Quotes by American Authors - Page 1927

YOUR GREATER ANIMALThey say that if you areEver confronted byA lion or bear,To never act scared.Instead act likeYou are the greater animalAnd that they'reThe hareThat you are aboutTo tear.This has beenProvenAnd compared.This is how presidentsAre lovedAnd feared.Each one of us has an animalWithin usThat is armed withMental,Physical orSpiritual giftsThat could shoot spearsThrough the air.So next timeYou are confronted inA fight that seems unfair,Just remember the lion and the bear.MAGNIFYYour greater animalAnd all that feel your magnificenceWill quickly step awayAnd disappear.
Suzy Kassem
Always seek justice, but love only mercy. To love justice and hate mercy is but a doorway to more injustice.
Criss Jami
Prayer covers the whole of man's life. There is no thought feeling yearning or desire however low trifling or vulgar we may deem it which if it affects our real interest or happiness we may not lay before God and be sure of sympathy. His nature is such that our often coming does not tire him. The whole burden of the whole life of every man may be rolled on to God and not weary him though it has wearied man.
Henry Ward Beecher
If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.
Penn Jillette
People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.
John Hasnas
The music grew louder, faster, as we saw an empty couch on the balcony and ran to get it, pushed aside another couple darting for the same thing, but it was ours, and we smiled wide, laughing at our fortune, our couch.
Lee Matthew Goldberg
Use your senses to SEE yourself for who you truly are. SMELL the flowers and become one with nature. TASTE the goodness of God. HEAR the truth. TOUCH the hearts of others with kindness and honest deeds.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The damaging part of learning to live your life in two parts , whether in reality or fantasy, cannot be underestimated. It is an infectious skill that you learned, one that would eventually spread beyond the bedroom of your life. Life wasn't ever what it seemed on the surface. Nothing could be trusted for what it appeared to be. After all, you weren't what you appeared to be. In learning to hide part of yourself, you lost the ability to trust anything or anyone fully. Without knowing it, you traded humane innocence for dry cynicism.
Alan Downs
Music felt married to place, and the notion of "somewhere" predated the Internet's seeming invention of "everywhere" (which often ends up feeling like "nowhere").
Carrie Brownstein
I wanted to kiss you like the waves kiss the shore under the blue sky.
Debasish Mridha
Someone described a writer's world as tormented, and I had to laugh.  A tormented writer?  I personally wouldn't have put those two words together.  Emotions have the power to torment a soul, yes, I agree to that.  But writers, through the formation of our characters, delve so often into the depths of a vast range of emotions that we earn the advantage.  For we've examined every little thrumming, fracture, spark, pang, and darkening of the heart to a point that we understand and appreciate the necessity and strength of emotions as well as the cause and effects manipulating them.  We understand.  We can imagine.  We sympathize.  Our knowledge is power over the torment of emotional ignorance.  I would suggest that those truly tormented are the readers of our works because those poor souls shall never know with such clarity and sentiment all the tiny little details that make our characters breath, move, and live before our very eyes.  Perhaps, if torment does lurk among writers, it comes simply through knowing more about an imagined friend than can ever be adequately expressed in words.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.
Wendell Berry
But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getting us ready for the grave. Is that right? Did He ever tell you? ("The Little Stranger")
Gene Wolfe
What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.
Reduced Shakespeare Company
People are more likely to remember the great social interaction they had with a colleague than the great meeting they both attended.
Ron Garan
If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
I've learned that it doesn't matter how your husband squeezes the toothpaste, the important thing is how he squeezes you.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Peace is not found in the sea.It is found when I dream of eternity.
Craig Froman
The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.
Rick Riordan
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself.
James Finn Garner
I'm not hurting you?"tHe shook his head with a crooked, very sexy smile.t"Not yet.
Lisa Kessler
People who think animals have expressionless faces are like people who can ignore an open package of Oreos. Not quite human.
Julia Kent
Ronan Lynch lived with every sort of secret.
Maggie Stiefvater
I love her more than just a little. I think it's because we're both somewhat broken, in our own odd ways. More importantly, we're both aware of it.
Patrick Rothfuss
fruit of passive-aggressive people. These people resist demands by indirect tactics. They will not take responsibility for their own choices; instead, they turn around and blame someone else for making them do it. Or they will agree to do things that they don’t really want to do, and then gripe about the person behind her back.
