Quotes by American Authors - Page 1787

Love is messy. If you really love someone, you can't avoid the pain. People die, people leave, things change, but sometimes it all works
Danielle Steel
A peaceful mind appreciates the present moment as the living embodiment of naked perfection, rather than a means to future attainment.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Malcolm X
It is clear that both at home and abroad producers have been unwilling to trust their fortunes entirely to the unrestricted play of competition. Both in world and domestic markets businessmen have sought security by substituting collective controls for the free play of market forces.
George W. Stocking
I read part of it all the way through.
Sam Goldwyn
This is what we do, my mother's life said. We find ourselves in the sacrifices we make.
Cammie McGovern
At any moment we can demonstrate our faith by taking action that shows our belief in God's promises!
Alisa Hope Wagner
This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since...I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.
Wendell Berry
There will always be an England While there's a country lane Wherever there's a cottage small Beside a field of grain.
Clark Ross Parker
Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.
Jenny Offill
I am impressed anew by... how much the harshness that challenges life is what causes the beauty. Birds fly because they must escape predators and search for food. Trees grow skyward because they compete fiercely with other trees for light. Living things need something to push off of. Each of us needs challenges to give us the right shape.
Carl Safina
Keep to the 'I-statements' and discuss your feelings, she lectured herself. I think, I feel. Don't be accusatory. Don't tell him that he is an insecure prick who should back off before you deck him. Instead, say, 'I feel you are acting like an insecure prick who should back off before I deck you.
Thomm Quackenbush
He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
Billy Wilder
If you put a man in the mindset of romance, his mind will start to create those synapses and he’ll start taking charge.
Roberto Hogue
When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
Will Durant
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Milton Friedman
He may be incensed, said Dizzy. I've never doubted the old parson's faith, but it has no place in politics. Good God, just imagine if each man allowed himself to be swayed by moral compunctions; we'd never get a damned thing accomplished in Parliament.
Carol K. Carr
My darling love, I think you have a fundamental misconception about what it means to be a great dandy. I have better taste than anyone else so I don't care what anyone else thinks about anything. I am right and they are wrong.
Miranda Neville
...that was before I'd started thinking about how life stuck on a ship wouldn't be so bad if Elder walked around pantless more.
Beth Revis
I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.
Joan Didion
Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.
Amy Poehler
You cannot pursue all your goals simultaneously or satisfy all your desires at once. And it's an emotional drain to think you can. Instead, you must focus on long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities.
Eric C. Sinoway
The difference between this waiting period and the wait that I had already been enduring was that I was no longer hoping that he would see me, wishing that he would work, or wondering if he would care. Instead, I knew that he would be at work in my marriage, and that somehow, someway, someday he would be glorified through our sufferings.
Tracie Miles
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.
A.E. Samaan
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser
The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.
Stephen King
Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose.""You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that much more in common. Diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It's like they're part of your blueprint. If something's wrong with you, you can usually trace it back to them."I nodded and kept writing."But," she said, "even though you're stuck with them, at the same time, they're also stuck with you. So that's why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they're the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not.
Sarah Dessen
A life of reaction is a life of slavery intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action not reaction.
Rita Mae Brown
If I kiss you now, I won’t be able to stop. We’ll miss the party.
Courtney Allison Moulton
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
Rebecca Solnit
We have to figure out a kinder way to connect with each other, and practice at it every day. Make it a think we love to do. One of our favorite things, in fact. Until it becomes our only way of being.
Scott Stabile
I can be somebody's and still be my own.
Shel Silverstein
To Jurgis the packers had been the equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people. Chapter 29, pg. 376
Upton Sinclair
A man can take only so much. Even a phony man like me.
Jeff Lindsay
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David Eagleman
Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
George Saunders
It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…
Edmund White
When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
Mark Helprin
A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.
Lemony Snicket
I look coolly in to the blue eyes of the person who is now my greatest opponent, the person who would keep me alive at his own expense. And I promise myself I will defeat his plan.
Suzanne Collins
a soul is far too large to hide.
Maggie Schein
The world has been loaned to humanity by the universal powers of creation.
Bryant McGill
Tonight sucked" my dad said and I started to laugh hearing him say that. "What?" He smiled at me. "Isn't that the slang you kids are using? The lingo? Do I sound hip?"I just shook my head. "The only hip I hear is the sound of yours breaking.
Robin Benway
Israel's first king, Saul, looked like he was born for the role. He was tall, handsome, intelligent, and sensitive to God's leading. But he eventually lost most of his attractive qualities, the most important being obedience.
Charles R. Swindoll
What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.
Clifford Geertz
Another silence for the record books. Then he sighs."I know. It's crazy. I feel like --" He stops himself. He suddenly looks so miserable that my heart aches for him.I hate my life.
Cynthia Hand
The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
Edith Wharton
The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
Richard Hofstadter
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
Rick Perlstein
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
Anna Quindlen
Relationships are so much like the United States - they only really thrive when faced with an external threat.
Laura Pedersen
Always remember that the tales of another are never as wondrous as your own.
Michael J. Sullivan
The Gods know what it is to be eternal, and they love to toy with mortals who use absolutes.
Josephine Angelini
Your place is with me,” Jem said. “It always will be.”“What do you mean?”He flushed, the color dark against his pale skin. “I mean,” he said, “Tessa Gray, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”Tessa sat bolt upright. “Jem!”They stared at each other for a moment. At last he said, trying for lightness, though his voice cracked, “That was not a no, I suppose, thoughneither was it a yes.”“You can’t mean it.”“I do mean it.”“You can’t—I’m not a Shadowhunter. They’ll expel you from the Clave—”He took a step closer to her, his eyes eager. “You may not be precisely a Shadowhunter. But you are not a mundane either, nor provably aDownworlder. Your situation is unique, so I do not know what the Clave will do. But they cannot forbid something that is not forbidden by the Law.They will have to take your—our—individual case into consideration, and that could take months. In the meantime they cannot prevent ourengagement.”“You are serious.” Her mouth was dry. “Jem, such a kindness on your part is indeed incredible. It does you credit. But I cannot let you sacrificeyourself in that way for me.”“Sacrifice? Tessa, I love you. I want to marry you.
Cassandra Clare
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves… They belonged to her her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and they they concerned no one but herself.
Kate Chopin
It's hard to part the curtains when the dark holds such familiarity.
Donna Lynn Hope
People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to
Simon S Tam
Being exposed to those beauty queens and Praying Mantises at the same time made me ask myself some hard questions. Would I have been so radical had I not been so fat? Could I have been one of the women on the other side parading my beauty of which I was so proud? As I stood there holding my JUDGE MEAT NOT WOMEN picket sign, I recalled all the people who had said to me throughout my life, "You've got such a pretty face." But they never finished the thought. The whole phrase is "You've got such a pretty face, too bad you're fat." But what if I weren't fat? Would I still have attacked this "Meat Parade" so fiercely? The truth is, my fat has informed my politics. And while I'd like to think I would have been just as ardent in my opposition to the objectification of women had I been thin, I'll never know for sure.
Camryn Manheim
Skepticism, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in.
Gerry Spence
Well, if a Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he shouldn’t come in and look around.
H. Beam Piper