Quotes by American Authors - Page 1835

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)
Christopher Hitchens
Have you been kissed before?” “I don’t know whether to say yes or no. Which answer will make you do it again?” “Oh, I’m going to do it again.” His thumb stroked her cheek. “Just wanted to know how slow to take things.” “A little faster would be fine.
Tessa Dare
In the whole history of my letters, of my liking boys, not once has a boy liked me back at the same time as I liked him. It was always me alone, longing after a boy, and that was fine, that was safe
Jenny Han
Wisdom holds a candle to experience, but you've got to take the candle and walk alone.
Lauren Kate
That's your response to everything: drink?""No, that's my response to nothing.
Charles Bukowski
And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.
Madeleine L'Engle
Go fuck yourself," I replied, always the lady. "I'm staying here.
Ava Gardner
For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger and full of life as we age, we disappear slowly. Our skin thins and evaporates. Our nails barely coat our fingertips. Our hair falls out. We are never more see-through.
Laura Anderson Kurk
I wasn't scared of losing my past. i was scared of losing my future.
Meg Jay
And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Connie Willis
It's ugly, but is it art?
Randall Jarrell
Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?"Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet
Bill Watterson
What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.
Stephen King
Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.
Jim Butcher
Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.
Evan Meekins
Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed byNewtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates.
Carl Sagan
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Henry Miller
What you expect, it will find the way to appear.
Debasish Mridha
Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Bringing light of our personal and social consciousness to dark corridors of human pain that have long been neglected and suppress.
William Keepin
Food stall owners reach out with menus, calling out their dinner selections like midway prizes
Vicki Alayne Bradley
...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.
Jennifer Egan
Those are the only to verbalizations usually that we make in movies—either to scream or to laugh—because those two reactions are rather close. Most things we laugh at are things that are really horrible, when you think about them. It’s funny and you don’t scream, as long as it’s not you. If it’s somebody else you can laugh.
Stephen King
All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.
S. Kelley Harrell
Placing our attention on providing consistent appreciation, approval, and applause to those we love not only focuses their energy on the good things about themselves but also teaches them to return the favor to us.
Sue Patton Thoele
Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.
Shannon L. Alder
Is that the end... of all the races and civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?
C.J. Cherryh
If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.
Peace Pilgrim
There was a moment when any hope within me froze solid and I was finally emptied of all energy to fight the cold. And at the very point of that very surrender, when I became convinced that I must bow to a world that would be forever frigid, God cupped the hands of my soul and poured in the warmth of Christmas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.
Nina LaCour
But replacing hunger for divine connection with Double Stuf Oreos is like giving a glass of sand to a person dying of thirst. It creates more thirst, more panic.
Geneen Roth
Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.
Suzanne Collins
She seemed like the kind of woman who would fall in love with the sky.
Nenia Campbell
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
Philip K Dick
Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable.
Sherman Alexie
And you require no answers", Foamfollower was laughing in his gladness, "You are sufficient to every question".
Stephen R. Donaldson
The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.
Bryant McGill
The sessions with Mr. Dubois continued, but it was in the private parlor of Abigail Braddock that Sarah Biddle received the greatest knowledge, for in Mrs. Braddock's private parlor Sarah Biddle learned not only to read books, but also to love them.
Stephanie Grace Whitson
...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...
Herman Melville
Live in the beauty of love to live in peace.
Debasish Mridha
Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you’re going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can’t just fix one with no concern for the other.
Charles Martin
Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself.
Gore Vidal
I followed the trail out of the room, invigorated by the possibility of reinventing my own body. The meaning was mine, as long as I was with those who had the vision and vocabulary to understand my creation.
Nick Krieger
Are you going to kiss me?" I blabbered stupidly."I'm working up the nerve," he said softly.
Liz Reinhardt
23. With God, even when nothing is happening...something is happening.
James C. Dobson
Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.
Zig Ziglar
Walking with Jesus is many times like walking in the eye of the storm--inner peace in the middle of chaos.
Alisa Hope Wagner
People don't want to listen to their thoughts, so they fill the world with noise.
Erin Entrada Kelly
People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa
Kathleen Glasgow
Once I was free in the shackles of sin:Free to be tempted, just bound to give in;Free to be captive to any desire;Free to eternally burn in hell’s fire.‘Til Someone bought me and called me His slave:Bound by commands I am free to obey;Captive by beauty I’m free to adore--Sentenced to sit at His feet evermore.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
You have a valid complaint, and I do recognize it ... but you are reading into things a little bit. Just the same, I will do my best to make horrible things happen to a bunch of white people before something else so graphic hits a minority character.
Robert Kirkman
Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.
Christian D. Larson
Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origens, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.
Christoph Wolff
[The waves] move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves.
Susan Casey
Textbook intelligence is not true intelligence. It only marks a man good at memorization.
Suzy Kassem
...introduced Doc to the miracle of morphine. From that very first shot it was as if he'd discovered the one vital ingredient that God had left out when He'd sent Doc kicking and screaming into the cold, cruel world.
Steve Earle
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
Dave Barry
these "sometimey" feelings are welcomed to stay... reminiscent of ying and yang: they need eachother to help me get through the good & bad days
Alexandra Elle