Quotes by American Authors - Page 174

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.
Ludwig von Mises
The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result.
Colin Beavan
Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that aborting horror you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to say anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.
Ernest Hemingway
It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that we are never so much human as when we are striving for what is beyond our grasp and that there is no battle worth the winning save that against our own ignorance and fear.
James Ramsey Ullman
God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.
Vance Havner
Eternity shall be at once a great eye-opener and a great mouth-shutter." -Jim Elliot
Elisabeth Elliot
What do you mean, is that it? I just saved his career and the CIA from ruin and he calls me a perfidious ass.""What's perfidious mean?" Ace asked from the driver's seat."You deceived him and stole his girlfriend out from under his nose," Julia said to Conrad. "I think technically 'ass' is a pretty mild revilement.""Revilement?" Ace looked at one and then the other in his rearview. "This is some kind of spy talk, isn't it? Okay, I'm down with it. Just tell me what it means.
Misty Evans
This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.
Holly Black
I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.
Mary Karr
…there was no more that I could do to make myself look better in that moment than smile and be kind…
Andie Mitchell
Divergent thinking is that one starts thinking from one point and expands from there to generate more ideas.
Pearl Zhu
Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population’s attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome’s emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think.
Chris Hedges
It doesn't matter how old you are, when you find your forever you just know.
Kate Benson
What else can you tell me?” Dad stares at me. “What have you learned while you were awake?”I learned that life is so, so fragile. I learned that you can know someone for just days and never forget the impression he left on you. I learned that art can be beautiful and sad at the same time. I learned that if someone loves you, he’ll wait for you to love him back. I learned that how much you want something doesn’t determine whether you get it or not, that “no” might not be enough, that life isn’t fair, that my parents can’t save me, that maybe no one can. “Nothing much,” I mutter.
Beth Revis
My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.~ Falsely yours
Charles Bukowski
There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.
Paul Kalanithi
The only thing that gave me comfort in the attic was thinking about my family. Now I'm home, but it's not the home I imagined. Not the family I imagined. I'd convinced myself that they'd continued on with their happy, carefree lives without me, that they were doing it double, because I couldn't do it at all. I was wrong.
Clara Kensie
When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
Barbara Kingsolver
Trying to destroy yourself gives a pretty clear message and it's not one I think you'd like. Sounds a bit like, “I'm too self-centered to be constructive, so I have to open a vein…
Thomm Quackenbush
Oh, goodie," Puck said as I stepped forward. "I'm going to have a rash in the most uncomfortable places.
Julie Kagawa
But girls willing to share your bed don't equal girls willing to put up with your random crap moods, listen to your exhaustive legal opinions, or support your life's goals the way someone who loves you would.
Tammara Webber
Life," said Simone St. James..."is stitched together from a series of mistakes, some little, some big, like the patches on the clothes we wore growin' up, you know
Suzanne Palmieri
Classic music is th' kind that we keep thinkin'll turn into a tune.
Frank McKinney
when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
William S Burroughs
Life-long learning is the modus of keeping your brain…your thoughts…your ideas…engaged in a quest for knowledge that enriches and expands the mind with a constant thirst for wisdom.
Wes Adamson
The Bible teaches that we have a Christian duty to help our neighbors in their time of need. We are called by God to bring the water of life for both soul and body. God created them both, and His purpose is to redeem them both.
Billy Graham
I've already seen what you've got," Liz said, completely out of patience. "Now gimme my wine.""It's not that. I want to show you something at my place."Do I have Idiot stamped on my forehead? They both knew what would happen if they were alone at his place.She leaped to grab the wine and some sloshed out on her head. "Ah!"He bit back a smile. "You shouldn't have done that.
Kylie Gilmore
He smiled and captured my hand..... I attempted to pull my hand away. He tightened his grip just a little and kept my hand encased in his. A warmth spread through to me.
Kenya Wright
When I have flash backs from PTSD I wish my mind came with a delete key.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137:Bethe was mischievous with 137Bohr was intrigued by 137Born was mystified by 137Fermi was frisky with 137Feynman was mesmerized by 137Heisenberg was fascinated by 137Lederman was enchanted by 137Pauli was consumed by 137Turing was matched by 137
Leon O Chua
You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now.
