Quotes by American Authors - Page 1628

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Her eyes widened as he guided her backward until she was trapped against the bed. He turned her around so that she faced it.“You remember when we met, how you told me off in your office? Ever since then, I’ve wanted something.” He smoothed his hands up her legs and pushed up her skirt. With one sharp tug, he ripped her lacy thong and tossed it to the floor. “You at my mercy.”He heard the excited catch of her breath and bent his head to murmur in her ear. “Good thing you still have those heels on.
Julie James
The comment section of the internet is like gang graffiti, it makes no sense and is ugly to look at.
michael p naughton
A "breakdown" is when you've exhausted every option and have no choice but to accept the fact that you are powerless to create the outcome you want. A "breakthrough" has the same definition.
Paul Colaianni
The massive spread of corporate controlled humans across the face of the Earth would be regarded as a parasitic growth by nature.
Steven Magee
Nothing in this life will ever make sense to me but I can't help but try to collect the change and hope it's enough to pay for our mistakes.
Tahereh Mafi
If I could mimic the dynamic of any Shakespearean marriage, I’d choose to mimic the Macbeths—before the murder, ruthless ambition, and torturous descents into madness and death, that is.
Jillian Keenan
Religious beliefs...should never be an excuse to treat people badly.
Zach Wahls
For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.
Rudy Rucker
I want to know everything about you." So he told her. The stars, too, seemed to listen.
Marie Rutkoski
Tears mess up your makeup.
Julia Child
My heart and my cock seemed to like the idea, and Whitney made me a slave to both, so my wits were outnumbered.
Rachael Wade
Do you think there's a difference? Between belonging with and belonging to?
Jenny Han
The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
Annie Dillard
How beautiful a woman can be if kindness is her true beauty.
Debasish Mridha
...the morning with the whole day waiting,full of promise,the nightof quiet, of no expectations, of rest.And the certainty of home, the one I live in,and the onethat lives in me.
Karen Hesse
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
The look of experience suited him, especially because somewhere deep in those eyes, there still lurked a dangerous invitation to play. He had a quality of masculine confidence that was a thousand times more potent than mere handsomeness. Perfect goodlooks could leave you cold, but this kind of sexy charisma went straight to your knees. -Haven Travis
Lisa Kleypas
It’s to your best interest to be patient with your REAL self as you nurture it back into existence." ~ Linda Deir
Linda Deir
We tend not to look at the bigger picture of our lives and instead dwell on the small things that irritate us. When we focus on the bigger picture, those small things fade away.
Ron Baratono
We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to."I think I'll stick with reality," I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. "I'd think you of all people would want to escape.""Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.
Robyn Schneider
I write-down to speak-up.
M.K. Asante Jr.
Your value is based on how much and how deeply you can love others without any expectations of a return.
Debasish Mridha
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.
Raquel Cepeda
You are mad!" she snapped, her chest heaving. "And you are a devil!""And you, my dear," Royce imperturbably replied, "are a bitch." With that, heturned to the horrified friar and unhesitatingly announced, "The lady and I wish to be wed.
Judith McNaught
Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?
Brian Evenson
The next day he passed Alai in the corridor, and they greeted each other, touched hands, talked, but they both knew that there was a wall there now.It might be breached, that wall, sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.
Orson Scott Card
I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.
Robert Frost
Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.
Stephen King
We're cleaning cat ears.Rhonda doesn't require us to come in on Sundays, but somebody has to feed the animals. Yesterday Alex and I helped five cats and two dogs find homes...We agreed we probably could have placed a couple more cats if their ears were nice and pink inside like in the wet-food commercials. We told Rhonda to take a much-deserved break today and we'd come in, feed everybody, and make our cats a little more like the ones on TV.So I skipped church to clean cat ears.
Mindy McGinnis
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.
Dan Simmons
Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?
Ernest Hemingway
Spend as much time as possible with positive, joyful people and as little time as possible with negative, unhappy people.
Molly Friedenfeld
There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.
Robert Henri
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland would say…
Mari Mancusi
Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time
Winona LaDuke
That Shay was in possesion of hand grenades was a comforting thought showed what kind of night this had become.
Scott Westerfeld
Save the children, save mankind.
