Quotes by American Authors - Page 1939

The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity -- about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless grass into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet gain! Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole checkered history of "food processing." Our species' discovery and development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when, propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to overprocess certain foods in such a way as to actually render them detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a maladaptive one -- contributing to disease and general ill health and now actually threatening to shorten human lives.
Michael Pollan
... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.
Gretchen Rubin
A friend is a possession we earn, not a gift. ....The Lord has declared that those who serve him and keep his commandments are called his servants. After they have been tested and tried and are found faithful and true in all things, they are called no longer servants, but friends. His friends are the ones he will take into his kingdom and with whom he will associate in an eternal inheritance.
Marvin J. Ashton
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity but in being uninteresting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you run fast enough, you can still catch those dreams. Don't give up yet!
Charmaine J.Forde
Sometimes people do misguided things for the most honorable of reasons.
Tamara Hughes
Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.
Daniel Alarcón
For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?
Alan W. Watts
Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant galaxy is as close to me as you are.
Dean Koontz
His hand snapped shut over the device and then he crossed his arms. Aria stared in horror. Her Smarteye was buried in a Neanderthal’s armpit.
Veronica Rossi
The only power worth a snot is the power to get up after you fall down.
G. Willow Wilson
Often, when a human suffers through major emotional traumas, a lack of well being follows if their feelings about the trauma are not completely expressed. When the trauma is severe and the suffering is continuous, their animal companion’s condition may deteriorate too.
Colleen M. Flanagan
It's hard for a masked man to hide behind a mask when he isn't wearing one.
Lionel Suggs
Supermom wasn't a bad job description. The pay was lousy if you were talking about real money. But the payoff was priceless in so many other ways.
Roxanne Henke
Ritual may be vital to reaction, but it is also the life blood of revolution.
David I. Kertzer
I dream that I run away from home taking the bot I love with me. I dream that I saw the ocean and it was endless and that I could not find the end of it. I dream that I fall asleep in an unquiet room with the boy that loves me and that I dream that I've run away from home taking the boy I love with me. I dream that I saw the ocean and it was endless and I could not find the end of it. I dream that I fall asleep in an unquiet room and that I dream about the life I'm already living.
Nicola Yoon
This is the greatest mystery of the human mind--the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.
John Steinbeck
Erase the victim mentality. Remember you are capable of achieving greatness. If only you'd believe in your abilities to overcome. You are victorious. Celebrate the victory.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Damn tricky cats!
Shelly Laurenston
Opportunities don’t make U turns.
James J-Pierre
Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?
Michelle M. Pillow
It's coming face to face with death that magnifies the values of life force..
Sidney Sheldon
He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there
Spencer Johnson
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.
Lena Dunham
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
Toni Morrison
Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There’s a light inside of you.
Judith Jamison
Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
If this is how you feel about a desert, I can't wait until you see your first real tree. Your mind will explode.
Marissa Meyer
The book did not say anything about a statue, valuable or otherwise, and so I stopped reading about the Bombinating Beast and got interested in the chapter about the Stain'd witches, who had ink instead of blood in their veins. I wondered what they kept in their pens.
Lemony Snicket
Could a vow be not all the way broken? Could a sin be not all the way committed?
Sierra Simone
I think it's because it shows that people--or hobbits, as the case may be--can find strength they didn't know they had.
Will Schwalbe
Watching you stand alone, all of my doubt suddenly goes away somehow.
The Band Perry
All of life comes in seed form – not as monuments.
Amy Layne Litzelman
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens
We live in a world of banal miracles.
Jess Walter
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it— say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Sontag
I’m in my classroom and I’m looking at this girl, but all I can see is my dad on the ground, in front of The Wall, telling the truth, finally—his knees drawn and his chest heaving—and when people pass by they look the other way, except for this one lady who stops to give my dad a hug. She gets down on her knees to reach him, and now she’s crying with a stranger, and without asking I know it’s because she’s lost something, too, and I wonder if in comforting my dad she thinks she can find it again. Probably not. It doesn’t work that way.
Tucker Elliot
Love will find a way against time itself.
Sylvia Day
Since the moment I saw you, all I can think about is ways to get you out of that dress." Squeezing her perfectly rounded ass, he softly growled. "So yeah, I like it.
Stacey O'Neale
There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it's not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.
Gretchen Rubin
Assuming Sandberg's advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women. And let’s be frank: if Sandberg chose to offer career advice for working-class women, a group she clearly knows little about, she would have been just as harshly criticized for overstepping her bounds.
Roxane Gay
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had.
Thomm Quackenbush
What I never expected is how much nothing there is afterwords. In life,, he was not nearby. Now he is everywhere I dream and every place I wake. Or if not him exactly, then a nothing so much like him I cannot seem to wish it goodnight.
Jim Moore
Truth could never be wholly contained in words.
Catherine Marshall
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
Carl Sagan
These are the sports, the offthrows, of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres.
Charles G. Finney
...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.
Laini Taylor
Their lives revolved around evil acts; some within their control, and some not. Some of them weren’t born with the capacity for kindness, and others found it better to spare no compassion for anyone in this cruel world because they felt none would be given to them. Fate deals a bad hand to some folks. Some people are just doomed to be no good.
Ramsey Isler
When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.
Ray Bradbury
One thing God has been showing me is that I'm not called to save the world, just to point those He places in my life towards the right way.
J.R. Rim
In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.
Dinesh D'Souza
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.
Charles Bukowski
We are what we are, Nial, neither as good or as evil as others paint us. And what we are doesn't change how truly we feel, only how free we are to follow those feelings.
Melissa Marr
The Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Because Jesus was someone, you’re free to be no one.
Tullian Tchividjian
Change occurs when excuses pivot to execution.
Ryan Lilly
Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts... for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and the season of summer is alive in spicy bloom, and beautiful women fill the room, and are generous with laughter and smiles... these things fill men's hearts with joy and remind one that life’s bounty is not always fleeting but can be captured, and enjoyed. It is in writing about this scene that I relive this night in my soul.
Roman Payne