Quotes by American Authors - Page 1919

The fish don't need to know why they're in the water.
Marty Rubin
Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.
Christy Hall
In lovesickness we had found a common language.
Aspen Matis
I been watchin' you, workin day and night, slavin so hard you barely have time to catch your breath. People do that for three reasons. Either they crazy, or stupid, or tryin' to forget.
Nicholas Sparks
A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.
Ben S. Bernanke
What if," replied Inspector Fry in the same maddeningly curteous tone, "we were all to construct daisy chains and drape them so as to shield the words from public view?
Lyndsay Faye
Id me didn't have to be concerned with long-term consequences. He was my instinctive, primitive self, driven by my most primal impulses. I wondered, briefly, if 'id' and 'idiot' came from the same root.
Jim Butcher
One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Our love douses us in flames. It's terrible and deep and wingless, but I'll burn here if you burn here too.
Nadège Richards
Energy healing is based on the supposition that illness results from disturbances in the body's energies and energy fields and can be addressed via interventions into those energies and energy fields.
Jed Diamond
In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U.S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time.
John Hockenberry
When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will ‘give way’ and it is I who will ‘fall.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
But people are not butterflies, right.People are, well, more important than butterflies.We have opposable thumbs, hello.You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people.
Inga Muscio
But freedom starts with honesty. We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by defining our- selves as good and others as bad. Let’s just agree that we all need help, that we are all in this together.
Judah Smith
The demoralization that the debase­ment of the currency left in its wake played a major role in bring­ing Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.
Henry Hazlitt
Just because it's a world of thieves out there don't mean there ain't no rules to it.
James Carlos Blake
Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.
John Green
NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.
Rita Dove
Do you take credit cards? I bet your pony would be worth a ride.
Cari Quinn
There's no such thing as a minor lapse of awareness. You're either present with what is--right here, right now--or you're someplace else.
Gay Hendricks
Think your best thoughts every moment, every day. You will be the best person on the way.
Debasish Mridha
I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.
Michael Cunningham
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information it is a creative human activity.
Stephen Jay Gould
Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.
Michael Finkel
You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you.""I know," Benteley agreed. "I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?
Philip K Dick
Nothing made by the hand of man has ever been so beautiful as starlight on the water or moonlight on the snow. And the same hand that made trees and fields and flowers, the seas and hills, the clouds and sky, has been making a home for us called heaven.
Billy Graham
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.
Martin Keogh
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible.
Lois McMaster Bujold
When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.
William Faulkner
My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.
Jonathan Safran Foer
In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.
Darrell Calkins
Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.
Jim Butcher
If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.
Kurt Lewin
We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like being extremely blue or extremely big or flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything.
John Green
No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.
George Lucas
LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about.
A.E. Samaan
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
Louise Glück
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Elie Wiesel
If I win several tournaments in a row I get so confident I'm in a cloud. A loss gets me eager again.
Chris Evert Lloyd
Quadruple crap. Why couldn’t I control myself? Why did he have this effect on me? “Are you compelling me right now?”To my surprise, his smile held an edge of sadness. “That would give you a much needed excuse, but I am afraid I am not.”Curse my body for reacting to his. As long as I kept him out of my heart, I would be okay.“I think it a bit too late for that, my dear.”“You’re using old man speak again.” I made a face. “It’s creepy.”He chuckled. “I’ll try to remember that, but I haven’t been around humans much in the past hundred years. It’s hard to keep up with the changes in common dialect.”“Let’s keep on topic, Jett. You were going to teach me how to control my mind.
Christie Rich
I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.
Woody Allen
It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
Jennifer Egan
The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude—each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves—and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.
John Pipkin
Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn't dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward moth.
Maggie Shipstead
You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.
Philip Roth
Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you'll be tomorrow.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
When in a relationship, a real man doesn't make his woman jealous of others, he makes others jealous of his woman.
Steve Maraboli
Don't be a fool. Don't give up something important to hold onto someone who can't even say they love you.
Sarah Dessen
He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay.
Scott Cairns
Who the hell is that?!Some call her Satan. Others, Beelzebub. She goes by many names.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
When things go wrong, don't go with them.
Elvis Presley
I learned long ago that when change comes, you gotta slow down and take note of it. In the midst of that change is all the possibility in the world.
Bertice Berry
Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. ‘Look at him!’ Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, ‘That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!’ Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. ‘That’s not fat,’ he declared, punching himself in the stomach, ‘that’s good healthy meat!’ He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks.
Christopher Isherwood
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.
Warren Buffett
People are more likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest.... Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty are virtual prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you. There is a connection between aversive states of mind -- loneliness, shame, even grief and horror -- and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason why romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives.
Jeanne Safer
... the reader is probably wondering that if Tolkien did indeed fashion two of his heroic characters from Catholic prophecies, what about the evil protagonists? Were any of them inspired by these little-known revelations concerning future times? The answer is yes, but to discover the links between the myth and the prophecies, we must venture not only into the realm of unnerving revelations, but also into the murky world of secret sects, dark plots, occult signs, bloody revolutions and conspiracy theories ~ we must probe deep into the burning Eye of Sauron.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Think of your personal and professional life—are you attracting what you want? Are you attracting the kind of people you like? Do you feel that life is working for you or against you? How have others been treating you? Are you pleased with your results?
Susan C.Young
Let's run the experiment.
Chris Hayes
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today -- all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals.
Mark Twain
Trust me, there are things in this mountain that will make your jaw bounce off the floor.
Jaleigh Johnson