Quotes by American Authors - Page 1671

Change is difficult, but it can be managed when you stay aware of the power of your choices, even if it’s simply your attitude.
Michael Thomas Sunnarborg
Let us be silent to listen to the heart's songs of eternity. Let us be kind to feel the beauty of tranquility. Let us vanish to belong and be nothing.
Debasish Mridha
When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb—and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior—its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself.
Tao Lin
Close your eyes!""You can't kiss me from down there, Wylan." "Just do it!
Leigh Bardugo
All night my heart makes its wayhowever it can over the rough groundof uncertainties, but only until nightmeets and then is overwhelmed bymorning, the light deepening, thewind easing and just waiting, as Itoo wait (and when have I ever beendisappointed?) for redbird to sing
Mary Oliver
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
Let your dream scream at you when you lose focus.
Debasish Mridha
There are those who have made their fortunes on other people’s misfortune. The Bible never promised that life would be fair.
Billy Graham
The only thing that matters in the end is your own survival. It's what humans and cockroaches are best at.
Susan Ee
Some people enjoy life—others just survive.
Debasish Mridha
That which makes the church "radical" and forever "new" is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church's view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus.
Stanley Hauerwas
We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.
Jonathan Franzen
Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.
Richard Rohr
Often the thing that brings you the most pain is the very thing that will lead you to the most gain and your breakthrough.
Jeanette Coron
Do not quarrel or restlessly seek for more knowledge, until you have given proper honor to what you already know.
Bryant McGill
Here's to the men who lose! What though their work be e'er so nobly plann'd And watched with zealous care No glorious halo crowns their efforts grand - Contempt is Failure's share!
G. L. Scarborough
An eternity is any moment opened with patience.
Noah Benshea
I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like I have to do something.”“Do what?”“I don’t know. That’s what’s wrong. Or part of what’s wrong. I feel like I’m sleepwalking.
Rainbow Rowell
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.
Elizabeth McCracken
Outside the youth center, between the liquor storeand the police station,a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;overflowing with blossomfoam,like a sudsy mug of beer;like a bride ripping off her clothes,dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.It’s been doing that all week:making beauty,and throwing it away,and making more.
Tony Hoagland
I once asked Randy how he knew that he had fallen in love with his girlfriend, Amy, and he just looked at me like it was the hardest question in the world. I expected some floral, florid explanation, about the air lightening and flute music filling his ears. This relationship that had him so transfixed—I expected a masterpiece of sentiment, one that would make me so happy for him and so empty inside. Instead he just turned to me and said,“The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when there was no question about it. One night I was lying in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just was there, undeniable.”There is no question about it.
David Levithan
No one will bother us now."tShe touched his lips with her finger. "I think I'll scream if they do."t"Oh, you'll be screaming. That I promise you.
Donna Grant
Start a rumor aboutpeace taking over,love being the new black,and compassion going viral.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.
Christopher Ryan
Humanity reveals her inner beauty through the interplay of gratitude, love, and kindness.
Debasish Mridha
One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.
Pete Hamill
Every spell is a journey.
Lawren Leo
If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.
Sharon Salzberg
satan is a christian creation and you can keep him, thank you!
Douglas Preston
How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.
Carl Sagan
Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.
Mark Z. Danielewski
Do you know how many ways love can hit you? So it makes you happy, or miserable? It makes you sick in the belly or hurt in the heart. It makes everything brighter and sharper, or it blurs all the edges. It makes you feel like a king or a fool. Every way love can hit you, it's hit me when it comes to you
Nora Roberts
I won't say ours was a tough school but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to Be if I Grow Up."
Lenny Bruce
No, they can't. They can't be Luke Skywalker.
Aaron Allston
Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.
Abraham Verghese
Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
We cannot ask forgiveness over and over again for our sins, and then return to our sins, expecting God to forgive us. We must turn from our practice of sin as best we know how, and turn to Christ by faith as our Lord and Savior.
Billy Graham
For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.
Alan Alda
Most of us knew things that we didn't even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used.
David Joy
She wasn’t the only one who was overjoyed.Deacon had launched himself at Aiden—Aiden saintly St. Delphi—nearly knocking him backward, over a fallen pure. The brothers hugged, oblivious to those fighting around them. Other than their eyes, they absolutely had nothing in common.Which was why I liked Deacon.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
In order for grace to truly be grace, it has to extend to absolutely everyone, no matter what, no questions, no exceptions. Otherwise we think that somehow, by living a moral life...we've deserved it
Jay Bakker
When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you
Gail Carson Levine
Lets build a happy little cloud.Lets build some happy little trees.
Bob Ross
Haven’t you known people who seem to have a “sixth sense” super-power when it comes to connecting, communicating, and understanding others? These emotionally intelligent people always know the right things to say to make us feel that we matter.
Susan C.Young
The author says resilience is the ability to move rob a preferred state to an expanded list of alternatives.
Andrew Zolli
Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people.
Namsoon Kang
The people we adore in our lives brighten our days and illuminate our nights.
Amy Leigh Mercree
The world can be seen from so many different angles. Each of us is born seeing the world in a different way, and each moment we live shapes our eyes and hearts differently.
Greg Keyes
I will to my dying day oppose, with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand and villainy on the other, as this Writ of Assistance is.
James Otis
This is the part in the movie where that guy says, "Zombies? What zombies?" just before they eat his brains. I don't want to be that guy.
Holly Black
If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.
Ann Brashares
And just then Damon stepped out of the coat closet, and at the same time Aunt Maggie tripped him neatly and said, “Bathroom door beside you,” and picked up a vase and hit the rising Damon over the head with it. Hard.
L.J. Smith
I will help build your museumWhen you run out of space to hang your workYou can hang your work in mine
Darnell Lamont Walker
Your dream is only possible through a clear intention and patience.
Bryant McGill
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.
Susan Sontag
Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards.""I didn't know that words grew on trees," said Milo timidly."Where did you think they grew?" shouted the earl irritably. A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn't know that letters grew on trees."I didn't know they grew at all," admitted Milo even more timidly. Several people shook their heads sadly."Well, money doesn't grow on trees, does it?" demanded the count."I've heard not," said Milo."Then something must. Why not words?" exclaimed the undersecretary triumphantly. The crowd cheered his display of logic and continued about its business.
Norton Juster
She stared at the castle. She had actually been summoned to a castle. A week before Christmas.
Fern Michaels
This is what it's all been about with you," he said in an even tone. "All the fear, allthe running. The nightmares." When she nodded, he said, "You called him the devil.""But you... married him?" "Basically? Yes.""Ceremony and everything?"She swallowed. "He tricked me into it. I-I was only sixteen."A muscle ticked in his cheek and his irises grew pale. "Then know this..."She stopped breathing."Lass, I'm about to make you a widow--
Kresley Cole
She positions herself on a stool in front of a giant washing machine, watching her garments twirl in flashing patterns of red and white on a sea of black. It subdues her, that clothes can be washed in Boston or Rome and look the same for it, that she can step on an airplane and be anywhere else in the civilized world within a day and wear the same clothes and be the same person. That the small realities stay knitted together!
Eliot Schrefer