Quotes by American Authors - Page 1817

I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others if not more.
Edward Noyes Westcott
Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?
Frederick Douglass
There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.
Christopher Paolini
Perhaps I am an insensitive rich woman. That doesn't change the fact that you can be downright mean and offensive, Kaladin Stormblessed.
Brandon Sanderson
I promise to dream with you both great dreams and small dreams. To ask your counsel in times of uncertainty. To honor your silence when you seek to be alone. To be ever wondrous at your curiosities and revelations. And to be ever rejuvenated by your passions . . .
Carew Papritz
Revise what you need to as changes occur and new information becomes available. Be willing to go back, look again, and consider where and how you can make adjustments in order to stay in alignment with your vision, mission, passion, and purpose. Rather than rehashing the past, know that your life is a working draft and you can revise the story you write about it. Let the revising begin.
Susan C.Young
[Y]ou have to stop loving and pursuing Christ in order to sin. When you are pursuing love, running toward Christ, you do not have opportunity to wonder, *Am I doing this right?* or *Did I serve enough this week?* When you are running toward Christ, you are freed up to serve, love, and give thanks without guilt, worry or fear. As long as you are running, you're safe.
Francis Chan
So as a seventh grader, no, you weren't friends with people you didn't like. But sometimes you also weren't friends with people you did like, which was complicated, and which didn't make any sense if you tried to explain it. Sometimes things just changed. That's where the sadness came in.
Lauren Myracle
My mother told me that truth is like my skin, a beautiful, protective covering, and the things that people say or do can be easily changed or discarded. She told me truth comes from the heart.
Stewart Lewis
Lifting my hands from the keyboard, I fold them in my lap and tilt back my desk chair. I think, I could do it. I could turn back time.
Devorah Fox
To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms.
Gene Luen Yang
When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed.
William S Burroughs
Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.
Lauren F. Winner
He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. "Hate to do this, Bill," he said of the fungi he was murdering. "Fungi have as much right to life as I do. they know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore."Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. "Bill," he said, "I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true." He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn't have done in a thousand years.Bill flew over to the windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. there was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trough was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode."Your second wish is about to come true," said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. he opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. "That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of," he told the bird. "You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for--to get out of the cage.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He wore the evidence of thinking all over his face, open and easy to read. Leah envied him that confidence to show what he was feeling.
Lauren Dane
On the off-chance you won't live forever, maybe you should try being happy now.
Janice Kaplan
This just means so much to me!I'd like to thank all the little people I crushed on my way to the top
Robin Benway
LIFE IS NEVER OVER.
Amy King
The best things in life are the things that we cannot buy with money.
Debasish Mridha
Helda's been trying to impress me with the embroidery on the sheets. One more minute and I thought I might use them to hang myself.""My mother did the embroidery," Bittterblue said.Katsa clapped her mouth shut and glared at Helda. "Thank you, Helda, for mentioning that detail.
Kristin Cashore
Unspeakable feelings need to find expression in words. However... verbalization of very intense feelings may be a difficult task.
James A. Chu
I bet you have girls hanging all over you. Dozens would probably kill to be in my spot and here I am, allergic to your bread.” I looked up. “Why? Because of my near godlike perfection?
J. Lynn
She wanted to be the rain, to cover him with moisture, to bring life to his seed.
Caris Roane
Who should we be trying to make the most proud? Our family? Our friends? Our teachers or bosses? What about the one who molded us out of the earth itself, who formed us like clay, and instilled within us the very breath of life that shaped the universe?
James D. Maxon
There were things that Pumpkin Head—now not Pumpkin Head anymore—had to do to be a girl. He had to be careful how he dressed, and how he acted. He had to be careful how he talked, and he always had to be calm. He was very frightened of what would happen if he didn't stay calm. For his face was really just a wonderful plastic one. The real Pumpkin Head was still inside, locked in, waiting to come out.
