings, no one listens, and I don't know if that's because I'm young or if it's because of something else. I saw Mom talking to a friend about her grandchildren and the second I walked into the room they shut up. Irina Cartwright told me it was a pity no one would ever inherit my blue eyes now." He shrugged and looked toward Magnus, who took a hand off the wheel for a moment to place it on Alec's. "It's not like a stab wound you can protect me from. It's a million little paper cuts every day.
Cassandra Clare
Aside from a very select few, there are no overnight success stories. Most of the time that single step took a thousand miles to get to it.
Carl Henegan
Perhaps we all said the right things at the wrong time; perhaps we couldn't help it. Perhaps words became too heavy to haul, and the moment we let them loose was always the wrong one, but they needed to be free.
Mackenzi Lee
A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
Mindset will change your reality and destination. Are you ready? If yes, start THINKING victory. Trust me - you will win.
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn.
Jennifer Estep
The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.
H.W. Brands
When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...
Tennessee Williams
TESLA’S CAT[Nikola Tesla’s favorite childhood companion] was the family’s black cat, Macak. Macak followed young Nikola everywhere, and they spent many happy hours rolling on the grass. It was Macak the cat who introduced Tesla to electricity on a dry winter evening. “As I stroked Macak’s back,” he recalled, “I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” Curious, he asked his father what caused the sparks. Puzzled at first, [his father] finally answered, “Well, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.” His father’s answer, equating the sparks with lightning, fascinated the young boy. As Tesla continued to stroke Macak, he began to wonder, “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God,” he concluded.
W. Bernard Carlson
Books are just old friends waiting to be discovered.
Carmela Dutra
When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out.
Robin Sloan
If I had wanted children of my own, I would have gotten married. If I had wanted to get married, I would have fallen in love. If I had wanted to fall in love, I would have met the right girl. If I had wanted to meet the right girl, I would have drank a whole lot less.
Carroll Bryant
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
Cornel West
I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
Jonathan Safran Foer
Whatever you did today is enough. Whatever you felt today is valid. Whatever you thought today isn't to be judged. Repeat the above each day.
Brittany Burgunder
Relationships are ropes. Love is a noose. - Durzo Blint
Brent Weeks
He didn't have a single clue what was going on with these two strangers, but every instinct told him Master George equaled good, Mistress Jane equaled bald- he blinked-uh, bad.
James Dashner
Time equals life; therefore, waste your time and waste of your life, or master your time and master your life.
Alan Lakein
No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence.
Smiley Blanton
Jung was the first to propose the model of psychic energy, suggesting that for introverts, energy flows inward, while for extroverts, energy flows outward. Introverts tend to embrace this definition. It fels right for us because we know exactly what it feels like to have our energy depleted when we have sent too much flowing outward.
Sophia Dembling
See how forgiving - how brave nature is.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Speak life. Let your voice be heard around the globe. Speak into existence prosperity, peace, love, happiness. Allow yours words to transcend throughout space and time.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
(by the way . . . I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it . . . ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in.)
Charles Bukowski
But the fact is, dreams catch us with our armor off.
Victoria Schwab
I like pancakes.
Brandon Mull
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
George R.R. Martin
It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.
Sharon Salzberg
Every man's got to figure to get beat sometime.
Joe Louis
Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.
Katherine Boo
A leprechaun did not just kill off my car in a hailstorm.
Kathy Bryson
It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’ games and work and manners!
Louisa May Alcott
Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.
Sheri S. Tepper
...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.
Laura Hillenbrand
All of us are products of our childhood.
Michael Jackson
Modern man, in so far as he is still Cartesian (he is of course going far beyond Descartes in many respects), is a subject for whom his own self-awareness as a thinking, observing, measuring and estimating "self" is absolutely primary. It is for him the one indubitable "reality," and all truth starts here. The more he is able to develop his consciousness as a subject over against objects, the more he can understand things in their relations to him and one another, the more he can manipulate these objects for his own interests, but also, at the same time, the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective prison, to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in a kind of impenetrable alienated and transparent bubble which contains all reality in the form of purely subjective experience. Modern consciousness then tends to create this solipsistic bubble of awareness - an ego-self imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such selves in so far as they are all "things" rather than persons.
Thomas Merton
Hell, yes," Dev says, sitting up now. "Don't get me wrong - we're totally going to make the beast with two backs tonight. But if we do it right, it's going to feel like holding hands.
David Levithan
It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the ‘Symposium’ and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn’t matter to me that I was reading a translation. I’d read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.
Andrea Dworkin
Unfortunately, violence has a way of overpowering even the strongest of wills
Kenneth Eade
Do you live to eat or eat to live?
Debasish Mridha
We could see in our own country as late as the 1960's and 1970's how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and cooly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre of hundred of thousands of men, women and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering - or should one say, cowardly? - consciences were aroused.
William L. Shirer
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
Stephen King
What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give the, Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn the, that it could never be Eden?
Walter M. Miller Jr
Nowadays, I dont have expectations, and this way she beats them all.
Jodi Picoult
Quality depends on kindness. Beauty depends on simplicity. Joy depends on generosity.
Debasish Mridha
Because just beingaround you makes me so fucking happy, you airhead. Ilike you. I want you. I see my unborn children in youreyes—okay scratch that one. I swear to fuck I’m notbeing flip here.” I sighed. “What my heart doeswhenever you’re near isn’t just about chemistry Cam.It’s like…stargazing. I feel insignificant and dazzled.Hopeful yet completely unprepared.
Z.A. Maxfield
It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not.
Paul Collins
Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent men she's been rejected by. The fact that you don't return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies.
Chris Kraus
Violence is the method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak. The strong of heart and brain need no violence, for they are irresistible in their consciousness of being right.
Alexander Berkman
Come on, there's no one there. You want coffee?" Tess asked."Yeah, sure, why not? I'm only on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't imagine why caffeine wouldn't help this situation.
Frankie Rose
Use your greatness, love, and kindness to change the world.
Debasish Mridha
Rylan!"Nadia and I turn our heads simultaneously towards the entrance to the living room as Tim Powers appears."Yeah?" I yell across the room.That's when I notice the expression on Power' face. A mixture of awe, amazement, appreciation, and a bit of jealousy."Your girlfriend's here," Tim informs me.He steps aside, and a goddess enters the room.It's been forever since I first had those dreams Ivy sent me with her in her disguise. But I still remember how she looks. Pale skin, long hair, bright-green eyes, and a model's figure. A perfect dream girl, who's now reality.Ivy smiles shyly as she steps into the room. Her skin is porcelain, unflawed and shiny. White-blind hair, straight and flowing, falls down her back and ends a little bit past her waist. She's not wearing her woven grass robe, but instead a dress mist likely altered from a piece of clothing from her clothes sack. It probably reached the floor at one point, with long sleeves, but the sleeves are gone and the skirt's been snipped away, leaving behind a green dress that shows off mile-long legs.But her face...all that pales in comparison to her face. Heart-shaped, with high cheekbones, an elegant nose, a well-shaped chin, and her lips—she's not covering them anymore—two shimmering, bright green pools I would be happy to drown in or go through. People believe the eyes are the window to your soul, and Ivy's soul is beautiful.
Colleen Boyd
They all ordered massive plates of eggs, pancakes, and reindeer sausage, though Frank looked a little worried about the reindeer. "You think it's okay that we're eating Rud
Rick Riordan