Quotes by American Authors - Page 1826

Father! Blessed word.
Maria S. Cummins
My knitting is simple", he said again. Ï can make anything you want with it, but it will always be simple.
Amy Lane
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.
Charles Frazier
One thing I've learned: we don't stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.
Kamal Ravikant
In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.
Michael Pollan
You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.
Chris Howard
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
George Ade
Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.
Rick Yancey
Love is to give, commit, and trust completely; the courage to be vulnerable without the omniscience of another's virtue.
Ken Poirot
The greatest effects we have on the world are the ones we can never see.
Chris Matakas
Then he asked me which one I thought was most likely to happen. I wish I knew. I really do. But I don’t. You’d think that after living with these people for fifteen years I’d know a little something about them. But right now I feel like I don’t know my parents at all. I guesswhen you get down to it, I’ve never really thought about them as people. They’ve always been my parents. Now I have to think about them as people with feelings. What a pain.The funny thing is, I bet they feel the same way.
Michael Thomas Ford
Games are lost and won in your mind as much as they are on the field.
Carl Deuker
There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.
Nora Ephron
Everything I've read about Christians in prison for their non-violent witness to Christ rings true. Whether it's St. Paul, St. Edmund Campion, Dorothy Day or Dr. King, the experience remains the same: God comes close to those in prison. God's spirit is unleashed on the person who suffers imprisonment in a spirit of obedient love. God is a God of prisoners, a God of the poor, a God of the oppressed--but most of all, as the life of Jesus testifies, a God of nonviolent resisters. God is a God of nonviolence and peace.
John Dear
My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
Jasper Johns
If we believe the Canon is closed and Scripture is sufficient, then we believe God is not speaking new words apart from Scripture.
Dan Phillips
Some men die for lack of love…some die because of it. Think about it." - Daemon
Anne Bishop
A minute or so passed by--not long, but long enough to make me wonder whether Oliver was setting up mood lighting or hiding dead bodies. Or if someone was up there waiting to stab me again. Or if someone was up there waiting to hand me a crown and tell me I was the long-lost princess of Genovia. Or if I'd tumble into a pit of lava, only to get saved at the last second by a flying carpet.
Lindsay Ribar
I love you," he murmured into my hair. "You are my night and stars, the fate I would fix myself to in any life.
Roshani Chokshi
In your sky, you are the brightest star.Without you light, it’s dark like tar.So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
Words, he knew, could scar.
Jodi Picoult
INTEGRITY IS: Empirical knowledge is one of the critical ingredients of integrity, followed by truth, which is not necessarily moral, hence the evaluation of the truth. Empirical knowledge, coupled with the evaluation of truth for determination of its morality, equals factual righteousness and subsequently perpetuates integrity. Perceptions can at times influence our evaluation of truth, which may ultimately influence our identification of a subject’s morality. Our perception of what is truthful and righteous is not necessarily others interpretations. Assumption and credulity is the archenemy—the nemesis, if you will—of truth and ultimately of morality. We sometimes have an unwillingness or aversion toward researching a subject before formulating an opinion. But the more knowledge we learn about a subject, the more beneficial it will be. Understanding based on factual data will enable a more realistic and enhanced resolution of questions about a subject’s morality.Do some investigation of facts, situations, ideology, and belief systems for your empirical knowledge. As you do so, the truth shall be brought to the surface. As you analyze empirical knowledge, the truth and its morality will determine the factual righteousness of the subject, and ultimately, its integrity.Integrity Equation:Empirical knowledge + truth + morality = factual righteousness = INTEGRITY
I.Alan Appt
How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.No.
Tana French
Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that's worth mentioning?
Coleman Cox
For the believer, humility is honesty about one's greatest flaws to a degree in which he is fearless about truly appearing less righteous than another.
Criss Jami
Love with an open heart. Live with an open mind.
Debasish Mridha
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?
Henry David Thoreau
Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.
Gayle Forman
If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here.
Toni Cada Bambara
45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each.Nearly 300 watchtowers.Over 250 dog runs.Twenty bunkers.Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.Over 11,000 armed guards.A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.96 miles of concrete wall.Not your typical holiday destination.JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this—among other—notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it.
Joanna Campbell
Meeting him was fate, loving him was a choice, and spending the rest of my life with him… well that was destiny.
T.K. Chapin
Together, in that room, our childhood notions of love melted away. We discovered love was not a fairytale. Sometimes there were no happy endings, and when there were, you needed to work like hell to keep the happiness alive.
Cristina Marrero
I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what "help" would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.
Dee-Williams
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
Michael Crichton
[ ] manic sex isn't really intercourse. It's dicourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin.
Terri Cheney
There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power.
Robin Hobb
I cannot wait to stare into the face of my children and be in love.
Rachel Walden
Disappointment is part of parenthood, Jasper. The trick is learnin' to love your kids even when they disappoint you.
Barry Lyga
None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway.
Shirley Jackson
Win over the fear and adversity and prove yourself wrong.
Debasish Mridha
Dagmar tried to stand, and Gwenvael caught her hand, pulling her back down. "You can't leave me. I'm tortured and brooding. You need to show me how much you adore me so I can learn to love myself again.""You've never stopped loving yourself.""Because I'm amazing.
G.A. Aiken
No.” The smile had left Sarah’s voice. “He still works for the Basij. Beware of weak men, little sister. He never returned to help, not even to express condolences for Father. Find a strong man. Get a man who will stand up for you, even if it means he has to fight the whole world. There is nothing more dangerous than a weak man.
Michael Benzehabe
There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?
Dennis Lehane
In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.
Thomas Szasz
The cut under his eye and the split skin on his lower lip only enhanced his profile. He didn’t look defeated. He looked like a fighter. A champion.
Lisa Kessler
All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.
Ray Bradbury
This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.
Thomas Ligotti
Because thoughts are energy, energy is matter, and matter never disappears...
Wendy Wunder
Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly.
John Shaw Billings
Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
Stephen King
Education is no substitute for intelligence.
Frank Herbert
Once Ed said to me, "For a very long time I didn't like myself." It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. "It was a very difficult time," he said, "and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually," he said, "I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people did like me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right." This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person "Ed" as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking. They cannot see themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.
John Steinbeck
Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at your to fight or flee - and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do.
Jim Butcher
You have been given a second chance to start your life over. You can't throw this opportunity away. If you do you will be a colossal fool. If you get the chance to do something and don't do it then you'll simply live with regret. That's a worse situation than trying something daring and maybe not succeeding. At least you tried. Isn't that what you want to show your kids?
Lorena Bathey
A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
Colson Whitehead
...and if this samskara has taught me anything, it's that only when you've opened your heart to the love that already surrounds you can you begin to see it elsewhere
Elizabeth Garbee
How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (break of contract).
Sloane Crosley
Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?
Philip Dray
If science is defined or understood as a mode of seeking knowledge, a means of interpreting nature in a way that can be demonstrated to others, then the plant-medicine traditions of the Amazon as they have been practiced constitute an authentic scientific discipline.
Jonathon Miller Weisberger
(Answers to life) - You don't have to have it all figured out by a certain age or time in your life. It will come in bits and pieces along the way.
Lindsey Rietzsch