Quotes by American Authors - Page 1838

You make this sound like a chore for you, like a job. This...," he pressed his fingers to my heart, "it's about love for me--undying, unwavering, unrelenting love. A love that won't let me move on, it won't let me get over you. I don't want to focus on the sickness that could replace you in my heart. I don't want to think of what will happen if I stop fighting for you, for us. But, sometimes I feel like I'm alone in this fight.
Jordan Deen
Lust and the English make no sense to me.
Paul Monette
I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off.
Ayize Jama-Everett
Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something -- even the marriage itself -- went wrong. For half their lives they tangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing up fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet.
Michael Chabon
Do you miss her?I blinked. Did I what? This was my best friend since preschool we were talking tabout, tthe girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had tmemorized my town phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet tunderneath me tduring ta thousand different movie nights and showed tme how to use ta tampon. She’d grown tup in my kitchen, she was my shadow-tself—or I was hers— and Sawyer twanted tto know if I missed her? What the hell kind of question was that?
Katie Cotugno
And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.
Anne Rice
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Russell Banks
A tool is but the extension of a man's hand and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well being of mankind.
Henry Ward Beecher
Digital innovation is a dynamic storybook that has intricate chapters, with a serendipitous cover, which can be flipped over to the next level, but it is a book that never ends.
Pearl Zhu
I can feel everything. And I want to keep feeling everything. Even the painful, awful, terrible things. Because feeling things is what lets us know that we're alive.
Jasmine Warga
Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.
Stephen King
I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.
Elmore Leonard
When I said confront, I meant that you need to confront the reality of your situation. You've made certain choices over your time here, and only you know why you made them. All of that, all of those decisions, have led you to where you are now.
Charlotte Huang
There was balance, harsh and violent like the noxious air in a swamp. But balance, nonetheless. Then somewhere in the fickle mists of creation came humanity, clawing and afraid, grasping and ambitious. Enveloped in a dangerous world, these creatures lived as scavengers; afraid of the greater things of the world. They were beset by disease, lack of claws or fangs, and the lack of habitat to call their own. Lefeyhdie had not provided any particular prey or plant for them to eat. These fleshy, naked beings were doomed to die of attrition. Curiously, these beings never stopped Doing, or Thinking. Breeding to strengthen their numbers. Sharpening rocks, shaping wood, gathering leaves and sticks for clothing and shelter. Eventually they had settlements of great number, crude but effective tools of war. Ancient forces began to pay attention to the growing incursion, plaguing them, slaying stragglers at night. But still the humans held on to the edge of the precipice, knuckles white with effort'.
T.P. Grish
Do not be dismayed to learn there is a bit of the devil in you. There is a bit of the devil in us all.
Arthur Byron Cover
Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.
Sharon Salzberg
As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.
Colson Whitehead
When I realize I made someone's day, it makes my day.
Genesis Quihuis
But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.
Neal Shusterman
Jesus Christ said 'by their fruits ye shall know them,' not by their disclaimers.
William S Burroughs
Even so, [... in the silence after a winter storm has ceased to howl, in the soft whisper of a morning snowfall, in the way the moonlight sparkles over new-fallen snow, you can feel when she has been near by, ever searching. You can sense the presence of the Winter Child.
Cameron Dokey
The world isn’t always what’s right in front of you, you know? It’s below, it’s above, it’s out there somewhere. Every burn of every light inside every house I see when I look down from the rooftop has a story. Sometimes we just need to change our perspective. And when I look down at everything, I remember that there’s more out there than just what’s going on in my house—the bullshit with my dad, school, my future. I look at all those full houses, and I remember, I’m just one of many. It’s not to say we’re not special or important, but it’s comforting, I guess. You don’t feel so alone.
Penelope Douglas
Why did everyone send casseroles in times of crisis? Why didn't anyone ever send brownies and Jack Daniel's?
Jaye Wells
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.
Susan Sontag
He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different.To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.
Robert Penn Warren
Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.
Michael Lewis
Sometimes emotion is gentle, like rain feeding the river to nourish life, but sometimes it explodes like a rainstorm whose floodwaters wipe out bridges and homes.
