Quotes by American Authors - Page 1812

Weird, even for one of us. Or maybe she's worse.""Worse how?""Normal.
Scott Westerfeld
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted.
Paul Tillich
Love in the service of self is greed in disguise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Aspiring authors, get this through your head. Cover art serves one purpose, and one purpose only, to get potential customers interested long enough to pick up the book to read the back cover blurb. In the internet age that means the thumb nail image needs to be interesting enough to click on. That’s what covers are for.
Larry Correia
If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
Saidiya V. Hartman
It's all you think about, all you talk about, and all you want us to talk about. What in the world would we call something like that? Oh, yeah! An obsession!
Maggie Stiefvater
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
Richard M. Rorty
Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's - this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics - it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak!
Piers Anthony
Electronic communication has transmuted conversations into durable and accessible records. Revisionist history has gone the way of the phone booth.
Kent Alan Robinson
[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.
Alan W. Watts
Maybe my greater fear should not be fear itself, but what I will lose should I submit to fear.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country.
Robert Frost
Mirroring is a powerful neuro-linguistic programming technique that can be used to bond with others, build rapport, and reach mutual understanding more quickly. You may already be using it instinctively without even being aware.
Susan C.Young
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
Junot Díaz
Confidence can be learned - but not from a book. Confidence comes from from living.
Saskia Shakin
I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.
Rabih Alameddine
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
Katherine Paterson
Look for magic in daily routine.
Lou Barlow
Now how can anybody look at that and not believe in God? I mean, how can anybody look at this and not believe there is some higher power, some divine force at work in the universe greater than Man, some god that created it, that created all this, that created us?
Katharine Hepburn
I made such a fool of myself,” she lamented.“Love does not make you a fool.”“He didn’t love me back.”“That does not make you a fool, either.”“Just tell me …” Her voice cracked. “When does it stop hurting?”“Sometimes never.
Mitch Albom
Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
Leah Price
You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It’s only kids in high school who are convinced they’re never going to change. There’s always going to be a pep rally and there’s always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.
Stephen King
Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.
Steve Jobs
So much beauty and joy in my life has come from going through something really difficult
Demi Lovato
Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.
Terrence Real
Love is like the human appendix. You take it for granted while it's there, but when it's suddenly gone you're forced to endure horrible pain that can only be alleviated through drugs.
Reverend Jen
Only by honoring the greater truths (the macrocosmic truth) may we begin to honor our subjective truths (our microcosmic truth). This is a recognition of the greater mystery of life and a deep honoring of being a child of that great mystery. In that profound recognition rests the awareness that the same macrocosmic mystery is within us, and it manifests and takes its course in many ways. When we simply recognize this fundamental aspect of the nature of existence, we can begin to understand its presence in our lives. And then finding ourselves moving away from the career or relationship we thought we’d be in for the rest of our life is less of a shock or a “something must be wrong” and more of a deep, humble sigh of “alright, okay, here we go, and so it is.” This is the way life moves. We do not hold the reins, and to feign so creates only pain. Evolution necessitates change.
Tehya Sky
I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I'd consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.
Amy Poehler
Do you think... do you think people ever learn anything?
Stephen King
...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.
Ursula K Le Guin
Men are as faithful as their options.
Chris Rock
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
Hunter S. Thompson
But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician's God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other.
Dexter Palmer
We often wait for that knock of opportunity, though I've found it's better to just grab a chainsaw and cut open your own fucking door.
Don Roff
There is a thought among some brands of theology that souls are waiting up in heaven to be born. Now how in the world anybody comes up with that is beyond me, and how you can be so sure of that is also beyond me. I always like to go back to Snoopy's theological writings, which he called, "Has It Ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong." And that's the way I feel. These things fascinate me, and I like to talk about them with other people, and hear what they think. But I'm always a little bit leery of people who are sure that they're right about things that nobody's ever been able to prove, and never will be able to prove.
Charles M. Schulz
When 1:45 came, half the class left, and Danny Hupfer whispered, "If she gives you a cream puff after we leave, I'm going to kill you" - which was not something that someone headed off to prepare for his bar mitzvah should be thinking.When 1:55 came and the other half of the class left, Meryl Lee whispered, "If she gives you one after we leave, I'm going to do Number 408 to you." I didn't remember what Number 408 was, but it was probably pretty close to what Danny Hupfer had promised.Even Mai Thi looked at me with narrowed eyes and said, "I know your home." Which sounded pretty ominous.
Gary D. Schmidt
I listened to you tell me, tell everyone, and all the world, “Praise the Lord.” You were broken, but not by bullets and bombs. You were broken by grace.
N.D. Wilson
Our fellow men are black magicians. And whoever is with them is a black magician on the spot. Think for a moment, can you deviate from the path that your fellow men have lined up for you? And if you remain with them, your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. The warrior, on the other hand, is free from all that. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. So, fear your captors, your masters. Don't waste your time and your power fearing freedom.
Carlos Castenada
Yellowdog, where does sorrow go?”He held his heart. “Lives here, in each of us.
Trebor Healey
A true messenger lives a burdened life. If he is the Lord’s vessel, he carries in his heart a burden for souls none can share but those who know it firsthand.
Billy Graham
If "Sex and the City" taught us anything, it's that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.
Elizabeth Bard
This universe was created for the love, by the love, and with love.
Debasish Mridha
Let me live in my house by the side of the road And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss
I was a let-er-goer and she was a hanger-on-er, but that doesn't mean I don't lean into her territory every once in a while.
Dee-Williams
Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.
Henry Ford
Sometimes, in order to find happiness, one must allow some old bridges to collapse, in order to build better ones.
Lionel Suggs
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H. Gass
Humble me so I do what is right. Break me so I cling to You. Expose me so my motives stay pure.
Alisa Hope Wagner
Patroclus,' he said. He was always better with words than I.
Madeline Miller
The most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies
Julia Serano
We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.
Philip Yancey
No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone.
Mitch Albom
If we know ourselves, and know our hearts, we're always home, anywhere.
Dawn Kohler
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion—like the phantom pain of an amputee.Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence...It would flood her, steal her breath.But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her feeling deflated, feeling noting but a vague restlessness.
Khaled Hosseini
In the twenty-first century, human minds, and to a lesser extent, human hearts can work like well calibrated precision instruments, but who can write the universal manual on imagination?
Martin Guevara Urbina
You can hardly call Deor old.' Arisa wrapped her arms around herself; the breeze was brisk despite the sunlight. 'He didn't live long enough to get old. Why would he do that? I know kings are supposed to care for the realm above all else, and so on, and so on, but that's rot. They're men, just like anyone else. Do you think he really, deliberately, laid down his life?''Yes,' said Weasel. 'At least, I think it's possible.'It was the last answer she'd expected from Weasel-the-cynic.'But why?' Arisa asked.'Not having been there, I can't say for sure.' Weasel stuck his hands in his pockets. 'But I'd guess it was for the future.'Arisa frowned. 'I don't understand.''The One God willing,' said Weasel softly, 'you never will.
Hilari Bell
Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart.
Christina Westover
Yes, he knew he was falling in love, her way. And the worst part was, as disabling as he found the emotion to be he craved it all the more. To feel this way about a woman was amazing even if it was ‘temporary and fleeting’, as he’d put it. It was a natural high like he’d never felt before. One he couldn’t get enough of.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?
William Saroyan
When the law fails to serve us, we must serve as the law.
Kenneth Eade