Quotes by American Authors - Page 1973

I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.
Tobias Wolff
I’d rather not know what lies ahead because I like the dark. I like thinking there is something good in the places I can’t see. And that’s not ignorance. That’s just hope.
Caroline George
Forgiving yourself, believing in yourself and choosing to love yourself are the best gifts one could receive.
Brittany Burgunder
I understand that comes with the territory, and that celebrities have a contract with the public: they get to be the target of jealousy and criticism, and sometimes admiration, in exchange for money and recognition. But I let that contract run out a while ago. It is not my job to be pretty, or cute, or anything that someone else wants me to be.
Mara Wilson
No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself out of defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended.
Jamaica Kincaid
I'm beginning to perceive motherhood as a long, slow letting go, of which birth is just the first step.
Sandra Steingraber
Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.
Thomas Huynh
God made a beauteous garden With lovely flowers strown,But one straight, narrow pathway That was not overgrown.And to this beauteous garden He brought mankind to live,And said "To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give.Prune ye my vines and fig trees, With care my flowers tend,But keep the pathway open Your home is at the end."God's Garden
Robert Frost
Beware of critics of education who cloak their desire to protect privilege (and inequality) in the garb of educational reform.
Michael S. Roth
The only lies that are true are the ones that you believe.
Colby Buzzell
Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?
Otis Webb Brawley
Molecules dissolve and pass away, but consciousness survives the death of the matter on which it rides.
Deepak Chopra
She ran her hand over his cock and said, "This is the only thing I ever want to come between us."tHis grin couldn't have stretched any further.
Terry Spear
Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation.
Christopher Bollen
We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
If Madison had a gun, she'd shoot out the sound system pumping "Jingle Bells" through her office speakers. Instead, she bit off Rudolph's chocolate head and pointed a finger at the brightly colored, foil-wrapped Santa on her desk. "You're next, big guy.
Debbie Mason
A human mind was built for contact with similar minds. It should,—in fact,—it must think about what is going on around it; for, if it is shut up in a thick, dark, bony box of a skull, it will always stay in that condition known as "status quo"; and grow up, antagonistic to all surroundings.
Ernest Vincent Wright
...we will stand amazed to see the topside of the tapestry and how God beautifully embroidered each circumstance into a pattern for our good and His glory.
Joni Eareckson Tada
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat
Sylvia Plath
I should rip your eyes out,” Newt said, spraying Thomas with spit. “Teach you a lesson in stupidity.Why’d you come over here? You expected a bloody hug? Huh? A nice sit-down to talk about the goodtimes in the Glade?
James Dashner
Well you know what they say. It’s always raining somewhere.
Michael Monroe
But just as your body needs sleep, your soul needs time to rest in God. To learn more about Him. To talk to Him. To worship and praise Him. To fellowship with other brothers and sisters.
Craig Groeschel
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
Sylvia Plath
Sometimes, we miss the truth when it's right in front of us, she thought. Sometimes the closer we are, the harder it is to see.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.
John Piper
She understood about the comfort you can get from a small separate world, whether it's a theatre or a basketball team or the inside of a book.
Susan Cooper
It's a date.""It's a cookie.""It's a cookie date.
Shaun David Hutchinson
Halfway down the aisle, Jamie suddenly seemed to tire, and they stopped while she caught her breath...It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.
Nicholas Sparks
All things are possible until they are proven impossible.
Pearl S. Buck
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. —STEVEN WRIGHT
Darynda Jones
If it weren't for pickpockets I'd have no sex life at all.
Rodney Dangerfield
...a noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories-it feels like she's back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can't, because they're just memories and they're set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she just has to watch herself do the same things over and over and it's a condemnation if it's anything.
Alden Bell
About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
James Baldwin
A book comes and says, 'Write me.
Madeleine L'Engle
I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.
Joshua Ferris
Point is, maybe some people wouldn't want to be around me all day, but there are people out there who would. And they're smart and funny. And they like some of the same things I like and hate some of the things I hate, but they also introduce me to all kinds of new things. That's as close to 'meant to be' as I can imagine.
Lauren Morrill
Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not an escape from my own life and problems.  It is an escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me. Reading in some wonderful ways helps me find out who I am. When she was a young girl Patricia MacLachlan's mother encouraged her to "read a book and find out who you are." And it is true that in some ways reading defines me as it refines me. Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality. I read to feel life.
