Quotes by American Authors - Page 2019

In an unfathomable expanse of universe supporting galaxies of star systems with orbiting planets innumerable, I am nothing.  And yet to the few bodies encircling my tiny little spot in the world, I am essential.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Listen you..you.."he sputtered."You what ? You've already used hellion,draft girl and missy' .i can think of several more degradation,but then again im not the one trying so hard to be intimidating.""How about you,maddending,foolish,moronic little chit ?""Much better !" she applauded.
Kate Noble
Marriage is just an elaborate game that allows two selfish people to periodically feel that they're not.
Paul Reiser
i am really colored & really sad sometimes & you hurt memore than i ever danced outta/ i am ready to die like a lily in thedesert/ & i cdnt let you in on it cuz i didnt know/ hereis what i have/ poems/ big thighs/ lil tits/ &so much love/ will you take it from me this one time/ please this is for you
Ntozake Shange
To find out a heart she'd believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed.
Jodi Picoult
And don't stress about the trip. We'll find some alone time in London," he continued, bending his head closer to mine. "Nothing keeps 007 from romancing a beautiful woman.
Cassidy Calloway
The rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting.
Louisa May Alcott
When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.
Chuck Palahniuk
The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when the cop warns you that there’s an accident ahead.) But the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions. Change begins when we learn to "own" our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.
Christopher Bollen
You don't save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.
Leo Durocher
Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.
Martha Grimes
But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.
Michael Pollan
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.
Sarah Vowell
Don't make light of any man's pain.
Patricia Briggs
The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having.
Marty Rubin
We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
Richard Feynman
Every angel is terrifying.Through the darkness, they move silently...I will go down into death with you.I must go where I must goTo see what I must seeIn that place where no one knows...... This is where love is taking me.You have been leadingMe, angels, in and out of death.I have no idea who you are.Eurydice. Is she nothingOr is she your mirror?I don't know anymore.I am at war.Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard,And so it is love that brings us,To what cannot be born,To ourselves,And so we must change,Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.Lovers disappear in each other.Do they disappear forever?Where do they go?
Kathy Acker
Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.
Ty Cobb
There’s nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.
Rafael Yglesias
I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.
Frederick Buechner
Kat," Hale groaned, then fell back onto the pillows."Funny, I didn't hear a doorbell.""I let myself in; hope that's okay."Hale smiled. "Or the alarm."She stepped inside, tossed a pocket-size bag of tools onto the bed. "You're due for an upgrade."Hale propped himself against the antique headboard and squinted up at her."She returns." He crossed his arms across his bare chest. "You know, I could be naked in here.
Ally Carter
A heart with love flies like a dove in the sky of beauty and kindness.
Debasish Mridha
To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.
Thomas Lloyd Qualls
We must stop treating the environment possessively, and as an expendable commodity.
Bryant McGill
From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...
Alice Hoffman
We all enter this world crying. Laughter is something we have to learn
Gina Barreca
When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.
H.W. Brands
life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one
Stella Adler
But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.
Robert McCammon
Don't get me wrong. I love to be alone. When I am by myself, I get to create my own version of reality where I am the popular girl and really pretty, and friends can't wait to talk to me. -Madisyn
Tara Michener
The biggest game you will ever play is the game in your mind. Master your mind, master your world.
Kevin Abdulrahman
As we sat there, the door opened, just barely, and a hand slid inside and dropped a set of keys on a side table."Thanks, Garrett!" I called out.He gave me a thumbs-up and closed the door."How do you suppose he knew we were performing sexual favors on each other?" I asked, snuggling against my man again."Possibly because you screamed my name about seven times.
Darynda Jones
Your life is your practice. Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other than where you are. You are looking for answers, insight, and wisdom that you already possess. Live the life in front of you, be the life you are, and see what you find out for yourself.
Karen Maezen Miller
I'll tell you something, Harpy," he said, his voice almost a whisper now. "It never even occurred to me that we wouldn't make it. And it never occurred to you that we would. You were just waiting for us to go down in flames. I thought we could get through anything.
Kristan Higgins
The creative process is a love story that never ends. The ideas are like suitors competing for your attention. You may have relationships, with multiple ideas, at once. You may devote yourself completely to one idea, for a awhile, but the affairs will never end. There will always be more ideas to romance and more concepts to develop. And all for that wonderful moment when you get to gaze at the complete creation and hold perfection in your arms, for one blissful moment... before your inner-critic starts tearing it to shreds.
Jaeda DeWalt
If you study a historical episode and feel good about it, it probably means that you haven't had it explained very well. Historical conflict is usually the struggle of different conceptions of what is good.
Patrick N. Allitt
What if I'm in charge of my own damn light switch?
Jandy Nelson
My heart is warm with the friends I make,And better friends I'll not be knowing,Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,No matter where it's going.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.
Robert B. Reich
Dropping his arm from my shoulders, he reached down and folded his hand around mine. It wasn’t the first time he’d held my hand, but there was an intimacy there that hadn’t been present before. A tight shiver curled its way down my spine as his thumb moved along my palm while we walked down to class.He had not done that before.Rider let go of my hand when we entered speech, and I stepped in front of him, walking toward my seat. I dropped my bag on the floor and started to sit when Rider swooped down, kissing my cheek once more.I flushed as I glanced over at him.He grinned as he sat. “Couldn’t help myself. Your cheek looked like it was missing my kiss.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory "making out" and "sleeping around," we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized.
Elisabeth Elliot
I always find that if I sit down, a solution presents itself!
Rob MacGregor
I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.
Jen Nadol
Seeking God first will always put us in the correct position and aim us in the right direction to move into the future God has for us.
Stormie Omartian
Expect progress, not perfection.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get outbut I'm too clever, I only let him outat night sometimeswhen everybody's asleep.I say, I know that you're there,so don't besad.then I put him back,but he's singing a littlein there, I haven't quite let himdieand we sleep together likethatwith oursecret pactand it's nice enough tomake a manweep, but I don'tweep, doyou?
Charles Bukowski
Okay.I will go.But only ifyou will give meyour guiltto takewith me.
Lisa Schroeder
Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, I watched people across the country scrambling to that same irrational altar for their answers. In the fierce storm of emotion that rolled across this country, one realization rose to the surface of my mind with blinding clarity: certainly this mechanism of unassailable blind faith is one of the greatest risks mankind faces today.
Nathan Phelps
Canada has no cultural unity no linguistic unity no religious unity no economic unity no geographic unity. All it has is unity.
Kenneth Boulding
I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
Thomas Jefferson
The effectiveness of a leader is best judged by the actions of those he guides.
Bill Courtney
I see best in the dark.
Jean Nicole Rivers
Praying is the time to ask and meditating is the time to listen.
Gabrielle Bernstein
If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.
Dean Koontz
Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
Anita Shreve
Life wants you to thrive in the domain of your own unique creative vision for your yourself.
Bryant McGill
I've never been poor only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is a temporary situation.
Mike Todd
In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?
Thomas Pynchon