Henry Cloud
...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!'- Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher
So many parents think they always need to teach their children about life, when in fact, if they listened once in a while, they would learn from their kids what life is truly about.
Martin R. Lemieux
It's only as bad as you make it.
Benjamin J. Carey
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.
Norman Rockwell
Thankfulness should always be our first response when God answers prayers.
Jim George
God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love under the wings of Jesus.
John Piper
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Alan W. Watts
Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.
Clay Shirky
Idolatrous beliefs have eroded the foundations of truth. Whether ancient or modern, all have posed alternatives to the biblical way of approaching God.
Billy Graham
I thought you were a drunk.""A drunk?""Bloodshot eyes, dirty clothes, getting home in the wee hours of the morning, making a lot ofnoise, grouchy all the time as if you had a hangover… what else was I to think?"He rubbed his face. "Sorry, I wasn't thinking. I should have showered, shaved, and dressed in asuit before I came out to tell you that you were making enough noise to raise the dead.
Linda Howard
The costs of military service are substantial. Many costs are readily apparent; others are less apparent but no less important. Among the most pervasive and potentially disabling consequences of these costs is the threat to the psychological health of our nation's fighting forces, and their families, and their survivors. -- Department of Defense Task Force, 2007
Jay Kopelman
When will it begin, anyway?" Sirus held his gaze for a moment, his eyes full of concern- a concern that Joss didn't understand. "Probably sooner than you're ready for." "When's that?" "Well." Sirus sighed, as if doing the math in his head."It'll take us about three minutes to gather this stuff and get to the cabin, and another two or three for Abraham to realize you're here. So I'd say you have about seven more minutes of freedom left.
Heather Brewer
Torka extended a conciliatory hand and laid it upon the old man’s shoulder. “Umak, Manaravak, Dak, and Tankh and Chuk will walk at my side. We will miss your strength, courage, and wisdom, but a man in possession of these qualities is needed here”.They left Grek standing at the edge of camp with his spear in hand and his pack frame on his back. As Torka walked on without looking back he wondered if he had ever done anything in his life as difficult as that.”You had no choice.” Umak came to walk beside him with Dak and Companion at his side. Manaravak and the two boys trotted on ahead.Torka eyed Dak and Umak without slowing his step. “Do you two imagine that you will never be old?”Dak replied with his usual curtness. “When I am old, I will have sense enough to know when it is time to step aside and let younger men take my place on the hunt”."It would seem the best thing to do,” Torka agreed. “But will you know when you are old? Or will your years sneak up on you like hunters tracking caribou… one after the other, each looking just the same until the stalking cloaks fall away and the spears of truth come out to wound you… until one day you are a young man trapped and rattling around in an old man’s skin, still believing that your old bones can do all the things they once did in your youth and trying to prove it even if it kills you?
William Sarabande
You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him. I did. "Life is futile," says my new therapist, Michaela, "and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.
Emma Forrest
Beau, what is it you want?""A porch," he says softly. He says it like it's my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. "All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.
Emily Henry
Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
Stephen R. Covey
She opened her sketchbook, carefully tore out several pages and handed them to Nasser--three detailed color sketches of three flowers. Leafing through the pages, he translated the message. A petunia: Your presence soothes me. A peppermint flower: warmth of feeling. And heartsease, the flower he'd given her so many times before.You occupy my thoughts."I've been doing a lot of reading," Lee said quietly, setting her sketchbook aside. "You're not the only one who knows what flowers mean.
Kaye Thornbrugh
Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.
Jonathan Maberry
My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.
Don Murray
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
Pat Conroy
I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away.But the nature of pain is that it changes— it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too.- survivor of child sexual abuse
Ellen Bass
So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.
Stephen King
You people would convict a grilled cheese sandwich of murder and the people wouldn’t question it.
Charles Manson
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual you have an obligation to be one.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.
E B White
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Kahlil Gibran
Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …
Janet Evanovich
Don't pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.
JFK
Entrepreneurs pay the price of a road less traveled, while everyone else takes the freeway and perpetually misses their own exit.
Ryan Lilly
We were kissing.I thought: This is good.I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed.
John Green
And sometimes," she added, in a slightly hushed tone, like she was letting me in on a secret, "if you don't feel great on the inside, just look great on the outside, and after a while you won't be able to tell the difference.
Morgan Matson
Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.
Michael Crichton
Dare to dream, dare to love, and dare to live.
Debasish Mridha