Aaron B. Powell
Milkers don’t spend half as long with their mothers." Eli spread his chore coat over Little Joe. "Not more than a few weeks. Sometimes one day. Maybe not even ... If you were a peeper, it’d be even worse. They don’t even get to see their mamas. They’re still jelly beans when they’re left alone to hatch.
Sandra Neil Wallace
When you became a Christian, you were still susceptible to living the way you learned to live before. Your brain was not wiped clean. That conflicts with this new life to which you gave yourself. Is it easy being a Christian in this world today? No! You are living in two contrary worlds at the same time. The two worlds have collided!
Van Harden
I brooded over it. If it had been any other dream, I would have ignored it. But it was one of those dreams. One of those purple dreams. One of those dreams that had an unusual tendency to come true.
Erica Sehyun Song
Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived ...My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real.Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.
Nina Sankovitch
Landon drops the bloody knife and stares at Summer like he doesn’t even know her anymore. The truth is, she’ll never be the girl she was seven months ago. Too much has happened. Too much has changed.“Why’d you do that?” Summer cries.“To save you,” he says.But there’s nothing left to save.
Laura Kreitzer
How’s it going?” Day said dryly and went about setting up his coffee machine.“It’s going better now that I’m seeing you.” Detective Johnson came over to Day and stood over him. Day had to practically reach around the tall man to start the machine. “Dude, want to give me a little room here.”“No. I like being close to you.” Detective Johnson took one long finger and slowly dragged it down the front of Day’s chest.“Well fuckin’ unlike it.” They both jumped at the sound of God’s gruff voice.God walked up to Day and grabbed him by the back of his neck. He spun Day around so hard that he dropped the small packs of sugar to the floor. All he could do was hold on to God’s massive biceps as he ravaged his mouth. Day let God completely control him until he was done proving his point. God released him and Day practically fell back into the counter.“Fuck, Cash,” Day whispered, completely out of breath. After Day got his wits about him he noticed that God and Johnson were in a serious stare off over his head.Johnson broke first and looked down at Day.“You’re fucking God now?” Johnson asked disbelievingly.“Okay, that just sounds wrong saying it like that, so I’m not going to comment.” Day inched away from the two giants and propped himself up on one of the break-room tables. “I think I’ll watch this one from the sidelines.
A.E. Via
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
Robert Anton Wilson
Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a simple thing. Maybe it's as simple as the salty taste of pork, and the vast deal of chewing in it, and how, when the chew is gone, you can still scrape at the bone with your bottom teeth and suck at the marrow.
Franny Billingsley
This would be the last moment of the primary during which I felt as though I inhabited a different planet than everyone else in my party, that I had heard a different speech, seen a different person, been in a different room than everyone else. But I can't say that I was unhappy that they had heard what they did. If they thought Hillary was telling them to fuck off, that was okay with me. For just one last day, before I joined their ranks, I wanted them to fuck off too.
Rebecca Traister
I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.
Sally Mann
I'm sixty-nine years old, and I have no plans to run for reelection. Do you think I give a damn?
John Hart
We discover part of our true self only by conspicuous inspection of the depths of our conscience.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Grow up, Bailey.""That is precisely what I'm doing," Bailey says. "I don't care if you don't understand that. Staying here won't make me happy. It will make you happy because you're insipid and boring, and an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It's not enough for me. It will never be enough for me. So I'm leaving. Do me a favor and marry someone who will take decent care of the sheep.
Erin Morgenstern
Names have power... And he kept the one I gave him. My dear, sweet Jackaby. - Eleanor
William Ritter
A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief.
A.W. Tozer
And the thing is, we can’t fail. We’ve already hit the bottom and come out of it. From here on out, if we just love and listen, we can’t go wrong, babe.
Erin McCarthy
Have you ever heard of the theory that it is better for one man to die than an entire nation to suffer? Do you believe that to be true? Is it ever okay to take a life in hopes of saving others?
Sara B. Larson
On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.
Nayomi Munaweera
To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Eye Contact. Direct eye contact is one of the best compliments you can give to another. You are subliminally telling them that you are listening, they matter, and that what they have to say is important.
Susan C.Young
And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.
Ally Condie
Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.
Mary Ann Shaffer