Quotes by American Authors - Page 1912

You can't love someone just by looking at them. That is lust. Not saying love can't come fast, but it doesn't come first.
Teresa Mummert
Jesus first, others next, and yourself last spells J-O-Y.
Linda Byler
Karma and Hell are the cowards revenge
Christopher Zzenn Loren
I will tell you what we shall do: if ever you need to rescue Catherine, or you Berkley, Maximus, I will help you, and you will do as much for me. Then we do not need to worry, I do not suppose anyone could stop all three of us, at least not before we can escape
Naomi Novik
Unfortunately, in a hierarchical structure, power relationships tend to determine the content; there is always the danger that a "rank-based" logic will prevail. Managers, intent on advancement, tend to supply the information they know their superiors want to hear, rather than the information they ought to hear. Large organizations tend, therefore, to become systematically stupid.
John Médaille
I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.
Mary MacLane
Keep Moving...Move forwardLet go Give inDecideand just DoProgress every dayAnd make one step forward no matter what's in your wayKeep moving, till one day you wake up and you're there.
Emma Daley
Gathering your own reference materials, sketches and using your own imagination is going to help you grow as an artist far more than stealing someone else's work.
Bonnie Hamlin
Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.
Viggo Mortensen
Moments of reflection occur with calm deliberation and careful thought. Imagine the thoughts which would come to you if you would simply allow them. By giving intentional consideration to a situation, you will gain clarity which you may not have achieved otherwise.
Susan C.Young
I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Simple" Kate had wanted to say, "I'm already dead.
Kimberly McCreight
Does changing for the better absolve you of all the wicked shit you did b
Ann Aguirre
Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met.
Maggie Georgiana Young
Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.
Sena Jeter Naslund
The middle class and upper middle class are highly attached to the institution of school explicitly as a sorting mechanism, as a way of justifying privileges of which middle-class members are already central beneficiaries. These critics suggest that the entire notion of schools as meritocracies actually reifies and reinforces class privilege--making those whom school rewards (those who already have a lot of benefits) feel they deserve the privileges they have.
Kirsten Olson
Isn't it true that there is a rare kind of person who perceives, as does a good dog, that life is doing something meaningful, and who discovers what it is and goes about doing it with a spirit of moderate hustle, and there is a not rare kind of person who perceives none of this and who goes about doing what is necessary in a spirit of aggrievedness?
Padgett Powell
I've tried to make choices. You don't really trust me to.
Kiera Cass
Gangsters live for the action. The closer to death, the nearer to the heated coil of the moment, the more alive they feel. Most would rather succumb to a barrage of bullets from a roomful of sworn enemies than to the debilitation of old age, dying the death of the feeble. A gangster becomes as addicted to the thrill of the battle and the potential to die in the midst of it as he does to he more attractive lures in his path. In his world, the potential for death exists every day. The better gangsters don't shy away from such a dreaded possibility but rather find comfort in its proximity.
Lorenzo Carcaterra
Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.
Ursula K Le Guin
I want you to be careful in this world. My heart is wrapped up in you.
Jeff Zentner
I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.
Gayle Forman
All I'd done for the past ten years was talk about it. I was sick of talking...sick of analyzing...sick of reliving it...sick of the screaming in my head that replayed over and over like a song stuck on repeat.
S.A. Healey
Time takes it all, whether you want it or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
Stephen King
Good and bad aren't absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.
Steve Hagen
The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.
Corey Taylor
Don’t take the high ground and assume you already know what you’ll do. The truth is, when it comes to someone you love, you’ll find there isn’t anything you won’t do.
