Quotes by American Authors - Page 2043

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
Ted Shawn
...and I know -I just know- you can remind me what it feels like to have someone look at me and love me with wanting me to be something else.
Amy Reed
There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.
Brian Andreas
We can't always control our circumstances, who are parents are, where we live, or how much money we make, but in those rare moments when we can shape our fate, when we do have the power to make our own happiness, we can't be too scared to do it.
Renee Carlino
What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsable not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I'm more than a little suspicious of those who see women's advancement as a bad thing.
Jessica Valenti
In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)
Alvin Plantinga
Dude,” he said instead, “I’m flattered as hell.” And then he kicked my foot, lightly, twice. He was smiling.He couldn’t see the chasm that had opened behind my ribs.
Kenneth Logan
People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.
Judith Guest
That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
Christopher Isherwood
I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward.Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large.
Wendy Hoffman
She put one hand on mine. “When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
Mitch Albom
[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.)What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine."A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?
William F. Buckley Jr.
Because you're not what I would have you be I blind myself to who in truth you are.
Madeleine L'Engle
No one can help you in holding a good job except Old Man You.
Edgar Watson Howe
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.
DaShanne Stokes
As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.
Tiffany Madison
Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music, I get most joy in life out of music.
Albert Einstein
Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first) it pleases you or not. You must do so because He says so; and you don't wait until you feel like doing so. Love begins with obedience toward God in which one gives to another whatever the other needs. Love is not a gooey, sticky sentimental thing; it is hard to love. Often it hurts to love. Love meant going to the cross through the garden of Gethsemane. Christ did not feel like dying for your sins, Christian, but He did so nonetheless. The Scriptures teach that he endured the cross while focusing on the subsequent joy that it would bring.
Jay E. Adams
Worldliness is an inner attitude that puts self at the center of life instead of God.
Billy Graham
Every great thing that has been accomplished, and is yet to be accomplished, starts with a dream.
Bill Courtney
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
David Foster Wallace
I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.
Peter Straub
When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated -- with the social consequences we know all too well.
Lloyd Alexander
The eyes are one of the most powerful tools a woman can have. With one look, she can relay the most intimate message. After the connection is made, words cease to exist.
Jennifer Salaiz
Twirling round ‘n round -faster and faster …she dreams this circular motionwill take her home, high in the heavens where hurt is onlyan earthly world.
David W. Earle
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. ... We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
If you can't you must, and if you must you can.
Anthony Robbins
This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not,” the Buddha taught. All the conditions have come together in such a way that we are where we are, and we are what we are. To hold on to feelings of regret is to lose the present moment.
Dang Nghiem
The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales.I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time. (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")?Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men).As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.
Denise Duhamel
To love one’s self, this is the greatest challenge we are all called to face.
T. Scott McLeod
The writer of this legend then recordsIts ghostly application in these words:The image is the Adversary old,Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;Our lusts and passions are the downward stairThat leads the soul from a diviner air;The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;The knights and ladies all whose flesh and boneBy avarice have been hardened into stone;The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelfTempts from his books and from his nobler self.The scholar and the world! The endless strife,The discord in the harmonies of life!The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books;The market-place, the eager love of gain,Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When it comes to profit over safety, profit usually wins.
James Frazee
Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say that 'Alice Faye picked a peck of pepper for the poor, piping pig in the purple poke.' Wait—is that not what we’re talking about here?
Elle Lothlorien
Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.
Gail Caldwell
To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
Henry Ford
No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.
Thomas Jefferson
When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.
Megan Devine
She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale. So she read instead, and admired those who could.
Nora Roberts
We spend more time asking what would Jesus do instead of what did Jesus do.
Tullian Tchividjian
It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin.
John Steinbeck
Swim or sink live or die survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.
John Adams
Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.
Christopher Hitchens
There’s no accounting for the opinions of old ladies. They think everyone is cute.
Shannon Wiersbitzky
Stop!" he yelled at the others. "Multigrain fighting is not allowed!
Rick Riordan
It was the discovery of the quantum universe that changed everything, and that universe was so small and so dynamic that it could not be observed directly. Trying to explain their insights, scientists looked at the language of mysticism. At the subatomic level, the parallels between quantum reality and mysticism were striking. For example, the behavior of light: in some contexts it acted like a wave, in others like a particle. Could it be both? Physicists had no concept for grasping this, so they dispensed with Western logic and embraced paradox. (This is important, too, for the notion of vampires being both living and dead.)
Katherine Ramsland
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life.
Lily King
Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub."Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending.
Soman Chainani
Don't wait for the law of attraction to happen to you; make it happen for you, by taking action. Once you do this, you will experience the law of revelation.
Charles F. Glassman
Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.
Lemony Snicket
It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons
Rachel Carson
How do I work? I grope.
Albert Einstein
Curiously, only in sports do we agree to eschew technological advances, making rules, for example, to limit the power potential of baseball bats. We understand that technology will ruin our games, but we do not understand that it can also ruin cultures.
Gene Logsdon
«This is why I run.»Because caring was a thing with claws. It sank them in, and didn't let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn't break you clean. It was a bone that didn't set, a cut that wouldn't close.It was better not to care - Lila tried not to care - but, sometimes, people got in. Like a knife against armor, they found the cracks, slid past the guard, and you didn't know how deep they were buried until they were gone and you were bleeding on the floor. And it wasn't fair.
V.E. Schwab
I don't believe in pessimism.
Clint Eastwood
Och, they suit you, Queenie! Promise me you'll wear them.
Elizabeth Wein
My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Every person in the AA program who's successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol- the power to stop.
Chris Prentiss
And there, in the midst of blinding orange, yellow, and white flames, our forever begins.
A.G. Howard