Quotes by American Authors - Page 1845

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.
Abraham Lincoln
I’m sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar. I heard the beatings of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn.
Leslie Feinberg
From her thighs, she gives you lifeAnd how you treat she who gives you lifeShows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator.And from seed to dustThere is ONE soul above all others --That you must always show patience, respect, and trustAnd this woman is your mother.And when your soul departs your bodyAnd your deeds are weighed against the featherThere is only one soul who can save yoursAnd this woman is your mother.And when the heart of the universeAsks her hair and mind,Whether you were gentle and kind to herHer heart will be forced to remain silentAnd her hair will speak freely as a separate entity,Very much like the seaweed in the sea --It will reveal all that it has heard and seen.This woman whose heart has seen yours,First before anybody else in the world,And whose womb had opened the doorFor your eyes to experience light and more --Is your very own MOTHER.So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel,Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childishHow you treat her is the ultimate test.If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right wayWith simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness.And always remember,That the queen in the Creator's kingdom,Who sits on the throne of all existence,Is exactly the same as in yours.And her name is,THE DIVINE MOTHER.
Suzy Kassem
The women in the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby, acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the Magi arrived. But the baby wasn't entertained. Her blue eyes were glazed over. She was staring into the middle distance, tired of everything. All this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not year a year old.
Ann Patchett
The guy in bed with her was not Nathan. Which meant Elle was buck-naked and wantonly riding the wrong guy.
Katee Robert
To enjoy the beauty of love, be a big person in this small world.
Debasish Mridha
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
Kahlil Gibran
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.
W.E.B. Du Bois
I wasn’t a class clown, because nuns have no sense of humor. They have rulers.
Dan Alatorre
Sometimes the word 'gratitude' feels too thin to explain things.
Dee-Williams
Consider everything an experiment.
Corita Kent
We are born to serve, to find the power of love, and to get what we deserve.
Debasish Mridha
The jury’s still out on your level of intellect. After all, you signed up with Evil Incorporated in the first place.
Katherine McIntyre
Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.
Christian Smith
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.
Anne Lamott
I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.
Trevor Noah
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
E.E. Cummings
We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a 
broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest
 ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest 
triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine 
heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or 
saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or 
criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs
of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts
and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment
 seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the 
awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Moses needed to learn that God was Jehovah-tsidkenu—the One who is righteous and the source of true acceptance. The staff was symbolic of Moses’ life. God was asking him to let go of it—to give complete control to him. When Moses picked it up, it was no longer his life but the very life of God…Just like Moses, until we yield control of our lives to Jesus Christ, it is impossible to see ourselves through God’s eyes. Try as we may, we will never see our worth through accomplishments or the opinions of others. (from Under His Wings: Healing Truth for Adoptees of All Ages)
Beth Willis Miller
When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters.Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be.
Charles Yu
We have to feed our loved ones, but at what cost. A dead man or woman can’t feed the living.
James Jean-Pierre
I had a sneaking suspicion that time was not constant, but I guess I could never prove it. I suppose it didn’t really matter. I even had a theory that time didn’t go in straight line at all. I knew I was no Albert Einstein, but I had the sneaking suspicion that everything had happened, was happening, or would happen was really happening all the time. There was no past, present, and future. Everything was going on all at once and forever. If that was true, then each moment was eternity.
Mark A. Roeder
It’s not going to be easy, but it’s kind of like ripping off a band-aid. Painful for a minute, but it has to be done.
Kenneth Eade
A long time ago I learned that an atheist and a believer trying to have a discussion about God and religion is like shooting the breeze and having it shoot back.
T. K. Decker
That's just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.
Maria Mitchell
With red clay between my toes,and the sun setting over my head,the ghost of my mother blows in,riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,riding on a honeysuckle breeze.
Brenda Sutton Rose
They said my solution was foreign because I lived on another planet. It required honesty. It required communication. It required kindness. It required integrity. It required compassion. It required empathy. It required a deep understanding of what it meant to be humane. It required courage to be something above the others. It required proving your love of God.
Shannon L. Alder
The hub of Christianity is not 'do something for Jesus.' The hub of Christianity is 'Jesus has done everything for you.' And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of Christian faith is our love for God instead of God's love for us. Don't get me wrong--what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.
Tullian Tchividjian
The lower the class of the affair, the more likely the band will be invited to eat.
Don Asher
The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.
Jodi Picoult
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.
Mark Twain
We still live in the era in which information is rich and insight is poor.
Pearl Zhu
In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.
George Saunders
Monsters were real. They wore human flesh and looked out from behind the eyes of seemingly benign people. You passed them on the street every day, never knowing they'd marked you as prey until it was too late.
Liana LeFey
Today is the most important day to start a new beginning. It will open the door of opportunity and reveal the holding.
Debasish Mridha
I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.
Patricia Geary
We both know that pain comes for us all. It's almost a relief. Because if all of us are going to someday lose the people we love most, or be lost by them, then what is there to do but live?
Emily Henry
Many of our efforts to intentionally craft and subsequently force our limited vision on life has more often than not resulted in some degree of cataclysm or schism or division or any number of other things that aren’t all that savory.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I believe that you can create genuine fulfillment, make money, have freedom and make a difference for others.
Michael Hutchison
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
Richard Wright
I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.
Gary Snyder
You need to wear less clothing, lass.
Terry Spear
When gratitude begins, then life finds the abundance and suffering ends.
Debasish Mridha
When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.
Mary Karr
On opening night, standing under the Rogers's marquee, [Lin] realized that if Eliza's struggle was the element of Hamilton's story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy.
Jeremy McCarter
After you're older two things are possibly more important than any others: health and money.
Helen Gurley Brown
Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
Jeffrey Eugenides
We are not free to love God insofar as we are enslaved to creatures. And we all are. We are addicted to whatever we cannot part with that is less than God, our true good. And that includes ourselves--especially ourselves and our own will. So we must renounce this too, this especially. God's world is not the problem; our attitude is. God does not want us to renounce the unspeakably beautiful world he gave us as creation, as gift, as it really is. He wants us to renounce it as creator, as our god, as it really is not. This wonderful world is our God-given house to live in and to live the love of God in. But God's bride must learn not to love her house as if it were her husband.
Peter Kreeft
Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.
Steven Pinker
The purpose of God's Word is to transform people in every country and every century into the image of God.
David Platt
The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight...[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour ofmeditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
M.F.K. Fisher
The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.
Ted Gioia
She goes on to explain about how need to not only listen to what the other person is saying but try to hear the meaning behind their words. But my thing is that if you want someone to understand what you're saying, you should say what you mean.
Susane Colasanti
Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.
Brennan Manning
Love is making friends with fear because fear is the constant companion of intimacy ~ and when you bring fear out of the darkness and into the light, you realize it was an illusion based on our own insecurities.
Allen L. Roland
If somebody tells you there's a rule, break it.
Hans Zimmer
Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.
Junot Díaz
Sometimes, you may think you have fallen into an abyss...when in fact, you've just descended to the roots...of the tree of life! Somewhere along your climb, you got lost amongst the branches, and lost in the darkness of the branches, the only way to find the straight way up would be to return to the roots! And from there amongst the roots, you will be able to look straight up and see the top again! And begin your ascent!
C. JoyBell C.
I was not a great communicator, but I communicated great things.
Ronald Reagan