Quotes by American Authors - Page 2170

My father did not teach me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it.
Clarence Kelland
Strategy and execution represent the two sides of one and the same thing.
Pearl Zhu
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
Henry David Thoreau
When you are giving, your mind grows wings of joy to fly.
Debasish Mridha
When we understand the illusory nature of life and the profound power of eternal love, which enables us to create miracles and experience the presence of our deceased loved ones, we find ourselves living with joy, hope and peace.
Susan Barbara Apollon
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Son of a Merryweather, he’s a lot stronger than he looks.
Nicki Elson
This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.
Cormac McCarthy
I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.
Tom Waits
Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.
Steven Weinberg
We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine
T.S Eliot
So then the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which personally I think is rather a mouthful,' Adelaide said as she set down her wineglass.'I'm sure others have much shorter terms,' the doctor said, sawing into his steak with more vigor than necessary.'Such as?' Grace asked.'There are plenty who just call us bitches, dear.
Mindy McGinnis
I've always wanted to wake up one day in a world where I liked the right people, and they lied me in return. I worry it'll never happen.
Kenneth Logan
Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead.
Jim Trombetta
Go to school to make a living. Learn about yourself to define your life.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
It’s the people we hardly know, and not our closest friends, who will improve our lives most dramatically
Meg Jay
When you give without expectation, you will always have more to give away.
Debasish Mridha
The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
Ray Bradbury
There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. . . . But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.
Gerard Way
I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.
Suzanne Collins
The only thing tougher than developing leadership skills is attempting to be successful without them.
Orrin Woodward
And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.
Ralph Ellison
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Stephen King
There are two things a combat deployment offers which all of us strongly desire. The first, being purpose. Every morning we woke up and knew why we were there. It is immediate and unavoidable. Although, it is extreme and unpleasant, there is a comfort in that purpose. The second, is simplicity. We have one goal. There are relatively simple rules on how to accomplish it, and we understand that just about everything will go wrong. Pretty simple.
Adam Fenner
His brothers accepted his fluid nature as something Darian simply was. He had been so all his life; suspended between male and female, one rising, the other ebbing without pattern or reason. The Queen, daughterless and doting, had gladly let her youngest sonwear gowns, bows, and curls far longer than appropriate, until his father had intervened with violent persuasion. At court, he now moved as a man. In private, he never stopped wearing gowns or ribbons when the softer she inside him waxed like the full moon. He allowed her complete rein. In truth, he no longer knew where he ended and she began. They were the same.
E.M. Hamill
I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?
John Green
The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.
Sonia Sotomayor
A full harvest moon lit the sky. In its glow, there appeared an old woman dressed in black lace. A shimmering veil covered her head. With her back to the old oak tree, she keened wildly. Her cry was carried by the autumn winds and lost on the wings of the nightingales.
AnneMarie Dapp
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
Kathy Acker
You and I were never meant to be together, but we are. Our pairing is not unlike two electrons ignoring natural laws in order to orbit one another. Life now defies reason—quirky but beautiful.
Richelle E. Goodrich
There is no problem this universe can hand you that you aren't innately designed to solve. If it has been handed to you, it can be handled by you. This is the brilliant effectiveness of our design.
Steve Maraboli
Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice.
Melika Dannese Lux
When every heart is filled with peace and every mind is searching for peace, how can there be war?
Debasish Mridha
I didn't mean to hurt her.
Quinn Loftis
How can he not share his newfound joy with his fellow man? And it is joy. There’s a pure kind of joy in the certainty of belief. The certainty that your life has purpose and meaning.
Nicola Yoon
From the very first moment I saw you, "Hi." "Hi."My heart has raced with adrenaline. Stomach full of butterflies and one mind hopelessly full of love.
Hope Alcocer
Isabelle was holding an umbrella. It was clear plastic, decorated with decals of colorful flowers. It was one of the girliest things Simon had ever seen, and he didn’t blame Alec for ducking out from under it and taking his chances with the rain.
Cassandra Clare
When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable- except that she had jumped first. The stiff had jumped first.Even I didn't jump first.Her eyes were so stern, so insistent.Beautiful.
Veronica Roth
The closest thing to Heaven, is having a peaceful mind, and a beautiful, pure heart.
Anthony Liccione
The placebo cures 30% of patients - no matter what they have.
David Kline
You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.That’s what I believe.The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.
Robert McCammon
The government is us; WE are the government, you and I."- Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
Oliver Sacks
In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.
Charlie Savage
There is a cost to loving anything, or anyone. No one tells you that when you are young.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Unless institutional power reinforces the hurt and prejudice suffered by a group, it is not oppression. By definition, a person of color cannot be racist, or a woman sexist, because they do not have the institutionalized power to act on their prejudices. Also, by definition, all white people are racist, not just because of the personal attitudes that we usually think of as racist, but because of the privilege white skin brings in our society. Whites cannot say they are not racist because they are born into a society that teaches racism and reinforces white privilege every day even before they can be aware of it. Whites can choose, however, to be active antiracists, which means making a commitment to a lifelong process of learning to recognize racism in themselves and in the institutions they are part of and taking steps to stop it.
