Quotes by American Authors - Page 1647

But I was eventually okay. And you will be okay too. Here's why. I had already made a decision early on that I would be a plain girl with tons of personality, and accepting it made everything a lot easier. If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have some say as to what your currency is going to be. I decided early on it was not going to be my looks.
Amy Poehler
When you move as much as I have...you know how it ends. You promise to stay in touch with people, but it doesn't work out. It never does. And you forgot about what the friendship used to be like, why you liked that person. And I hated it. And I just didn't want to do it again. Not with you.
Morgan Matson
He was acting like our kiss had broken him, and his reaction was breaking me.
Shannon A. Thompson
Religion was a means to an end. She had seen it wielded as a weapon. If she needed to use it, she would, but she would never allow herself to be used by it.
Kiersten White
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
John Steinbeck
Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.
Lee Child
Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don't have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don't understand, then I don't have the time to explain it to you. If you don't have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.
Ann Patchett
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defea
William O. Douglas
I have the perfect simplified tax form for government. Why don't they just print our money with a return address on it?
Bob Hope
Look. I don't expect you to spill your guts to me. Your business is your business. Dress how you want to dress. Let people wonder. Fuck 'em."I smile.Solo raised a finger. "But you've got to stop looking for a fight every time someone makes a comment. High school sucks for everyone."I feel my smile fade, and I sit back in the chair. "It kind of feels like you're defending those guys."Solo shrugs. "There will always be guys like Jim Vickers. But I'm not going to let them stop me from doing what I want. And neither should you.
Jeff Garvin
See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else - sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you're not making someone bleed.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography.
Gay Talese
You are so special and important and elegant and smart and kind and worthwhile, and you are so much better than me and everyone else I’ve ever known in every single way, and you are the only truth I have ever found in this lying world, and I love you to the floor of me, and it breaks me to imagine a future without you in it, and I just want you to know all that, just because.
Seth King
[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.
Rick Moody
The greater the pain associated with love, the more likely a person is to be attracted to others who will inflict this pain…for isn’t this what love is? Hurt people tend to hurt other people.
David W. Earle
Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee. I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects. I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Beyond the pain, anger and unforgiveness, there is only one thing; love. This is where the magic happens
Renae A.Sauter
Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...
Asa Don Brown
I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.
Natasha Trethewey
He understood now why she was so much calmer, so much happier when he held her hand while they walked. When he first did that, she had looked at their linked fingers quizzically, but didn't pull away, even though she had been as skittish as a stray cat. limit.
Sandra Ross
Consumers are what’s going to change the world, not necessarily industries or governments,
Horace Luke
What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?
Dave Cullen
Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.
Cheryl Strayed
Being around her now was nine parts bliss and one part torment. And he wanted it to last as long as possible.
Molly Ringle
How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.
Ernest Hemingway
It’s ego – the false self – that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.
Jed McKenna
Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.
Margot Lee Shetterly
Hey," I said softly and cupped his cheek."Yeah?"“What about your dream?”His face went dimples. “I’m lookin’ at it, darlin’.”Oh. Crap. My heart felt near bursting. I was absolutely done for. This man owned me, body and soul, and everything in between.
Madeline Sheehan
Cath couldn't control whether she saw Levi on campus. But she could worry about it, and as long as she was worrying about it, it probably wasn't going to happen. Like some sort of anxiety vaccine. Like watching a pot to make sure it never boiled.
Rainbow Rowell
positivity is the father of reinvention
Josh Stern
God plants the talent and it grows, sustained by a spirit-given strength to endure, even in the midst of darkness. It thrives in the valleys of life and ignores the peaks. It blooms like a flower when cradled by the warmth of the sun. It remains in a hidden stairwell in a concentration camp. It grows, fed in secret, in the heart of every artist.
Kristy Cambron
Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing
Warren Buffett
Love is not quiet.Love is loud and clear. Love makes noise for justice, against all injustice,and never forgets those most vulnerable.I am seeing, more clearly than ever,what Love demands,and I will do my best to answer its callwith conviction, and an open heart for all.
Scott Stabile
I have discovered that some people are wealthier than others not because of their superior intelligence but because of their abundant mindset.
