Quotes by American Authors - Page 1808

I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.
Rick Bragg
After a few months of talking with people and observing them, I realized that the traits of the successful fitness enthusiasts had everything in common with those of the high achievers I had spent years studying in business.
Chalene Johnson
I wish I could have saved you," he says finally. And this is what it always comes back to. Salvation. Him saving me. Me saving him. Impossibilities, because there is no such thing, and it's not what we ever needed from each other anyway.
Katja Millay
You project a confident image through good body posture.
Cindy Ann Peterson
...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
David Rakoff
When we got into office the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
John F Kennedy
there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done
Evan Meekins
You think because you are born of light that you're somehow better and kinder than those who aren't, but you're not. It merely makes you feel entitled in your wrongful actions against others. But, you're no better than my mother. If anything you're worse because you think your viciousness is justified...
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Take a chance on God. After all, He took a chance on you.
Susan May Warren
Laura, this isn't love. Love lets you go on a trip without following you. Love can live without you for a week, knowing you'll come back.''No, it can't.' The afternoon shadows grew long and cold. In spite of the chill, a heat rose up inside her and flooded her face. 'That's how you know it's true love. When he can't live without you.'Karen shook her head. 'That's how you know it's obsession. Or something else.
Natalie Standiford
What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.
Amy Tan
Our Victrola stood in the diningroom. I was allowed to climb onto the seat of a diningroom chair to wind it, start the record turning, and set the needle playing. In a second I'd jumped to the floor, to spin or march around the room as the music called for - now there were all the other records I could play too. I skinned back onto the chair just in time to lift the needle at the end, stop the record and turn it over, then change the needle. Winding up, dancing, being cocked to start and stop the record, was of course, all in one the act of listening. Movement must be at the very heart of listening.
Eudora Welty
Commit yourself to the possibility that everything you see around you is far less real than God. You want to see the truth "with all your heart, with all you soul, and with all your mind," as Jesus says. This is actually a commitment to joy.
Deepak Chopra
A year of life spent with someone you love feels like a lifetime. Someone destroys that love it feels like a lifetime is gone. Why do people want to take lifetimes away?
Kensley Hagan
Why were things funny? Was God laughing at us? Or was laughter the dispensation of God? Maybe laughter itself was Godlike. When we laugh, we rise above pain. We rise above indignity. We even rise above incredulity. We "get it." Maybe in the way God "gets it.
Richard Tillotson
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Henry Ward Beecher
Is that a bulletproof vest? See, now that's so insulting. That's like saying I'm not smart enough to shoot you in the head." Eddie DeChooch
Janet Evanovich
What is truth" I was asked. "Truth is neither good nor bad. Neither evil nor pure. It just is." That's what I told her. Because through our convictions of good and bad, of evil and pure, we taint the truth with our own filters and our own desires. Truth is no respecter of what that man over there thinks is good or of what that woman over there thinks is evil. Truth remains as Truth, regardless of what you think about it.
C. JoyBell C.
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
Michael Cunningham
If you're naturally kind you attract a lot of people you don't like.
William Feather
I suspect that a greater and more insidious influence [than violence in movies] may lie in what they tell us about being in love, and how to conduct ourselves while in that condition.
David Thomson
You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
E.A. Bucchianeri
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Mark Twain
I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it - I will love you through that, as well. If you don't need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Great crowds followed our Lord . . . as He healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the hungry. However, the moment He started talking about the cross . . . “many . . . no longer followed him” (John 6:66 NIV).
Billy Graham
Your habits and hygiene demonstrate how you feel about yourself. Without saying a word, they speak for you.
Susan C.Young
- What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world to have a soft time and what is it? Float on flowery beds of ease? Think Man was just made to be happy?- Why not? Though I've never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce Man really was made for!- Well, we know not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason a man who doesn't buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him sometimes, is nothing but a... well, he's simply a weakling. Mollycoddle, in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take a sneak, or even kill himself?- Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.
Sinclair Lewis
So now that you know my truth, let's talk about yours.
J.D. Cunegan
Death is not the end of life but the beginning of eternal life.