Linda Stout
It seems to be difficult if not impossible for human beings to avoid thinking of government as mystical entity with a nature and a history all its own. It constitutes for them a creature somehow interposed between themselves and the great flow of cosmic events, and they look to it to think for them and to protect them. In democratic countries it is theoretically their agent, but there seems to be a strong tendency to convert the presumably free citizen into its agent, or at all events, its client. This exalted view of its scope, character, powers and autonomy is fundamentally false. A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men…. Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general, have come to a degree of puissance in the world that is unchallenged by that of any other group. Their fiats, however preposterous, are generally obeyed as a matter of duty, they are assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom, and the lives of multitudes are willingly sacrificed in their interest.
H.L. Mencken
think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
Neal Stephenson
On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth
Anthony Doerr
The good news is you survived. The bad news is you're hurt and no one can heal you but yourself.
Clementine von Radics
Toxic people will pollute everything around them. Don’t hesitate. Fumigate.
Mandy Hale
Abe held my gaze a bit longer and then broke into an easy smile. ʺOf course, of course. This is a family gathering. A celebration. And look: hereʹs our newest member.ʺ Dimitri had joined us and wore black and white like my mother and me. He stood beside me, conspicuously not touching. ʺMr. Mazur,ʺ he said formally, nodding a greeting to both of them. ʺGuardian Hathaway.ʺ Dimitri was seven years older than me, but right then, facing my parents, he looked like he was sixteen and about to pick me up for a date. ʺAh, Belikov,ʺ said Abe, shaking Dimitriʹs hand. ʺIʹd been hoping weʹd run into each other. Iʹd really like to get to know you better. Maybe we can set aside some time to talk, learn more about life, love, et cetera. Do you like to hunt? You seem like a hunting man. Thatʹs what we should do sometime. I know a great spot in the woods. Far, far away. We could make a day of it. Iʹve certainly got a lot of questions Iʹd like to ask you. A lot of things Iʹd like to tell you too.ʺ I shot a panicked look at my mother, silently begging her to stop this. Abe had spent a good deal of time talking to Adrian when we dated, explaining in vivid and gruesome detail exactly how Abe expected his daughter to be treated. I did not want Abe taking Dimitri off alone into the wilderness, especially if firearms were involved. ʺActually,ʺ said my mom casually. ʺIʹd like to come along. I also have a number of questions—especially about when you two were back at St. Vladimirʹs.ʺ ʺDonʹt you guys have somewhere to be?ʺ I asked hastily. ʺWeʹre about to start.ʺ That, at least, was true. Nearly everyone was in formation, and the crowd was quieting. ʺOf course,ʺ said Abe. To my astonishment, he brushed a kiss over my forehead before stepping away. ʺIʹm glad youʹre back.ʺ Then, with a wink, he said to Dimitri: ʺLooking forward to our chat.ʺ ʺRun,ʺ I said when they were gone. ʺIf you slip out now, maybe they wonʹt notice. Go back to Sib
Richelle Mead
I went for walks across the fields in my cozy, cotton-knit shirt, my worn out jeans, and my cowboy boots. I would stand at the pasture fence and watch the sun set. One day, pink ripples trailed its red ball; then the next it was a yellow bulb shining against gold-dusted clouds. Though it seemed as if heaven was on the other side of the hill, for some reason, the sunset was sad. At night, I would sit in the rocking chair by the fire with a cup of coffee and a book in my hand, a practice I had grown to love over the years. But what was once refreshing was now depressing. And when I stopped to ask myself what was wrong with me to see the world as so dull, dark, and worn-out looking, I remembered.
James Russell Lingerfelt
Your level of audacity affects how well they perceive your idea.  Audacity in asking means that you ask for what you actually want. When you are in the heat of the conversation, and things are getting real, and the yes and no affects your bank account, you will sometimes feel a temptation to be safe, rather than... sorry.  What a bullshit phrase, by the way. I’d rather die in the pursuit of my peak potential, than live forever in a mediocre, average way.”Excerpt From: “Unlimited Influence: Sell Any Idea One On One.
Jonathan DeCollibus
We cannot trust our own minds, traditions and beliefs.
Bryant McGill
The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy
Gregory B. Sadler
We're all in the human race. The question is, are you running toward your dreams or just away from your fears?
John Mark Green
Trying to think more outside the box is like taking a picture with a camera, the more you do it, the more you learn about different positions and angles. The more you take pictures, the more you learn that you can change the camera distance range or change the speeds, and different amounts of light let in. Likewise, the camera speed is the same as allowing yourself time for outside ideas and thoughts to flow.
Wes Adamson
It's not the wound that teaches, but the healing.
Marty Rubin
This little girl's grown up by now," she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.
Alice Sebold