Quotes by American Authors - Page 1918

And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.
Kent Haruf
Goodness could be found sometimes in the middle of hell.
Charles Bukowski
Night helps us appreciate daylight, while lengthy days make us yearn for a good stretch of night.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Love foods that sustain and protect you, and love you back.
Bryant McGill
Definition of a Writer: One who tells stories that demand to be told.
Ana Patrick
I don’t want Dane to die, but if I had to pick, I want you...with me forever!” - Christian Stone
Nancy Glynn
I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn’t afraid anymore.
John K. Brown
Plus, I happened to be a history nerd. Why else would I be interested in a guy born in the year 519?
Priya Ardis
If a man ever lets you know that he sees marriage as a trap, and women as nothing but scheming connivers, you are by no means to marry him. Any man that sees your entire sex in so harsh a light has nothing to offer you.
Courtney Milan
The very fact that you can observe this thinking mind is proof that you are not this thinking mind.
Chris Matakas
Some people need Hell. If you’re the type of guy who sees a hooker in an alleyway and instinctively thinks, “Hey, now there’s something I could rape and kill without any consequences,” then the concept of Hell might really keep you out of trouble.
Sarah Silverman
Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.
Kameron Hurley
Learning to let go is not giving up! It is simply passing the burden to a better fighter, so you can fight another day. (God)
Shannon L. Alder
To love is to destroy, and to be the one loved is to be destroyed.
Cassandra Clare
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
Truman Capote
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Thomas Jefferson
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
Octavia E. Butler
'Sugar, aint you ever had no good time?' she said with a bit of sadness in her voice. 'What you mean?' Sugar said,...'Seems to me that I ain't never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.''Just smile? Smile at what? At who?''Smile into the air, girl!' she said and waved her arm through the air....you better start, 'cause time is running and a life without good times ain't a life worth having.
Bernice L. McFadden
Love is nothing more than elevated levels of dopamine, nor-epinephrine, and other chemicals. But the way Uncle Antionio's face lights up as they dance... I wonder what it would be like to feel that. To let the chemicals of romance take over for just a little while. Then I remember that I am immortal and that my body doesn't work like everyone else's. Who knows if I can even feel love?
Jessica Khoury
There are too many people who love me, and accept me, and never try and change me, and who don’t condemn me in the slightest, for me to waste even one moment of my life anymore worrying about what other people will think.
Dan Pearce
All I know is, he found out you left and he locked himself in the shed and barricaded the door. No one's seen him since," Doug said. "When I bolted, Sean and Evan were trying to boost Caleb up onto the roof so he could look through the skylight and make sure the kid wasn't dead or something.
Kate Brian
That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.
Kathryn Stockett
Truth is in our blood. It is the essennce of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we loose some of that perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope.
Daniel Mackler
The bonding ceremony is a walk through our peers, a family member or friend usually leads those to be bonded down that path with a white laced leash.”“You want me to wear a collar!” He placed a hand around his neck instinctively.Lorn lifted a dark eyebrow. “The leash doesn't go around your neck.” He glanced between Kallen’s legs.
James Cox
I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.
Anne Rice
What do I want now? I want to be treated with the respect I deserve in the current VA system and not be retraumatized. I want the men who did this to me to be punished and if that isn't possible, I want reassurance what happened to me will never ever happen to another woman in the Armed services. I want some restitution of the damage I have.
Diane Chamberlain
Love and honor the world around you, and you experience life in its fullest. There is no “Other.” There is simply us. The all of us, the whole of us. The mankind of us. Anything else is a lie.
Cassandra Blizzard
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
Ann Patchett
Elizabeth walked past just as Mrs. Ferguson, pulling down her wide-brimmed hat, announced that teenagers today were the most inconsiderate creatures she had ever seen. 'I'm afraid I have to agree with you,' Elizabeth had heard her twin say mournfully, clearly distinguishing herself from the inconsiderate teenagers milling all around them.
