Quotes by American Authors - Page 2167

As a parent who raised his children in dysfunction, I know the parental wounds my children received were not intentional; often they were my best expression of love, sometimes coming out sideways, not as I intended.
David W. Earle
To understand what's happening in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, you need to know what's going on in the year 2024! Soundscape: Where hearing is believing.
Royce Flippin
Love, is sometimes a simpler form of slowly dying, it's like a bullet that ricochets off time's walls of desire, waiting to hit that picture perfect heart of regrets.
Anthony Liccione
I wonder how much the general population of this country know that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice.
Jodi Picoult
I have a hundred reasons to dislike this gentleman,” Erica reminded herself aloud. “And a thousand reasons more not to go courting with any man.”Lavinia laughed at that. “Whenever has a woman’s heart listened to her head?
Davis Bunn
Because I am committed to the truth of Scripture, I must try to understand what Scripture says, even if it transcends my own experience.
Craig S. Keener
War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.
Samuel Moyn
At home you could depend on your parents, but in America you are on your own and should make as many friends as you can . . . You don't know who may hold out a helpful hand in your hour of need.
Ha Jin
There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
Sue Monk Kidd
Do you eat all of the men in the family? Where do they go? Does this house have a basement?
Maggie Stiefvater
Choose being kind over being right and you'll be right every time.
Richard Carlson
Isn't that just typical. You're either asking for it, or having it forced upon you without your consent. Who decided women always have to be passive in sex?
Nenia Campbell
Every once in a while God allows you to stub your toe as a kind reminder to be grateful for the miraculous body attached to it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I don't correct her to let her know her backdoor wisdom yanks me deep into another country, where water runs uphill.
Justin Bog
Beliefs will nourish or poison depending on their compatibility with reality.
Steve Maraboli
One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies' -- is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent.
Lemony Snicket
The freedom of our people is more important!” Julie says fiercely. “We will never stop fighting, never stop working for what is right!”Jack just smiles at her. “That’s a nice lie to believe,” he says.
Beth Revis
We are doing ourselves no favors when we look to the crowd to tell us where we are.
Erin Loechner
Deep down, I have come to the conclusion that the reason (children) are such a low priority to the great human institutions that seek to control this world, both secular and Christian, is that an invisible battle, a spiritual war, rages over each and every child. It is above us and beyond us and engages the full fury of the hosts of both heaven and hell. Children may be ignored by government, church, and mission – but not by Satan or God Almighty.
Wess Stafford
Reasons are the spoils of victory. When you've destroyed the enemy, then your leaders write down the reasons in books, and give moving speeches about them. If you've done your job, then there aren't any of the enemy left to dispute your leader's reasons. At least not until the next war.
Terry Goodkind
Who you are in public is a test of your conviction; who you are in private, integrity.
Criss Jami
She was this girl I once knew. Took my breath away, she was so pretty. Took my heart, if you want to know the truth. I was kind of angry about it at the time.
Christy Hayes
Can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here?I want to be.I can.I believe it.
Veronica Roth
There are two ways to destroy a country: to involve it in a civil war or to keep all people ignorant by teaching them only religion.
Debasish Mridha
All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost.
James Frey
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Chuck Palahniuk
Human beings are not primarily thinking creatures. We are creatures driven by our loves.
Matt Chandler
It's never just a game when you're winning.
George Carlin
No business can be made easier to do than excuses are to make.
Orrin Woodward
Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.
Cary Carson
I got swirling eyes and the capacity to shatter windows with my bare voice. Tod got teleportation and invisibility. The supernatural world is so far from fair.
Rachel Vincent
Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.
David Graeber
Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.
Bryant McGill
What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our deepest longings and the question of who we are intended to be cuts us in half, dividing us within ourselves. At critical stages and significant moments in the course of life, we sink with the weight of our own questions; we drown in our own psyche in order to reach a subtle ground that secretly sustains our every breath. In that sense, all separations, splits, and conflicts are evidence of a unity we long to find, both individually and collectively.
Michael Meade
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore
I have learned to be happy by calming my ego.
Debasish Mridha
What made the difference between choosing to die and deciding to live?Was it the weight of sadness that buckled them over and dragged them away from all sane, rational thoughts with an anchor of hopelessness so intense they just gave up fighting?
Heidi R. Kling
The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.
Craig M. Gay
I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded. Victory has no charms for men when purchased at such cost.
George McClellandin Blue
Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
He done his level best.Was he a mining on the flat..He done it with a zest..Was he a leading of the choir..He done his level best.If he'd a reg'lar task to do,He never took no rest..Or if 'twas off and on the same..He done his level best.If he was preachin' on his beat,He'd tramp from east to west,And north to south ..in cold and heat..He done his level best.He'd Yank a sinner outen (Hades),And land him with the blest;Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,And do his level best.He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,And dance and drink and jest,He done his level best.Whate'er this man was sot to doHe done it with a zest;No matter what his contract was,He'd do his level best...
Mark Twain
If you insist on disavowing that which is ugly about what you do," said Magnus, still looking at Alec, "you will never learn from your mistakes.
Cassandra Clare
If I tell you something Leah, can you keep a secret?" Conor pressed a callused finger across a petroglyph of a deer like a blind man etching memory into his brain.
Laura Treacy Bentley
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man.
Whittaker Chambers
To be a Christian is not a pious pose. It is not a long list of restrictions. Christianity flings open the windows to the real joy of living. Those who have been truly converted to Jesus Christ know the meaning of abundant living.
Billy Graham
I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
When anything gets freed a zest goes round the world.
Hortense Calisher
Today is the day you've been waiting for.
Marty Rubin
We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known
Carson McCullers
Sharing your passion with others will not only enlighten them to your dedication and commitment, it can enable you to garner their participation, collaboration, cooperation, and endorsement.
Susan C.Young
Spiritually, we have wandered far from the faith of our fathers . . . no nation which relegates the Bible to the background, which disregards the love of God and flouts the claims of the Man of Galilee, can long survive.
Billy Graham
The 50-50-90 rule: anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
Andy Rooney
The past does not exist unless you carry the remains of it with you.
Alanna Zabel
Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.
Thomas Jefferson
I'm not trying to avoid you,' I replied lamely, but what else could I say? Sorry Brae but when I first came down to meet you I had no idea how hard it was going to be to avoid telling you that I was turning into a grotesque monster and I am worried that there is a good chance I could wake up one morning with a sudden lust for your blood. Somehow I didn't think that would go down particularly well.
Heather James
It's ironic..here is life passing, like clouds drifting over the sky, yet they don't see what's in front of them. They believe there is something more substantial going on in that little screen in their hands.
Katie Kacvinsky
Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.
Richard Jackson
Shame isn't a strong enough word for what I feel. "You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him, you know," Haymitch says.
Suzanne Collins
Mother why does the River not riseIt is not the River's timeWhy does the seed not sproutIt is not the seed's timeWhy does the rain not fallthe leaf not unfurl itselfWhere is the hind and why does she not graze the fields before usit is not their timeThe River knows its timeThe seed knows its time The rain the leaf and the hindThey know their timeThe River will rise the seed will sproutThe rains come down and the leaves unfurlThe hind will bring her children to graze before usAll in their time
Megan Whalen Turner