Deborah Sandella
The biggest impediment to loving life is our inflated egos. Only by suppressing our ego and controlling our selfish thoughts can we truly comprehend the immaculate beauty of every day unfolding before us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
As I've always said to Talyn, tough times never last. But tough Andarions. I learned that from watching you as a boy. Your parents, grandparents, and Keris treated you like shit and yet you never once spoke against them. You'd just lift your chin and carry on. 'Barking dogs don't bother me,' you used to say. 'Sooner or later, they reach the end of their yard and hit a fence. I'll keep going past it, and won't hear them anymore.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
I feel sorry for you, Detective Esteban. Because I'm all out of patience, and you're all out of time. I'm sure we'll see each other again someday. In Hell. Save a seat for me.
H.L. Sudler
And besides, I couldn't stay at the party. It was too dangerous. I nearly died.""From what?""Boredom.
Jennifer Donnelly
He seemed to believe that indignation was a sufficient guardian.
Stephen L. Carter
The jump is so frightening between where I am and where I want to be... because of all I may become I will close my eyes and leap!
Mary Anne Radmacher
And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.
Phil Klay
Name your intention.
Patti Digh
Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature — by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse — we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature — natural selection — gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy.
Robert Wright
Perhaps you can feel if you can’t hear,” was her fancy. “Perhaps kind thoughts reach people somehow, even through windows and doors and walls. Perhaps you feel a little warm and comforted, and don’t know why, when I am standing here in the cold and hoping you will get well and happy again.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11
Walter Mosley
A life of living free and taking endless satisfaction from a person’s promiscuous meanderings entails intermittently retooling oneself to meet a desired future. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of life is detecting when the ground moves beneath us and then nimbly shifting our mental perspective.
Kilroy J. Oldster
You said th' Magic was in my back. Th' doctor calls it rheumatics.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I’m not here to disagree with people or try to change anyone’s mind. I’m just here to accept and love others right where they are – no matter their belief systems or backgrounds.
Alaric Hutchinson
And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
André Aciman
The secret to excitement is discovering new paths, and having the courage to take them.
Lawren Leo
A cliffhanger is when ...
Buffy Andrews
There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.
James McBride
Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.
Wally Lamb
I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me. I started to laugh. This was a stupid way to die, all right. But also a god damned funny one.
Adam-Troy Castro
I had a dream about you last night... if atomic clocks are synced up to a satellite to keep their time accurate, where does the satellite get its time? Is there a chain of atomic clocks setting time for other atomic clocks?
Marshall Ramsay
Art is a sense of magic.
Stan Brakhage
Sadie heard her inside cleaning up the kitchen and wondered what dreams Betty's mother had for herself, if all mothers had them, bottled up beneath their mother exteriors.
Karen Brown
We firmly believe that therapy is education rather than healing that it is growth rather than treatment.
Arnold Lazarus
Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don't let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children in grocery stores. I love to watch them work on their mothers to get what they want, and, because I am always a child, I'm pulling for them to get the candy and to get it NOW. The other day I watched a little blond beauty pull her mother's face to her and lay her hands on her mother's cheeks and kiss her nose. Needless to say they opened the bag of cookies then and there.
Ellen Gilchrist
Women have become trained to be lone soldiers online, knowing that to send up a signal flare for help is more likely to attract enemies than allies.
Violet Blue
In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.
Nicole Krauss
Don't make someone burn, and then try to douse the flames with the things you should have done. Those regrets are gasoline not water.
Tarryn Fisher
No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.
Diana Peterfreund
When leaders lead in ways that people’s brains can follow, good results follow as well.
Henry Cloud
As each wave of technology is released. It must be accompanied by a demand for new skills, new language. Consumers must constantly update their ways of thinking, always questioning their understanding of the world. Going back to old ways, old technology is forbidden. There in no past, no present, only an endless future of inadequacy
Richard Kadrey
For a moment she knew exactly what he was thinking, not just about Tom, but about her, and himself, and all of life, and she liked the way he saw things. She could spend her life tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts.He wasn't a stiff, and he wasn't a weakling either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.
Matthew Thomas