Debasish Mridha
For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.
Howard Pyle
If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery.
Lemony Snicket
[T.J.] Without thinking, I held them out to her. She stopped laughing, and looked at me like she wasn't quite sure what I meant. I waited, and she leaned toward me and opened her mouth. I slid my fingers inside, wondering if my eyes were as big as hers. When she sucked the breadfruit off, my breathing got all messed up."More?"She nodded, just barely, and her breathing didn't sound right either. I scooped up some breadfruit and this time, when I put my fingers in her mouth, she put her hand on my wrist. I waited for her to swallow and then I lost my shit completely. I grabbed her face with both hands, and I kissed her, hard. She opened her mouth and I slipped my tongue inside. I could have kissed her for days, and if she told me to stop I wasn't sure I'd be able to.
Tracey Garvis-Graves
The greatest lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give to the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out until they can secure its repeal.
Henry Martyn Robert
With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion.
Noah Levine
You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world
Dean Young
The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.
Rodolfo R. Llinás
The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
Charles Simic
We must know that when we invite people into our lives, we are not just inviting people; but we are inviting experiences into our lives, as well. The time that we will spend with the people that we welcome in, will be the time spent on creating experiences in our lives. We are not really taught this. We are not taught that attached to a person is a world, and in that world our feelings and thoughts will mingle with the feelings and thoughts of the other person. Ultimately, we shape our lives depending upon our choices of the people we take in, and also depending upon the people that we couldn't choose. People are so much more than just lumps of bones, skin, and feelings. When they said one person can change the whole world, what that means is that if you change the life of one person, you are already changing one whole world. And vice versa. So be careful. Be brave, but be careful.
C. JoyBell C.
The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.
Edith Wharton
Instant chemistry feels great! It is a raw, organic emotion. The art and science of relationship chemistry is still a mystery to me, but it is always a delight when it happens. You certainly know when you feel it, and that sizzle begins many a new relationship.
Susan C.Young
Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent.
Tom Perrotta
With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement
Lauren DeStefano
Thorne cleared his throat. "We need to get back to the house. We've already risked drawing enough attention, and she..." He looked at Winter. There was an edge to his expression, like he didn't trust anyone who was more attractive than he was. "...will definitely draw attention.
Marissa Meyer
Immature loves says ' I love because I need you. Mature love says I need you because I love you.
Erich Fromm
The [women's] march was pointless, classless, and brainless, but not harmless. One common theme was anger at certain crass comments Trump made in the past. To combat this, the march’s leaders and their lemmings decided to be crude, lewd, and even more crass in the present. It’s much like trying to correct your child’s cursing by cursing him out.
Selwyn Duke
Darkness has its own beauty that you can only see with your inner light.
Debasish Mridha
I can sleep anywhere. Planes. Trains. Sofa. Lawn chairs. Call it the upside to my life as an army brat. Never having a home means, I guess, that everywhere is your home. There is absolutely no place I'm anxious to return to. But this is different.I'm not trying to fall asleep in someplace new; I'm trying to fall asleep in someplace that's old.
Ally Carter
A footman approached bearing a tray of sparkling wine. Lord Sheffield motioned the footman away before he could offer them a glass of champagne. “Forgive me,” he murmured in Amelia’s ear. “I cannot wait another moment to have you in my arms.
Erica Ridley
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
Joseph Campbell
Wouldn't it be great to be gifted? In fact... It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You're not born this way, you get this way.
Seth Godin
Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Make each day, the best day of life.
Debasish Mridha
all children are required to attend School, which is like a party to which everyone forgot to bring punch, or hats, or fiddles, and none of the games have good prizes.
Catherynne M. Valente
But you have to sacrifice yourself for YOURSELF, too.
Darnell Lamont Walker
When you find yourself in the thickness of pursuing a goal or dream, stop only to rest. Momentum builds success.
Suzy Kassem
You can have all the words in the world,but if not said rightly, those words are simply wasted potential.
Joel T. McGrath
It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures his existence.
Jim Morrison
Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.
Paul Bowles
A hero can be afraid, but a hero never runs away.
Deborah Wiles