Quotes by American Authors - Page 1843

A true understand of oneself is vital. Writing enables us to act as a sun in our own universe, to become the perfect overseer, and observe the innumerable changes in the seasons of life. Writing is an intense form of self-exploration, and through thoughtful encounters with the humble self, we grow, and that growth diminishes unhappiness and creates joy.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that’s breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We tell the dead to rest in peace, when we should worry about the living to live in peace.
Anthony Liccione
The drums are slamming, rhythmic, exciting. As the minutes pass, it feels to me like we are collectively pulling the year 2004 toward us. Like we have roped it with our music, and now we are hauling it across the night sky like it's a massive fishing net, brimming with all our unknown destinies. And what a heavy net it is, indeed, carrying as it does all the births, deaths, tragedies, wars, love stories, inventions, transformations and calamities that are destined for all of us this coming year.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.
Toni Morrison
As we grow in the knowledge of God's holiness, even though we are growing in the practice of holiness, it seems the gap between our knowledge and our practice always gets wider. This is the Holy Spirit's way of drawing us to more and more holiness.
Jerry Bridges
It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.
Michael Chabon
The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.
Barbara W. Tuchman
In that most burdensome moment of all human history, with blood appearing at every pore and an anguished cry upon His lips, Christ sought Him whom He had always sought—His Father. “Abba,” He cried, “Papa,” or from the lips of a younger child, “Daddy.” This is such a personal moment it almost seems a sacrilege to cite it. A Son in unrelieved pain, a Father His only true source of strength, both of them staying the course, making it through the night—together.
Jeffrey R. Holland
What a slut time is. She screws everybody...
John Green
According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)
Jeffrey Eugenides
I will never be a loser. Never. Because I will never stop trying to be better.
Toni Sorenson
That boy shakes me upside down and inside out.
Alecia Whitaker
Learning to think for yourself is how you separate yourself from your parents and make the transition from being a child to being an adult, though part of maturity is being able to take opposing viewpoints into consideration.
Belle Blackburn
My object is merely to give the reader a general introduction into an abode where, if so disposed, he may linger and loiter with me day by day until we gradually become familiar with all its localities.
Washington Irving
The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for God. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in Him.... We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God.
Paul David Tripp
History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.
Aberjhani
An attitude of gratitude is one of the greatest attitudes of life.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?
Thomas Ligotti
At the end of the day, I do not care how many Democrats or Republicans are in office. What I do care about is whether our leader is truly serving THE PEOPLE or only his/her own pockets. Is our leader in tune with the concerns and needs of the man on the street - or only issues concerning private interests? Is this leader uniting or dividing the country? Milking or contributing to it? Building and preserving it -- or bringing it all down?
Suzy Kassem
For the devil has no power . . . except in the dark." - Madame Dorothea
Cassandra Clare
When in brief flashes of serendipity you glimpse what you were born to do... Do it. No matter what. Take steps toward it, even if they are depressingly small at first. With each inch closer to your central magic, you will feel it. It is unmistakable for anything else. It's called purpose.
Jacob Nordby
Who was I to meddle in people’s love lives? Mine was a mess. My heartwanted the one thing it wasn’t allowed to have — love with someone besides mycupid-appointed soul mate. I was so screwed up, I made the dysfunctionalrelationships on Jerry Springer look wholesome.
Jenn Windrow
But she stopped herself. That wouldn't make it right. You didn't forgive because it was the only choice you thought you had. That didn't make it forgiveness, that made it desperation. She'd always been too desperate about Jake. Always.
Sarah Addison Allen
The journey is where we find perspective.
Alison Levine
Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear
Stephen King
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
Mark Twain
I embrace my sensitivity and let it enhance my joy every day.
Amy Leigh Mercree
Could a being create the fifty billion galaxieseach with two hundred billion starsthen rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
Ron Patterson
When you etch your moral code in stone, you have no room for editing. You leave open the possibility that, as our ethical views evolve, your code becomes less relevant. You could find yourself with four of ten divine moral laws describing how to treat God and zero that prohibit rape or slavery.