Richelle Mead
If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is now known by every intelligent man, the book never could have been written. It was produced by ignorance, and has been believed and defended by its author. It has lost power in the proportion that man has gained knowledge. A few years ago, this book was appealed to in the settlement of all scientific questions; but now, even the clergy confess that in such matters, it has ceased to speak with the voice of authority. For the establishment of facts, the word of man is now considered far better than the word of God. In the world of science, Jehovah was superseded by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. All that God told Moses, admitting the entire account to be true, is dust and ashes compared to the discoveries of Descartes, Laplace, and Humboldt. In matters of fact, the bible has ceased to be regarded as a standard. Science has succeeded in breaking the chains of theology. A few years ago, Science endeavored to show that it was not inconsistent with the bible. The tables have been turned, and now, Religion is endeavoring to prove that the bible is not inconsistent with Science. The standard has been changed.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Keegan felt nervous as Rourk walked toward her. What should she say? In an instant, he stood in front of her. She felt his fingers trace the side of her face. She looked up into his grey eyes as he leaned down and kissed her.Keegan had kissed boys before, but she’d never felt anything like this.
Julia Crane
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
James Baldwin
I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?
Tana French
Words. Ever since chisel was taken to slate, it has been accepted that words can and do change the world.
LIFE Magazine
The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.
Laurie Perez
We've seen firsthand the footprints of the Mordant's treachery.
Karen Azinger
Posture is paramount to your future.
Cindy Ann Peterson
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you gazethrough the world at it,all your life long.When you have to look aside from ityour eyes roll, you bellowin anger, anxiousto return to it, steadilyto gaze at it, think itall your life long.
Ursula K Le Guin
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Flannery O'Connor
Slowly, God is opening my eyes to needs all around me. In Scripture, God revisits this issue of caring for the poor- an echo that repeats itself from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible acknowledges that the poor will always be part of society, but God takes on their cause. The Mosaic law of the Old Testament is filled with regulations to prevent and eliminate poverty. The poor were given the right to glean- to take produce from the unharvested edges of the fields, a portion of the tithes, and a daily wage. The law prevented permanent slavery by releasing Jewish bondsmen and women on the sabbatical and Jubilee year and forbade charging interest on loans. In one of his most tender acts, God made sure that the poor- the aliens, widows, and orphans- were all invited to the feasts.
Margaret Feinberg
He [Harry Bosch] defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company
Michael Connelly
Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
Tullian Tchividjian
Sometimes, before you make any plans or resolutions, before you declare your heroic intent to persevere, you just have to cry.
Jaclyn Dolamore
Nothing was nothing else. Nothing was anything it shouldn’t be.
Patrick Rothfuss
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
Christopher Bram
Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice it is merely custom.
Mark Twain
He wanted to grind every Federation world into dust beneath his boot as his army blazed a trail of blood and corpses all the way to Seneca.He wanted to storm their inner sanctum and fire a laser into the skull of their Field Marshal while their Chairman watched, then fire a laser into the skull of their Chairman.He wanted to burn their bodies on a pyre and carry the ashes back to Deucali and spread them on his mother’s consecrated grave.
G.S. Jennsen
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
Cameron Awkward-Rich
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Stephen King
You are Entering the Red Zone.Proceed at Own Risk.When in Doubt Run.
Justin Cronin
I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
Wally Lamb
You have some queer friends, Dorothy,' she said.The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends,' was the answer
L. Frank Baum
Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?
Annie Dillard
When an orphan is depressed," wrote Wilbur Larch, "he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know," Dr. Larch wrote. "I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate--your own, and everybody else's.
John Irving
Love could be passionate, compassionate, and kind. Love could be physical, spiritual, or eternal.
Debasish Mridha
MUSIC is, can, and will.
Stephanie Lahart
But it's not the pressure of data that gives rise to the understanding. It's, on the contrary, the child's own struggle to make sense of the data
Eleanor Duckworth
...churches would aim to take people at every age and ability level and help them become the most loving version of themselves possible. They would help people face the challenges of life--challenges that could make them bitter, self-absorbed, callous, or hateful--with openness, courage, and generosity. (p. 54)
Brian D. McLaren
A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later when you see the guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking a cigar and saying "long-time-no-see." If he hadn't broken your heart you couldn't have that glorious feeling of relief!
Phyllis Battelle
Our only reality is our perception of reality.
Ruth Sanford
I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.
Anthony Liccione