Ken Grimwood
Revenge is a dish best served in something microwaveable
Josh Stern
I am who I am because the tears of my past have watered the magnificence of my present.
Steve Maraboli
When you hear the haunting melody of guilt and shame, drown it out with God's song of forgiveness and love.
Katy Kauffman
Kindness and Truth should always hold hands. Together they are powerful and fully capable of spreading insight and revelation, while also generating conviction and true repentance. However, one without the other is never as beneficial or profitable.When truth is spoken in a callous manner, or merely in a hurried fashion, discourse will most likely follow. By forgetting to speak honest words with the love and kindness of God behind them, our candor will put folks off. This in turn hinders our effectiveness and the work of the Holy Spirit
Cheryl Zelenka
There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.
Karen Russell
World peace starts with the Creator- Jesus!!
Mary Kate
God hasn't called you to walk in someone else's shoes (purpose). He wants you to walk in the shoes that fit you, for which He made you. You aren't going to succeed walking in another woman's shoes.
Beth Moore Jones
The warmth of my love will transform winter into spring and adorn you with floral blooms of my heart.
Debasish Mridha
And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass,It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers'
Walt Whitman
Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
Philip Caputo
Not very smart," Chudo-Yudo growled. "Stalking a Baba Yaga." He showed a set of sharp white teeth. "Maybe he has a death wish. I could help with that You want me to eat him?
Deborah Blake
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
Harriet Tubman
Leadership is about movement and growth.
Mark Sanborn
Then you never really feel comfortable around most people. Especially your family, who probably never seemed to understand you. But as you grow up you find others like yourself, people who support you, embrace your weirdness, and love for who you are - and they become your new family." - Tara
Elizabeth Briggs
Oh external worshiper, know that worship without heart is motions. Oh seeker of knowledge, know that knowledge without purification is a dangerous weapon of the ego. Oh activist, know that work without orientation of heart is fruitless. Oh lover, know that love without God is pain.
Yasmin Mogahed
Every single person is sacred. Sacred means special, precious, a treasure of true beauty. That means you.
Amy Leigh Mercree
November comesAnd November goes,With the last red berriesAnd the first white snows.With night coming early,And dawn coming late,And ice in the bucketAnd frost by the gate.The fires burnAnd the kettles sing,And earth sinks to restUntil next spring.
Clyde Watson
SALLY: Grab what you want and hope for the best.
Bijou Hunter
A society coming apart at top and bottom, or passing over into another form, contains just as many possibilities for revelation as a society running along smoothly in its own rut. The individual is thrust out of the sheltered nest that society has provided. He can no longer hide his nakedness by the old disguises. he learns how much of what he has taken for granted was by its own nature neither eternal nor necessary but thoroughly temporal and contingent. He learns that the solitude of the self is an irreducible dimension of human life no matter how completely that self had seemed to be contained in its social milieu. In the end, he sees each man as solitary and unsheltered before his own death. Admittedly, these are painful truths, but the most basic things are always learned with pain, since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, economic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded. What he learns has always been there, lying concealed beneath the surface of even the best-functioning societies; it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster. But so long as man does not have to face up to such a truth, he will not do so.
William Barrett
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.
Khaled Hosseini
If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.
Naomi Wolf
Yes, I can see why so many are taken with you. You're so, so, so.." Vincent's words trailed off. He gazed off into the trees. "What's the word I'm looking for?""Adorably handsome?" Breccan offered with a smug smile."Incredibly stuck on yourself."Vincent quickly gave his retort. "Seriously, you're not that cute. And I mean that in every offending way possible.
Madison Thorne Grey
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other
Orson Welles
Sympathy is never wasted except when you give it to yourself.
John W. Raper
Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I’ve always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn’t know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those “many thousand” selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It’s you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I’ve been waiting to tell everything to.
Suzanne Berne
By seizing every opportunity for kindness, forgiveness, healing, and love that crosses my path each day, I hope that my death, although perhaps sad for some, will be gracefully concluded.
Lisa J. Shultz