Francine Pascal
The roads of life are paved wide and skirt the mountains. And these very roads are choked with a steady stream of pathetically pedantic travelers who in reality have no intent of traveling. And if we are to discover the real travelers, much less join them, we will find them out on precarious paths that defy the roads and scale the mountains.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of and why? Just as the seed of health is an illness because illness contains information our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
Marilyn Ferguson
I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.
Dorothy Allison
I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No.""Then why do we come here?"He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.
Jonathan Tropper
Alicia's sweet friend, Cassie, who never thought of anyone as being a stranger, rushed up to Halloran and kneed him in the groin. The big bad dragon shifter cried out, clutched his crotch, and fell to his knees. Cassie grabbed Alicia's arm and ran with her toward the back of the keep. Alicia glanced over her shoulder and couldn't believe her human friend had dropped the dragon fae.
Terry Spear
If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.
Henry Cloud
Now I'm not saying the act of going to church fixes everything. Just as simply looking at a restaurant menu won't give you nourishment. We've got to engage with what's offered if it's going to do us any good. But putting my heart in a place to receive truth certainly got me going in a different direction.
Lysa TerKeurst
You are so going down for that." He grabbed the keys and headed back to the road. "When you least expect it," he added over his shoulder."I'm shaking in my shoes," she called out."You're not wearing any.""Exactly."Damn, he liked this girl.
Robin Bielman
A child conceived on Christmas Eve is considered unlucky and will later resent his parents for their unholy transgression, their lack of control and piety. The child may be deformed with a harelip or be cursed with the ears and head of a wolf. Or the infant may be born a werewolf.
Jody Shields
Control thought-forms are the basis of our deepest moral crisis.
Bryant McGill
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian Wiman
I think best on two wheels
Kenneth L. Decroo
When there is no purpose of thought or activities to keep us firmly planted in routines, we connect to our personal spirit. Then the adventure begins ~
Jeanne McElvaney
She reads books as one would breathe air,to fill up and live.
Anne Dillard
There is no financial plateau that you cannot reach
Yehuda Belsky
Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story
Chuck Wendig
Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease.
Harlan Coben
IT IS SAID that time is unrelated to everything else. It goes on and on, unnoticing of our actions, our falls, our triumphs. Who’s to care then, if time does not remember us? It flies by, fleeting, inattentive and disinterested in any occupants of this earth. What are we, then, if time thinks so little of everyone it passes? Time is truly apathetic to the many to whom a little empathy would mean so much.~April~ Disarming Reign of Blood
Alexia Purdy
I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?
Kenneth Cain
The difference between "active" and "busy" is that the former includes reflection and is directed, whereas the busy life feels out of control and does not seem purposeful or meaningful.
Robert J. Wicks
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Tim O'Brien
Owning a book is a third of the goal. The others are actually reading it and applying it.
Israel Wayne
Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
Noam Chomsky
I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Focus is the ability to say no to the GOOD so you can fulfill the yes you said to the GREAT.
Orrin Woodward
solid and dense as his own, a nose ring and angelbites.
Cherrie Lynn
Our dedication to charity guides our purpose. The love of laughter inspires our vision. The generous support of supporters, friends and fans along with the finest businesses in Houston and throughout America helps drive our mission. Thank you to those who generously donate to one or all of the charities Sol-Caritas supports.
Carlos Wallace
Many of us have been burned by love and vowed to keep ourselves safe and not get pulled in again. But, inevitably, we do. Then we vow that this time, it's going to be different. This time, we're not going to make the same mistakes. And things seem wonderful--for a while. But more often than not, the same problems come up over and over.
Jed Diamond
My mother was obviously never there to take the blame she deserved. She left me to absorb it all in her place. She was far too busy in her own world, that incidentally revolved around herself. I'm pretty sure she dated a new guy every few months for most of my childhood. Some would last longer and show up again later after disappearing for a while, like the last day of a cold or flu before you start feeling better.
Ashly Lorenzana
Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction.
Henry David Thoreau
Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.
Jennifer Elisabeth