Gladys M. Hunt
If a ghost was a recording of a memory, as some believed, and Wasp pulled back the curtain from the third alcove on the right, she might find the wide-eyed bloody-handed ghost of herself, hugging her knees and shivering, trying to unremember the sound of her little dagger sinking hilt-deep into girlflesh, the day she earned her name.
Nicole Kornher-Stace
While we may continue to use the wordssmart and stupid, and while IQ tests may persist for certain purposes, the monopolyof those who believe in a single general intelligence has come to an end. Brain scientists and geneticists are documentingthe incredible differentiation of human capacities, computer programmers are creating systems that are intelligent in different ways, and educators are freshly acknowledging that their students have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
Howard Gardner
Poverty and desperation are the parents of ambition. (character Norm Woodruff)
Phil Valentine
The Great Magician is very clear when he says there will always be trouble in the world. As for any human today, in my book, that is a call to action. That’s a call to our own inner hero. That hero is inside all of us whether we be fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, olive, or yellow. We all have the capacity to be heroes in this life.
Mark Andrew Poe
Staying for your children is noble. However, staying with someone that teaches your children that "selective" evilness is okay is mental illness.
Shannon L. Alder
Her skin smells of vintage books and pale moonlight, exotic things, forbidden loves and rainy nights.
Melody Lee
I'm going to turn my life around. Make a complete three sixty.""Don't you mean one eighty?" he corrected. "If you do that, you'll end up right back where you started.""Maybe. But at least I'll have a chance of coming out of it a different person - a better version of me.
Megan Duke
Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?
Patricia Cornwell
Drab and colorless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs. Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and color and which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers....Outside the windows of her basement flat were two window boxes of geraniums, her favorite flower, and inside, wherever there was room, there was a little pot containing a geranium struggling desperately to conquer its environment, or a single hyacinth or tulip, bought from a barrow for a hard-earned shilling. Then too, the people for whom she worked would sometimes present her with the leavings of their cut flowers which in their wilted state she would take home and try to nurse back to health, and once in a while, particularly in the spring, she would buy herself a little box of pansies, primroses or anemones. As long as she had flowers Mrs. Harris had no serious complaints concerning the life she led. They were her escape from the somber stone desert in which she lived. These bright flashes of color satisfied her. They were something to return to in the evening, something to wake up to in the morning.
Paul Gallico
[R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
In order to defeat our challengers and rise above every obstacle, we must be able to persevere.
Ellen J. Barrier
Don't buy the garbage that you're over the hill at fifty. This country makes such a big thing about age particularly if you're a woman. What I think is relevant is your experience what you have to offer. I hope people will recognize that and keep going.
Molly Yard
To be in your children's memories tomorrow,You have to be in their lives today.
Barbara Johnson
Man is a rebel, and a rebel is naturally in confusion. He is in conflict with every other rebel. For a rebel by his very nature is selfish. He is seeking his own good and not the good of others.
Billy Graham
If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?
Richard Wright
The unitive capacities of the spouses don't exist for nothing; they exist for motherhood and fatherhood. That is the matrix in which they develop, for children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness which is initiated by matrimony itself.
J. Budziszewski
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and immediately all my biggest fears start running through my mind. I wonder if my fears will one day be my new reality. The fears seem so real. I struggle to shift my focus. Then slowly I realize that my fears are devoid of any love and that only love is real.
Renae A.Sauter
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble-making individual.
James K. Glassman
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
You must learn day by day year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love the more you are interested in the more you enjoy the more you are indignant about the more you have left when anything happens.
Ethel Barrymore
Beaten armies always shout, "TREASON!
John Taliaferro
And if you looking for a surefire way to turn a comfortable party into a very alcohol-fueled romp through gender politics, bring up feminism.
Alida Nugent
If you were coming in the Fall, I'd brush the Summer by With half a smile and half a spurn, As Housewives do a Fly. If I could see you in a year, I'd wind the months in balls —And put them each in separate Drawers, For fear the numbers fuse —If only Centuries, delayed, I'd count them on my Hand, Subtracting, till my fingers dropped Into Van Diemen's land. If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I ’d toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity. But, now, uncertain of the length Of this, that is between, It goads me, like the Goblin Bee, That will not state — its sting.
Emily Dickinson