Quotes by American Authors - Page 221

It is naive to think that sport is above politics, that any kind of level playing field exists, or that sport allows the world to put its problems on hold.
Amy Bass
You must transform your confidence in order to transform your body.
Josh Bezoni
Trippers and askers surround me,People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward andcity I live in, or the nation,The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors oldand new,My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or lossor lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,the fitful events;These come to me days and nights and go from me again,But they are not the Me myself.Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog withlinguists and contenders,I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
Walt Whitman
Disobey God and you are forgiven. Disobey Nature and you get disease.
Nancy S. Mure
We needed a refrigerator for our new place and I've never bought a refrigerator my whole life. I went into the appliance store, there's like 900 of 'em lined up, there's a salesman there. What's this guy supposed to say about refrigerators? "Well you got this refrigerator here, This keeps all your food cold for 600...You've got this refrigerator, This keeps all your food cold for 800...Check this out, 1400, keeps all your food cold.
Brian Regan
Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself
Joost A.M. Meerloo
Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
Zora Neale Hurston
We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.
Carl Sagan
History can teach us so much, and yet we seem to learns so little.
Orrin Woodward
There are many types of marriage relationships and all of them can work, but none is sadder than the one that doesn't represent peace in your heart.
Shannon L. Alder
As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.
Scott Farris
...And yet a knowledgeis here that tenses the throatas for song: the inheritanceof the ones, alive or oncealive, who stand behindthe ones I have imagined,who took into their mindsthe troubles of this place,blights of love and race,but saw a good fate hereand willingly paid its cost,kept it the best they could,thought of its good,and mourned the good they lost.(From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)
Wendell Berry
When Jesus isn’t our everything, our enough, we pursue every other thing that fills.
Mary E. DeMuth
It's like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can't believe when I touch things they don't blow to bits. I can't believe I was so way off.I thought, I don't know, I thought wrong.
Jandy Nelson
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
Sharon Salzberg
When you aren't drinking or using drugs or spending lots of money on fancy toys or basking in the glow of fame or working all the time or eating your way through the refrigerator, being hateful and angry is a very handy shield from the truth. It lets you focus on everyone else's shortcomings, and all the ways they have let you down. You can bemoan how all these broken people keep finding you somehow. That way you don't have to focus on what really matters -- the tough work of fiing what is broken inside you.
Glenn Beck
A chilled pea soup of insane simplicity, garnished with creme fraiche and celery leaves. Roasted beet salad with poached pears and goat cheese. Rack of lamb wrapped in crispy prosciutto, served over a celery root and horseradish puree, with sautéed spicy black kale. A thin-as-paper apple galette with fig glaze. Everything turned out brilliantly, including Patrick, who roused himself as I was pulling the lamb from the oven to rest before carving. He disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes and came out shiny; green pallor and under-eye bags gone like magic. Pink with health and vitality, polished and ridiculously handsome, he looked as if he could run a marathon, and I was gobsmacked. He came up behind me just as I was finishing his port sauce for the lamb with a sprinkle of honey vinegar and a bit of butter, the only changes I made to any of his recipes, finding the sauce without them a bit one-dimensional and in need of edge smoothing.
Stacey Ballis
In understanding the basics of digestion, you'll discover who's in charge. Here's a hint. It's not you.
Nancy S. Mure
Life isn’t really linear. Although it’s generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that’s ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms.
Thomas Lloyd Qualls
There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn't then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them.
LouAnne Johnson
Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence.
Lemony Snicket
His strength kept me moving forward, and it was also tearing me apart.
Rebecca Donovan
They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.""Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.""We need more special effects and dance numbers.
Bill Watterson
I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.
Mary Kubica
And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love: of accepting the possibility that God could ever love us.
William Peter Blatty
The luckiest people are the hardest working people." - L. R. W. Lee
L.R.W. Lee
dragon took what it wanted. Took and kept.
Erin Kellison
He sniffed her. The rubbery black nose inhaled deeply as it passed back and forth over her face, along her throat, her ears. Jeez, it was like being vacuumed-only most Hoovers didn't have the potential to bite her face off.
Dani Harper
He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.
Jodi Picoult
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.
Lev Grossman
A coward is a servant of his fears.A hero enslaves his fears.
Lera Auerbach
You know better than that the only thing about you that scares me isyour absence, Alaric
Alyssa Day
Like ships men flounder time and time again.
Henry Miller
I waited for her to nod before pacing while I bit my lip. That hurt, so I switched to biting my finger nail.
K.F. Breene
We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other's pain. Maybe that's why we all feel like failures so often - because we all have the wrong job description for love.
Glennon Doyle Melton
A genius is a person who is more observant and has more patience.
Debasish Mridha
I just want to keep you safe.I smile. Americans can be so naive.
Kristin Hannah
Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
Sam Rayburn
If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?
J.D. Salinger
Low-grade pain can be so rooted in your being that the pain begins to look like you, and you begin to look like the pain — it becomes your identity.
Bryant McGill
What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.
Eudora Welty
...only in the late 1100s and 1200s did scholars in Sicily and Spain translate Aristotle's greatest philosophical and scientific texts. These translations had an impact reminiscent of those science fiction stories in which the world suddenly encounters a civilization far in advance of its own. Aristotle had systematically answered the widest range of questions on everything from ethics to physics to biology. Students flocked to the universities advertising that they taught Aristotle. For Christian theologians, all of this posed at least two problems. First, the whole Augustinian tradition had taught that faith provided the standpoint from which one could understand the world correctly. Since Aristotle had not been a Christian, how had he managed to understand so much? Second, most theologians had drawn on the idea, going back to Aristotle's teacher Plato, that the road to knowledge involves turning away from the senses and looking inward to the truths of the soul. Aristotle, on the other hand, taught that all knowledge begins with sense observation.
William C. Placher
Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Henry James
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
Zora Neale Hurston
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
Brené Brown
The dead shouldn’t cry, not even the lesser dead.
Christopher Buehlman
Perhaps my gift to you will be as simple as a single word, whispered into your ear by one of your servants as you lie on your deathbed, a word that solves a final mystery and makes it easy for you to slip quietly into the dark.
Dexter Palmer
If we can teach everyone how to calm their minds, this world will see peace.
Debasish Mridha
I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.
Elle Lothlorien
He has achieved success who has lived well laughed often and loved much who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children.
Bessie A. Stanley
Passion is a catalyst for action and provides you with the emotional stamina to stick with it, regardless of the obstacles.
Susan C.Young
Death changes nothing but the masks that cover our faces.
Kahlil Gibran
You can succeed if nobody else believes it but you will never succeed if you don't believe in yourself.
William J. H. Boetcker
I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly
Gretchen Rubin
Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannon be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.
Marilynne Robinson
We make our own luck. I believed that, too. We chose our own fate. We controlled our own future. I knew what I wanted. I needed to go get it.
Kasie West
All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's no
Steve Wozniak
The truest treasure is a soul who believes in its own existence
Jewel
Today we're younger than we're ever gonna be
Regina Spektor
I thought if you wore that, no matter what face you saw every morning in the mirror," he said in his deep voice, "you'll never forget who you really are."My eyes filling with tear, I held my hand out across the tabletop. He grasped my fingers, his grip strong and reassuring."As if I ever could," I said, my voice clogged with emotion, "with you around to remind me.
Meg Cabot