Quotes by American Authors - Page 1979

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
Richard Brookhiser
I've always wanted the happy ending, but now I'll just settle for the ending.
David Levithan
Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home.
Anthony Liccione
[Olive’s] left foot was bleeding through a wide swath of bandages onto the tarp it was resting on. The bowl next to her was full of blood.Olive looked a little pale. “I don’t think I should move,” she said.“What are you doing?” Roger shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.“I decided I might try to eat my toes,” Olive said, closing her eyes. “But now that I’ve started, I don’t think I should move.”Roger pushed himself off the wall and knelt down next to her. He unbuckled her silver belt and reached with it under her dress. He looped the belt around the top of her leg and tightened it. His hands were not shaking. “Sit on the loose end,” he said, pushing it under her. “I hope that works.”“You brought flowers,” she said, blinking.“Olive,” he said. “You cut off your toes.”She looked down at the bowl. “Are they still toes?” she asked.
Amelia Gray
It may not be pretty, but sometimes justice has to be hard to keep the rest of us straight and safe.
Intisar Khanani
the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love
Tom Robbins
When you told me, “You are my star,” my heart danced with joy because that was the best sentence that I have ever heard.
Debasish Mridha
Thats called hypocrisy, you shuck face piece of -!
James Dashner
I was born into chaos. I didn’t know what peace felt like.
Shannon A. Thompson
SIMPLICITY is practicing a lifestyle that is increasingly free of excess, greed, covetousness, and other forms of dependence on the things of this world. The Holy Spirit works through simplicity to release spiritual gifts such as hospitality, mercy, and giving... to live free of anxiety, and to better take care of this Earth.
Siang-Yang Tan
Self-consciousness is hell.
Marty Rubin
Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.
Edgar Allan Poe
A lack of common sense usually ends in some heroic feat, much like the soldier who dives onto the grenade so that others may live.
Criss Jami
Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine. You want to stay near the core of the thing - right in the hub of the wheel - not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness - that's your heart. That's where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.
Daniel M. Wegner
Seek a man that doesn't ask you to prove your love. Seek a man that will prove God's love.
Shannon L. Alder
You're either reading a book or you're not.
Jonathan Franzen
Chicken is Good! It tastes like chicken.
Jean Craighead George
I have not always chosen the safest path. I've made my mistakes, plenty of them. I sometimes jump too soon and fail to appreciate the consequences. But I've learned something important along the way: I've learned to heed the call of my heart. I've learned that the safest path is not always the best path and I've learned that the voice of fear is not always to be trusted.
Steve Goodier
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
Walt Whitman
The healthy being craves an occasional wildness a jolt from normality a sharpening of the edge of appetite his own little festival of the Saturnalia a brief excursion from his way of life.
Robert Maclver
What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt.
John Green
Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipline and self-denial will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning quiet time.
Brennan Manning
Loving her was heaven that turned to hell when she died.
Jonathon Scott Fuqua
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Gideon J. Tucker
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.
Mark Twain
All those religions--they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying.
Robert A. Heinlein
But I also knew that if he turned away from me at this moment, somehow I would survive that, and I would find a way to flourish like the yard that still bloomed and grew around my family home.I'm Sookie Stackhouse. I belong here.
Charlaine Harris
This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
Jennifer Egan
When i get into the best college in America, he is cutting radishes for dinner. I have just found out ten minutes ago. I am elated. He puts down the knife to shake my hand and then goes back to cutting radishes.
Weike Wang
My old mind hadn’t been capable of holding this much love. My old heart had not been strong enough to bear it. Maybe this was the part of me that I’d brought forward to be intensified in my new life. Like Carlisle’s compassion and Esme’s devotion. I would probably never be able to do anything interesting or special like Edward, Alice, and Jasper could do. Maybe I would just love Edward more than anyone in the history of the world had ever loved anyone else. I could live with that.
Stephenie Meyer
An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
When I no longer have your heartI will not request your bodyyour presenceor even your polite conversation.I will go away to a far countryseparated from you by the sea— on which I cannot walk —and refrain even from sendinglettersdescribing my pain.
Alice Walker
If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.
Nicole Krauss
But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond.....
Amor Towles
Life is about making mistakes. If you don’t take chances, blindfolded and frightened as you are, you’re not really living, are you? Heartache makes you stronger. Misery is the stuff of good poetry. You’re denying yourself much more than the bad things in life by listening to Zita’s fortunes.
Kimberly Karalius
To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221
Hugh Howey
Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.
Allie Brosh
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
Robert Hughes
I've always been a poor sport and a sore loser...any other behavior might encourage a repeat performance
Josh Stern
But everyone has some kind of power to hurt people.
Kristin Cashore
Without her, I couldn't live.
Kenya Wright
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth
Abraham Lincoln
Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.
Steven Pinker
Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.
Dorothy Parker
Ours was not one of those nice, quaintly old-fashioned mobile homes that senior citizens putter around in. We lived in the beat-up tin can of clichéd poverty.
Kathy Bryson
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
Susan Sontag
How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.
Gina Barreca
We must learn to view change as a natural phenomenon-to anticipate it and to plan for it. The future is ours to channel in the direction we want to go ... we must continually ask ourselves "What will happen if ... ?" or better still "How can we make it happen?"
Lisa Taylor
I'm simply reminding you that you're worth more than what you'll find at the bottom of a bottle.
Myra McEntire
Love the people who love you back.
Laura Ruby
We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
My prescription for better health is to let go of the six things that could be destroying it—anger, regret, blame, resentment, worry, and guilt.
Charles F. Glassman
Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.
Booth Tarkington
Education is a means, not an end. We don't enroll in formal education ad nauseam as a way of escaping life. Rather, we educate ourselves in order to become equipped to respond wisely to God's calling.
Ken Wytsma
May our eyes focus rightly on Christ ... before the need to please others, before church, and before the busyness of Christian life. Those things will surely have their place, but they will be most valuable if put in their proper position.
Traci LaRussa
Don't worry, I can't be bothered! You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You're not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if you hate me so much? Why the hell are you married to me? What the hell are you doing carrying my child? I mean, why didn't you just get rid of it when you had the chance? Because listen to me, listen to me, I got news for you - I wish to God that you had!
Richard Yates
Once I realize that the tune I’m whistling in my head is the theme that’s driving my heart, I suddenly realize that the most important question I can ask is, “What are the lyrics?
Craig D. Lounsbrough