Quotes by American Authors - Page 1807

I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.
Suzanne Collins
In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.
Noam Chomsky
Sophie Bach from The Maker:You’re a human being with a personality and a will, and you make choices and think and create. Is there no meaning to you, Adrien Bach?And what about us? Is the way we feel about each other just simulated emotions from some biological process—nothing more?
Wes Moore
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway
For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. These events, so distant in legend, play a part in shaping the very events we witness about us, each and every day.
Jacqueline Carey
We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.
Sheryl Sandberg
You become a champion by fighting one more round.
James Corbett
It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.
Catherynne M. Valente
He tells me to pick the music. I’m not sure if he knows that handing me his iPod is like handing me the window to his soul.
Becky Albertalli
Real, but sometimes beautiful.
Nancy Garden
After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.
Harmony Korine
The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.
Jerzy Kosiński
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
John Steinbeck
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are. (in Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind)
Rachel Naomi Remen
The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars.
Kristen Iversen
It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!
Roman Payne
Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.
Cheris Kramarae
I figured I only had about two seconds to live. It’s amazing how many thoughts you can have in two seconds.
Dinah Katt
I have some devotional books you can look over. Learn to quote from them. Nothing discourages unwanted questions as much as a flow of pious bleating.(Petyr Baelish to Sansa Stark)
George R.R. Martin
The color palette is confined to that of a Gustave Dore' engraving, greys and blacks, and subtle shadings of these rendered in harrowing crosshatches and highlighted with sudden glaring areas of nothingness, like splotches of vitiligo sent to haunt the dead with memories of what real light did to the eyes.
Kevin Hearne
..he had trampled her poor, pining heart, and the wound was still raw, even these many years later.
Ransom Riggs
Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women's studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person... Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something - certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item's expression keenly, and she loved this world. every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn to them." (Free Food For Millionaires, p.41).
Min Jin Lee
We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
Carl Sagan
When I was a kid, I used to watch that show, sitting on the couch in my pajamas and wishing more than anything that one day I'd just change into this other person. I thought that would explain everything. You know, about why I felt so different. Then I'd find out that my mother was really an alien or that I'd been bitten by a radioactive spider as a baby and it would all be okay because I'd be able to fly and see through walls.. But it never happened. I just went on being me my whole life, until one day I realized that all those superheroes were doing was fighting themselves, and that getting to breathe underwater or shoot fire from your fingers didn't really make up for being screwed up in the first place. It was just the consolation prize - you got the great costume and the invisible jet for being a loser in everything else.
Michael Thomas Ford
...personal torture instructor...I mean physical therapist.
Simone Elkeles
Consider, O Lord, how You sit atop the sky;like a man in a glass bottom boat.Consider sky elsewhere; worn thin as a mattress.
Cecilia Llompart
There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The butterfly startled at Mary’s gesture and floated up, drifting on the breeze, its wings sparkling blue and bright in the late afternoon sunshine.Silence watched it, enthralled, and then her eyes met Michael’s.A corner of his mouth cocked up. “Welcome home, m’love.
Elizabeth Hoyt
If you want to enjoy confidence, engagement, positive feedback, connection, and reward in your relationships, start being and doing what it takes to make it happen.
Susan C.Young
Age is a funny thing. So are appearances. Neither is relevant to what one knows, in my opinion.
Darren T. Patrick
Tell me a truth, Senna.""I don't know how.""Then tell me a lie.""I don't love you.""The truth is for the mind," he says. "Lies are for the heart. So let's just keep lying.
Tarryn Fisher
Friends are the artists who paint happy lips on your face.
Richelle E. Goodrich
We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.
Richard J. Foster
You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow
Amy Lowell
Today, I would pick the person who made me feel warm, rather than the one who left me cold.
Lauren Graham
But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.
Robert Farrar Capon
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
Geraldine Brooks
Our feelings are the wings of our intuition.
Jodi Livon
Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.
Nikola Tesla
Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
My mind is the only sanctuary that has not been stolen from me.
Christopher Paolini
People see God every day they just don't recognize Him.
Pearl Bailey
Good gravy on biscuits, girlfriend, you are in the middle of more messes than a platter of scrambled eggs. What's going on? Are the planets aligned funny? Or is that unaligned? Shoot, I have no idea. But I need to know what's going on. You and I will be going out for coffee in about thirty seconds.
Paige Shelton
The social displacements that occur as consequences of variations in the value of money result solely from the circumstance that this assumption never holds good. In the chapter dealing with the determinants of the objective exchange-value of money it was shown that variations in the value of money always start from a given point and gradually spread out from this point through the whole community.
Ludwig von Mises
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
Albert Einstein
I am ashamed to say this, but as a child, neither my parents not my teachers pushed me to read. In fact, I did not read an entire book through until I was a grown man and had learned the awesome power of reading on my own.
Daniel Whyte III
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.
Kim Stanley Robinson
With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.
Sharon Salzberg
Yes, us. And the vow I just made. Hell, Rosa, it's about your home branded on my body.
Ellen Connor
When life gets hectic and you feel overwhelmed, take a moment to focus on the people and things you are most grateful for. When you have an attitude of gratitude, frustrating troubles will fall by the wayside.
Dana Arcuri
You can't do passion halfway. Living your passion means you're all in. You trust your heart and trust your gut wherever that takes you.
Joe Plumeri
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Living without personal boundaries is like trying to hold my breath and gasp for air, at the same time, it doesn't work. My introverted nature requires solitary sanctuary, to breathe. My internal batteries need time to recharge if i am to give from a place of abundance.
Jaeda DeWalt
... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.
Michael Crichton
Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Matthew Knisely
I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.
Chila Woychik
How tragic it will be if we don't each come to grips with our own personal potential and learn the role the Lord has in mind for us. How sad if we waste one more day with a lack of commitment and not meet the measure of our creation.
Glenn L. Pace
The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.
Steven Pressfield
Successful people aren’t born that way. They usually work very hard, and that means constant effort – even if it’s not hard, it is steady. People born to wealth need to work to keep it. A radical shift means a thousand small changes, a few a day. Eventually you wake up……and you’re the person you wanted to be.
Rohvannyn Shaw