Quotes by American Authors - Page 1755

Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.
Richard Rohr
A lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back.
Sarah J Maas
We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.
Christopher Hitchens
No one can claim they are mature until they experience the hallucinogenic ramifications of being in love, and undertaken an urgent personal assessment and soul-searching discernment that is mandated after experiencing the bitterness of losing in the love game.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.
Leslie White
Demon pox, oh, demon pox, Just how is it acquired? One must go down to the bad part of town Until one is very tired.Demon pox, oh, demon pox I had it all along— No, not the pox, you foolish blocks, I mean this very song— For I was right, and you were wrong!
Cassandra Clare
[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
Stephen King
Compassionate people are boundaried people.
Brené Brown
If only men came made to order. It's so hard to find a decent fellow.
Adriana Trigiani
Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.
Mary Roach
My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call “the gap” or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture.
Darrell Calkins
For the achiever the battle with critics is a slow war of attrition. Let time do the dirty work for you.
Bryant McGill
I hold a little fundraiser every day. Its called going to work.
Stephen Colbert
Close your eyes to feel deeply the tranquility and serenity of the mind.
Debasish Mridha
Does speed dating necessarily end up in a quickie divorce....?
Josh Stern
It doesn't really matter how you feel about your character, it just matters what you do with it.
Kiera Cass
Sometimes being poor means having to choose between your principles and your survival.
Paula Stokes
I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same things and be so utterly different.
Gayle Forman
You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?
Stephen King
Success is often a series of small accomplishments that lead to great results.
Tamara Myles
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.
Bill Gates
The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.
Criss Jami
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence. There are a lot of people out there with good and marketable ideas but pure entrepreneurial types almost never accept defeat.
Lisa M. Amos
If someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.
Sarah Dessen
I’ve gotta get out of the basement. I’ve gotta see the world. I’ve gotta make a difference
Gerard Way
She wanted to ride him, to feel all that strength pulsing beneath her, but the most primitive part of her brain knew that this first time, he was going to be on top. A man like Declan was dominant to his core.
Katie Reus
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
Henry Ford
It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.""Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight.""That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Intelligent people, as some say, in their openness, are indeed slow to criticize, but conversely, in their openness to the concerns of others, the genuine are slow to fret about being criticized.
Criss Jami
Maybe not here and now, but somewhere, someday.
Richelle E. Goodrich
So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.
Sharon Creech
That person who declares that there is always something wrong is always doing something to make things wrong.
Christian D. Larson
The moment the door opened I knew an ass-kicking was inevitable. Whether I'd be giving it or receiving it was still a bit of a mystery.
Rachel Vincent
Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.
Michael Cunningham
No, I don’t think you do, fighting isn’t the release you desire.
Magen McMinimy
He bombarded me with words, of all things, apparently clueless to the fact that the predawn hours rendered me incapable of coherent thought.
Darynda Jones
It is important to view current events through Christ-like eyes.
Todd Stocker
But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is 'silly,' and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.
Rollo May
The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.
George Friedman
Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?
Jim Butcher
Amber was busy flirting with a rookie named Dead Meat if he didn’t stop flirting back. She was eleven, for heaven’s sake! Of course, he may have just been humoring her. And it was a little cute. In a gross, Chester-the-molester kind of way.
Darynda Jones
I've got to that point in life when there's very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there's one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Erica Jong
As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.
Paul Russell
Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. ("Jane Brown's Body")
Cornell Woolrich
Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, - men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; and their descendant to this day always acts as if the house were his camp, - wears his hat at all hours, tumbles himself about, and puts his heels on the tops of chairs or mantel-pieces, just as his father rolled on the green sward, and put his upon trees or logs, - keep all the windows and doors open, winter and summer, that he may get air enough for his great lungs, - calls everybody "stranger", with nonchalant bonhommie, and is altogether the frankest, easiest, most jovial creature living.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Act as if you are the hero of the movie we call life.
Debasish Mridha
If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.
Timothy J. Keller
The first time I saw her,Everything in my head went quiet.
Neil Hilborn
You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and you are on the verge of remembering you don't know what, mermaids or the sudden smell ofkelp on the ebb tide or a poem you read once, something connectedwith the flavor of life itself...
Eleanor Clark
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
Chris Hedges
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind.
Tana French
Reality does not create the entire womb of human life. We have eyes that witness truth and beauty. We are creatures that think, plan, dream, and remember. The lambent luminescence supplied by human memory reveals that we live in a dream world. Human imagination tied to memory tells us how to live today and forevermore.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
Diane Arbus
Sometimes, there aren't any good choices. Sometimes, making the right one is hard... It's funny, but when you think about it, we're all broken. That's what life does. It knocks you down and breaks you and you either get back up again, or you don't. You either do things on your terms, or you don't. You let the bad things win, or you don't.""You either let it break you, or you don't.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences guide us to wisdom.
Suzy Kassem
Just go with it', he thought. 'You won't figure out anything if you give in to fear'.
James Dashner
No,” he replied, firmly, smoothing her hair back from the side of her face. “I'll never leave youalone again. You've spent too many years always having to be the strong one, never having anyone torely upon. It stops now, Taylor. What I heard changes nothing when it comes to how I feel about you. Irespect you in a way I've never respected anyone before. Share this burden with me. You've been stronglong enough. Let me shoulder it from here on out. I promise you, I won't fail you.
Rose Wynters