Debasish Mridha
The Bad-Moon Girls appear on days when Dad doesn't know what he is thinking, or even if he is thinking. Those days can weigh less than air or more than an ocean. He has blank thoughts without feelings, followed by heavy feelings without thoughts. Time means nothing. A minute ticks by in the same rhythm as an entire day. He can look at one thing for an hour without moving. He can see me or Victor without knowing we are in the room, peering at us as if we are underwater, moving in warped slow motion.After the nothingness, he wades through a stagnant lake with the moon reflected in it, waiting for the daylight to rinse it away. He almost drowns while time ticks on. The sky is filled with black milk. No stars. Two days can pass before he surfaces.Dad's brain-switch, the focusing thing the rest of us switch on to make things look better, is a bit buggered. Those are his words, not mine.The Bad-Moon Girls whisper evil in Dad's ear, the sort of women who would set their own mother on fire if there were no other way to light their cigarettes. The trouble is, they can follow. Just as we were setting off to Clacton last autumn, they hunted him down.
Joanna Campbell
To live in a world that requires you to become someone else, being yourself is your best choice and most valuable accomplishment."-Steven Cuoco
Steven Cuoco
Shut up…let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough...I don’t even think about women anymore. I think about you.
Louis C.K.
Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.
Esther Perel
She stops speaking, but I can hear her silent sobs. They’re the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
Beth Revis
The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone. So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope....
Harvey Milk
He looks good for a while, but ya know, ya can’t shine a sneaker.
Claire Cook
It’s probably better and more accessible to measure change readiness rather than change progress.
Pearl Zhu
If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
Arika Okrent
I don’t see it as my role to save or rescue anybody any more than regular people feel the need to rescue each other from sleeping and dreaming.
Jed McKenna
The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?
Stephen Jay Gould
The pure menace radiating from my younger sister is undeniable. She can hate me, but I need her to know that she has something that Stella never did: a place to fall. "And if he hurts you or if anyone hurts you...you have me." It feels unnatural, but I hug my sister. Her arms are limp at her sides, but she doesn't push me away. "Remember, you have me," I repeat.
Katie McGarry
In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.
Rabih Alameddine
I feel like I'm forgetting something. Vyrus. Clans. Zombies. Stay out of the sun. Don't get shot. Abandon your life. Drink blood to survive. No, guess that pretty much covers it.
Charlie Huston
Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes delinquent, or faces teasing and bullying. We could have a society in which diverse people and organizations work together to ensure that families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods are nurturing and that our capitalistic system functions to benefit everyone.
Anthony Biglan
I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them.
Neil Young
Parenting is a gift for adults’ spiritual growth spurts, and it’s a challenge to think of anything else that fills a home with more laughter!
Gabriel Cousens M.D.
Better to be the failure who nobly strived than the success who never really had to.
Brandon Sanderson
While I'm fine with you two dating and being happy, please try not to break his heart too much when the time comes.
Richelle Mead
The woman was not what would be termed an exquisite, or what his grandfather’s generation would have styled ‘a diamond of the first water.’ There was something too primal in her features and her bearing, and her aura shimmered with power. She was a sunset on a mountain peak, or the eerie colors in the sky in the far north of Scotland. She was a vein of gold still glittering inside the rock, her treasure clear but held close, in her own keeping.She would never belong to anyone but herself, and that made him long for her to share that self with him—in every conceivable way.
Cara McKinnon
You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?
Wally Lamb
I lost myself immediately in one of the books, only emerging when the phone rang.“Dashiell?” my father intoned. As if someone else with my voice might be answering the phone at my mother’s apartment.“Yes, Father?”“Leeza and I would like to wish you a merry Christmas.”“Thank you, Father. And to you, as well.”[awkward pause][even more awkward pause]“I hope your mother isn’t giving you any trouble.”Oh, Father, I love it when you play this game.“She told me if I clean all the ashes out of the grate, then I’ll be able to help my sisters get ready for the ball.”“It’s Christmas, Dashiell. Can’t you give that attitude a rest?”“Merry Christmas, Dad. And thanks for the presents.”“What presents?”“I’m sorry—those were all from Mom, weren’t they?”“Dashiell …”“I gotta go. The gingerbread men are on
Rachel Cohn
The most treasured and sacred moments of our lives are those filled with the spirit of love. The greater the measure of our love, the greater is our joy. In the end, the development of such love is the true measure of success in life.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
Beck
The windows of my soul I throw Wide open to the sun.
John Greenleaf Whittier