Quotes by American Authors - Page 1806

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E B White
You humble me, Nikki. Don't you see that? It must be clear from my expression that I do not, because he goes on. "If I do all those things for you--soothe you, center you, give you strength--then that is worth more to me than every penny I have earned building Stark International.
J. Kenner
May the stars guide you. May the winds cleanse all ills and remain at your back. May the earth protect you and give you strength. May fire guard you, and rain refresh you, may all nature be your friend until we meet again in this place.
Elizabeth Haydon
There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.
Gail Godwin
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Walt Whitman
Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I almost wish I hadn't any conscience, it's so inconvenient. If I didn't care about doing right, and didn't feel uncomfortable when doing wrong, I should get on capitally. I can't help wishing, sometimes, that father and mother hadn't been so dreadfully particular about such things. -- Jo
Louisa May Alcott
And you would have lost. We were surrounded. He threatened your life, and he would have made good on that threat. He had you, and that meant he had me, too.
Becca Fitzpatrick
There is a greater will, a greater need and purpose hidden within each life, and there is an inner law that knows best how each must live and that is worth stealing for; it’s worth dying for, and worth living for as well.
Michael Meade
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people they think it's their fault.
Henry Kissinger
I close my eyes and think about the only thing that makes life worth the trials: Emma Kingsley, her sweet smile, and the laugh that make me believe in a future.
Cristin Harber
We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's okay to laugh, you know. The earth's not going to split open. You're not going to hell. Believe me. If there's a hell, I'll be there ahead of you, and they'll be too busy with me to even check you in.
Jennifer Niven
And He knew him, imagine, To be known, spoken of, By the creator of everything That rule from above.
Brian M. Boyce
Even after thousands of years, I want to live in your heart with love, joy, and care.
Debasish Mridha
How many of us stop short of success on purpose? How many of us sabotage our own happiness because failure, while miserable, is a fear we're familiar with? Success, however, dreams come true, are a whole new kind of terrifying, an entire new species of responsibilities and disillusions, requiring a new way to think, act and become. Why do we REALLY quit? Because it's hopeless? Or because it's possible...
Jennifer DeLucy
Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
Catherynne M. Valente
A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…]This is the grammar of animacy.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
Sam Harris
Water will not flow from a faucet that is not connected to its source.
Mary Morrissey
Why not is a slogan for an interesting life.
Mason Cooley
There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
Joan Didion
Judgement of others and ourselves always comes from a place of fear. It is fear that keeps us from living authentically all that we say we value.
Shannon L. Alder
It's hard. Being 15, 16, 17. You get so angry. You want to do something with that anger. I guess try to find some other way to let it out. Don't kill people. Don't kill yourself. Let yourself grow up a little. Then you might to start to think differently about things. You might get new opportunities to do something with your life that you never thought possible as a teenager." -- Thomas Harvey in the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)
Jack Chaucer
When I loved myself enough, I no longer needed things or people to make me feel safe.
Kim McMillen
Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flowersteel, stitch, cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.
Karen Russell
That is why it could happen anywhere, given the right ingredients: particular people in government, competing with others- or with each other- over natural and wealth-creating resources.
Clea Koff
Every hero is scared. That-s what being brave is about - confronting fear.
Nely Cab
The present is the necessary product of all the past the necessary cause of all the future.
Robert G. Ingersoll
It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.
Francesca Lia Block
And in what fairy tale would John ever be any sane person's idea of Prince Charming anyway? He was the opposite of charming. More like Prince Terrifying.
Meg Cabot
Work becomes worship when you dedicate it to God and perform it with an awareness of his presence.
Rick Warren
I think sometimes I think too damn much. I worry about this and that and everything else and then I wake up and four more years have slipped right out the back door.
Kris Radish
He's come a long way, but he's still never accepted that he's forgiven.
Mary Jane Hathaway
All authority belongs to the people.
Thomas Jefferson
Each honest calling each walk of life has its own elite its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
Margaret Sanger
Our conversation with God should be utterly free and familiar, because God is the only person who will never, ever misunderstand us and never, ever reject us (hate us, ignore us, or be indifferent to us). These are the tow reasons we hid from other people, even our friends, even our parents, and the tow reasons we should never hide from God.
Peter Kreeft
Children are never too young to begin the study of nature's book, and never too old to quit. ~Laura Hecox
Candace Fleming
Ivy! It's a natural disaster! You have to be there!
Annie Barrows
Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.
Ron Paul
People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.
Isabel Allende
It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.
Gore Vidal
Our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.
Don Williams
You have some balls."Frankie hated that expression, ever since Zada had pointed out to her that it equates courage with the male equipment...
E. Lockhart
Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the cold; that woman anxiously counting her comical flock lest one goose escape her vigilance; all those who slept, or toiled, or loved under the low-hung roofs or the sharp turrets. Those people out there, if they caught sight of her own face pressed close to the window pane, might be speculating about her. To them she was part of the pattern of the lumbering train with its trail of smoke and little boxlike carriages. Perhaps they envied her, riding at ease to distant Paris. How little they knew of that! How little she herself know what awaited her at the end of the journey!
Rachel Field
I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?
Ned Vizzini
Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you've got.
Benjamin Hoff
It’s your life to live. Own it! You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life.
Frank Sonnenberg
I clenched my fist around the railing, finally forcing myself to acknowledge what that meant. I'd always known, of course. It was always there, at the back of my mind; I just didn't want to think about it. But if Ember was the sleeper...I would have to kill her.
Julie Kagawa
Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.
Siri Hustvedt
They (the blacks) had no right which the white man was bound to respect.
Roger B. Taney
Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?
Laura Dave
When you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.
Zig Ziglar
Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.
Jonathan Tropper
Come to think of it, she did not speak a word. Yet I could have sworn she had the most beautiful voice.
Julie Klassen
the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.
Charles Bukowski
The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.
Glenn Close
Don't think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.
Austin Kleon