Quotes by American Authors - Page 1888

Pride and folly, they go together like two tightly grasping hands.
Patrick Rothfuss
Everytime you’re denying the flesh, you’re feeding and making the spirit stronger.
Jeanette Coron
Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature. You can fill in the names here with your own political disaster story. But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done.
Richard Rohr
You play it safe and all you end up with is a lifetime of should-have-beens.
Vivi Andrews
No woman truly wants independence. She wants the freedom to choose her own master. This is also what men want. The origin of all human conflict is, possibly, disagreement about who ought and ought not to be one's master. The origin of all human happiness is, maybe, mutual agreement on the subject.
Gina Wohlsdorf
The fault in our stars is the inability to see that the world falls in love with fantasy, fairytales and magic in movies. Even religion asks us to believe in the most unlikely of situations. However, despite all the great movies we love, we choose to see so many real life spiritual experiences as delusion, mania, psychosis or wishful thinking. Our society gives great devotion to the arts. However, they solve so many problems with realism, rather than giving into the possibilty of God's plan for a person, that doesn't involve their theological views about how God helps write his children's stories.
Shannon L. Alder
Agitation gives birth to creation.
Terry Tempest Williams
Stand up for Truth even it means standing alone.
Suzy Kassem
I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.
Craig M. Mullaney
What other goal could there be, then finding one's self within God and God within one's very Self? For as we know God, we also are known.
Vivian Amis
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Stephen King
Many in business feel they have to live up to a machismo archetype of the big-swinging-dick business leader
Jon Miller
In a country where Christians were looked upon with suspicion and disfavor, a government leader said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Christians seem to thrive under persecution. Perhaps we should prosper them, and then they would disappear.
Billy Graham
Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph
Robert E. Howard
When I got up this morning the sea was full of sun pennies - and now it all seems to be covered in lemon scrim. Writers ought to live far inland or next to the city dump, if they are ever to get any work one. Or perhaps they need to be stronger-minded than I am.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Sometimes, for the present," I said, turning to April, "all we can do is hold on. Sometimes it's that ability, and that ability alone, that gets us through the rough parts. But if we do hold on, then eventually the storm does pass and the sun comes out and we can go on again.
Janene Wolsey Baadsgaard
Most haters are stuck in a poisonous mental prison of jealousy and self-doubt that blinds them to their own potentiality.
Steve Maraboli
Think of your attacks as the ocean during a storm. Waves come and crash. They beat on the sand over and over. Slamming into anything on its way. But then, the storm retreats. The water is calm and the waves slowly come and go. Every attack rises and falls. You either have to hold on," he squeezes my shoulders, "or stop it before the storm comes.
Lindsay Paige
George looked at her for a long moment. Finally he replied, "And why do you find it so hard to think someone might like you and want to do things for you?
Tamora Pierce
One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don’t have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
This has always bothered me. If "Change" is the only constant how can we have absolutes?
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
It/ll be better tomorrow...
Hubert Selby Jr.
I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?
David Byrne
Love is a seed that we diligently plant and requires tender care and watering in order for the tree to ever grow. Just as we cannot foresee the future and what is to become of this love later in life, the tree cannot tell what the weather will be like in the future. The strongest of winds and pouring rain may befall on the tree, however as long as the foundation and roots remains strong, love is able to exist.
Forrest Curran
An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.
Brandon Mull
What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.
Wallace Stegner
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
Peter De Vries
That was when things got weird. You may have thought things were weird already, but this was uber-weird
Dinah Katt
Misogyny… is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.
Joss Whedon
I've given her signs! I've given her plenty of signs. What does she want me to do? Slap him across the face with my glove, and challenge him to pistols at dawn?
Molly Ringle
The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.
H.P. Lovecraft
And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).
Cornel West
There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.
Andrew Solomon
Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down -how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?- he'd remember that ambulance, just like the one he'd been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, was an X on its side.
Eleanor Henderson
Denial is a very effective human trick. People often tell how a situation was "unbearable," though, clearly, they have borne it. Lived to tell, so to speak.
Lorna Jane Cook
Who knows? Maybe you both live happily ever after, or maybe three months from now you end the relationship because he doesn't squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom...nothing is guaranteed." - Olivia Harper, Secret Need
Satin Russell
Sometimes I think the truly committed Christian is in conflict with society around him more than any other person. Society is going one direction, and the Christian is going in the opposite direction. This brings about friction and conflict. But God has promised, in the midst of trouble and conflict, a genuine peace, a sense of assurance and security, that the worldly person never knows.
Billy Graham
Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Shut the F--- up and create your f---ing art.
Garrett Robinson
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
Henry James
There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there to depend on. Pa and Jack had gone, and Ma needed help to take care of Mary and the little girls, and somehow to get them all safely to the west on a train.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
No one can be the total cure for another person.
Frank Lentricchia
We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.
Al Gore
Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition.An army and navy represent the people's toys.
Emma Goldman
Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Arnold H. Glasow
Tequila makes me dream up things like dance battles.
Rachel Hollis
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Annie Dillard
I will now sing another song for your pleasure. Now, if you like Phil Collins...you should be shot in the head.
Robert Clark
Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought.
Marilynne Robinson
The same numbness and disappointment every day sends some people looking for something tragic for proof of life.
Bryant McGill
The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.
Frank Herbert
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not confuse humility with humiliation.
Alan Cohen
God is more concerned about the attitude of our hearts than the way we express it. Worship isn’t supposed to be entertainment.
Billy Graham
As a mother, you need to remember that a loving and compassionate God is one hundred percent aware of your child’s situation.
Elizabeth George
People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.
Piers Anthony
What in the world could this family have done to deserve a fate such as this?
Michael Jay
I'm allergic to stupidity.
Chris Colfer