David G. McAfee
Minutes remain the same length whether they are held against the span of years or minutes themselves. Yet, when minutes are held against themselves, they seem so terribly brief. Therefore, we’d be wise to celebrate life before minutes are all that’s left.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Guess we're going north," Dev said slowly."Everyone, follow Lassie.Timmy's in the well.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
Orson Scott Card
After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue.She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L'Heure Bleue. For me they signify love.
Susan Hubbard
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims - the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is that nobody really possesses a great kind of power for long. Those who have it on loan from Fate count on it too much and are themselves destroyed.
Paul Hoffman
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
Jonathan Franzen
His name feels like a secret, and now he's wearing it on his wrist. I want to know all about this girl who put it there. What she looks like. If she's got freckles, fair hair or dark, like his. If she's scrappy or etheral, funny or serious, scrape-kneed or ladylike. I know that she loves him, so I want to know everything else. But West doesn't want to share her with me. I shouldn't keep trying to scale these walls he puts up. I'm a terrible climber.
Robin York
You will not find Jesus in heaven, reclining on a cloud. He isn’t in church on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews. He isn’t locked away in the Vatican or held hostage by a denominational seminary. Rather, Jesus is sitting in the Emergency Room, an uninsured, undocumented immigrant needing healing. He is behind bars, so far from his parole date he can’t think that far into the future. He is homeless, evicted from his apartment, waiting in line at the shelter for a bed and a cup of soup. He is the poor child living in government housing with lice in his hair, the stripes of abuse on his body and a growl in his stomach. He is an old forgotten woman in a roach infested apartment who no one thinks of anymore. He is a refugee in Sudan, living in squalor. He is the abused and molested child who falsely feels responsible for the evil that is perpetrated against her. He is the young woman who hates herself for the decisions she has made, decisions that have imperiled her life, but did the best she could, torn between impossible choices. Jesus is anyone without power, ability or the means to help themselves, and he beckons us to come to him; not on a do-gooding crusade, but in solidarity and embrace.
Ronnie McBrayer
It was a love that was not a contract but an affection of the soul.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
If you like to be immortal, live for others and die for others.
Debasish Mridha
And how is your head? Better?" he asked."Very much. Sometimes it hurts." Right now it was throbbing. "But every day I am much improved.""Where did you hit it? Are you bruised?"I put a hand to the back of my head, a little to the left, where I had landed with such jarring force. "Here," I said. "It's still a little tender."And leaning forward, he touched my hair right where I had just laid my hand. Such was he glamour that attended him that I expected the ache to instantly melt away, healed by his royal caress. But in fact, I felt a sudden leap in my heart that made the pain briefly more intense.
Sharon Shinn
Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today's deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans need both more research and more vigilance.
Harriet A. Washington
He fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.
Nancy Milford
Next I prayed to Allah, whose ears are deaf; then did I beseech his fallen twin, the Devil Hornprick, who sits upon his thorn of fire, gloating upon his constellations and counting his bloody seeds. In Baclava it is said Hornprick once caught a glimpse of the First Woman, as she sat singing to her snake in her chamber of sacred mud. Dazzled by her sight, the light of love and lust, he fell. He is still falling. For all eternity her breasts orbit his dreams.
Rikki Ducornet
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
Fran Lebowitz
Don't Become An Artist, Actor, Muscian, Producer or Writer, Etc, For Only The Money. You May Be Very Dissapointed.
Chris Mentillo
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes to increase luxury and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Henry George
There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all these landscapes. We turn wild trees to standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. But every fish is different from every other fish. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember specificity is everything.
Derrick Jensen
You know what else he said?" Anne Marie asked."Tell me," I said. I didn't want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are.
Brock Clarke
There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.
David Halberstam
To many people dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.
John Mason Brown
There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more that of the sick who want something different and that of the traveler who says "Anywhere but here."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.
Hugh Howey
We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.
Jennifer Elisabeth
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Alice Walker
God can give or take away, Well who would make such an awful rule.
Josh Ritter
Always forget to complain, but never forget to appreciate and compliment.
Debasish Mridha
You are the reason my heart beats. Your love is my lifeline, and I'm not about to give it up - not now - not ever!
Emily Rose Philips
Simply by living in this particular time and space, you're doing something nearly 100% of all other humans ever never could. Don't waste it.
Bill Loguidice
I can't leave her now. I like her too much. There, I said it. But I won't say it again.
Veronica Roth