Al Sarrantonio
For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.
Larry Kramer
I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?
Janet Fitch
They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White
Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?
Garth Risk Hallberg
It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.
Erin Morgenstern
As for Percy, he held his magic ballpoint pen like he was trying to decide whether to bust out some sword moves or autograph Nike’s chariot.
Rick Riordan
If it is your time love will track you down like a cruise missile.
Lynda Barry
...but before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Harper Lee
God can take the ordinary and create the extraordinary. Our incredible God has the power to transform your simple life and give you the life of your dreams. Remarkable things happen in your life when you believe.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The medium obscured the message.
Christopher Moore
To criticize one's country is to do it a service... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism--a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
J. William Fulbright (Senator)
But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. ""But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does.""No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.
Matt Ruff
Flowers are conscious, intelligent forces. They have been given to us for our happiness and our healing.We can hasten our own evolution by through employing the tools offered to us by a conscious, caring Mother Nature—flowers and their essences.Flower essences allow us to see into the soul of things—into ourselves, our world, and all living beings.Flower essences are a response to the call of an ever-awakening humanity to minister to its spiritual needs.Mother Nature’s pharmacy has long been accessible to those who have pried open her botanical medicine chest. And to those who wish to learn her language—the language of flowers—she bestows her most wonderful secrets of perfect well-being.In keeping with herbalism’s ancient tradition of communing with the plant kingdom, flower essences have evolved as a natural expression of healing—in the simplest ways, through the simplest means.(The) principle of magnetism is strongly operative in flower essences that vibrationally align us with the positive qualities that we seek to uncover within ourselves.How, then, do flower essences work? Very well indeed.
Lila Devi
The heart can bear a tremendous amount of pain and still hold an abundance of happiness. As you experience more of life's intense pleasures and extreme depths of despair, you will learn just what the heart can hold.
Charlotte Symonds
When you start loving yourself and respecting your time and energy, things will change. Get to know your worth, and your value will go up.
Germany Kent
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
Ernest Hemingway
Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
T.C. Boyle
When you reach out to God humbly, you'll find that He's already reaching out to you.
Craig Groeschel
When you're crying, your tears may be watering the seeds of your come-back.
Steve Maraboli
Each piece of glass is another piece of myself I gave to him. It's too bad I didn't keep any pieces for myself.
Amanda Grace
Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.
Michael Crichton
The void can only be filled with love.
Marty Rubin
Wasn't growing catnip in one's yard the kitty equivalent of giving candy to children?
Caroline Paul
I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here.
Siri Hustvedt
Life is like a box of chocolates: You get through what little actual good stuff there is right away, then you constantly fool yourself into believing there's still something good in whatever's left.
James Rozoff
I realized how hard it that must have been, how much hurt when you know the only way to help someone is to give him distance. So I let him go.
Katie Kacvinsky
Isn't it amazing that we’ll cause ourselves more pain by thinking about, and avoiding something we’re afraid of, or something we know we must deal with, but don't want to face? The best thing you can do is just do it, just face the fear and get it over with. How do you get the courage? You create your courage by just taking action…
James A. Murphy
Who knew Demon Child would have such a normal name? I expected something exotic like Serena or Destiny or the Evil One That Comes in the Night to Make Us Chilly.
Darynda Jones
And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.
James Purdy
Letting people be okay without us is how we get to be okay without them.
Merrit Malloy
What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.
Rachel Kushner
The architect of popular culture is none other than Satan. He is the chief designer and chief marketer, and he has been branding worldliness since the beginning of time. His methods are shifty and constantly in motion, changing fads and trends to keep the world running in circles, trying to keep up with the latest and greatest.
Billy Graham
If only [there] really was a door and [you] could walk through it into another life, where threads didn't snarl and stitches didn't go all tight and tiny. Where people loved you and didn't leave you for someone else.
Karen Hancock
With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.
Edwin Powell Hubble