Quotes by American Authors - Page 2217

Mr. Bhaer saw the drops on her cheeks, ... The sight seemed to touch him very much, for suddenly stooping down, he asked in a tone that meant a great deal, "Heart's dearest, why do you cry?"Now, if Jo had not been new to this sort of thing she would have said she wasn't crying, had a cold in her head, or told any other feminine fib proper to the occasion. Instead of which, that undignified creature answered, with an irrepressible sob, "Because you are going away.""Ach, mein Gott, that is so good!" cried Mr. Bhaer, managing to clasp his hands in spite of the umbrella and the bundles, "Jo, I haf nothing but much love to gif you. I came to see if you could care for it, and I waited to be sure that I was something more than a friend. Am I? Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?" he added, all in one breath."Oh, yes!" said Jo, and he was quite satisfied, for she folded both hands over his arm, and looked up at him with an expression that plainly showed how happy she would be to walk through life beside him, even though she had no better shelter than the old umbrella, if he carried it.
Louisa May Alcott
Bushwhacked, I examine my hands. Same hands. Rings still there but no longer valid.
Suzanne Finnamore
Spirit does not exist in just one location; rather it is all encompassing, living within and amongst us in each moment, thought and action. I believe that Spirit is raised to it's highest level, when individuals gather with wisdom, compassion and a discerning desire to provide service to humanity". We are all One, One Energy, from One Light. Let us band together as Humans, with love for all of humanity, living each day in harmony as we explore our spirit.
Kala Ambrose
Sometimes it's all I can do to not look at you.
Katie Reus
People that are lazy don't get anything accomplished. It's People like me that are reliable.
Richard W. Todd
All trademarks, company names, registered names, products, characters, mottos, logos, jingles and catchphrases used or cited in this work are the property of their respective owners and have only been mentioned and or used as cultural references to enhance the narrative and in no way were used to disparage or harm the owners and their companies. It is the author's sincerest wish the owners of the cited trademarks, company names, etc. appreciate the success they have achieved in making their products household names and appreciate the free plug.
E.A. Bucchianeri
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Roger Zelazny
Seriously, what is the purpose? Maybe I’d feel better about walking around speaking fluent jive if I knew there was a reason for it.
Elle Lothlorien
Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.
Gilbert Sorrentino
You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
Jodi Picoult
The man in 4B wondered if he could have your autograph. He told me his daughter is a huge fan.”
Tara Janzen
Clearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.
Shannon Hale
You could write your way into happiness. It might not be the happiness you'd experience if Eldric pushed Leanne from a cliff, but there's a firefly glimmer in writing something that would please Rose.
Franny Billingsley
Jesus wisely counseled his followers to search for the kingdom of heaven within themselves; but to go within, one needs a door, a key, and the courage to turn the knob. Spiritual practice gives you all three.
Darren Main
Love is not always fireworks and magic. Often we’ll experience it in the form of patience, acceptance, loyalty, and mutual respect.
Charles F. Glassman
I have always been on speaking terms with God, especially now. God and I just had a few weeks of silence. 'Tis over now.
Jennifer Hudson Taylor
Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.''Will you be all right?''I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.
Philip K Dick
His father had been in the military and so had his grandfather. It was a natural fit when Ronan and his brothers each donned a uniform of some kind.
Sara Humphreys
Love anyone and everyone, don't fear for rejection. Love is an inner perception, there is only love, no place for rejection.
Debasish Mridha
Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason there of until all of the events transpire.
Joseph Smith Jr.
A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.
Barbara Kingsolver
I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.
Deb Caletti
Four out of five doctors prescribe baseball for whatever ails you. The fifth guy is a quack.
Tom Swyers
Emotions are like muscles. Most of them go highly unattended, it's usually the weaker, undefined ones that cause injury to the rest, and there is most certainly memory response in play.
Erica Goros
Football is blocking and tackling. Everything else is mythology.
Vince Lombardi
New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.
Robert Kahn
I should leave, she told herself once or twice, to savor the thought of their surprise, their regret. What a childish idea. Then Jack would leave, no doubt, so that should would come back, as she would have to do, and her father would be plunged in sorrow of which she was directly the cause, and which would not end in this life.
Marilynne Robinson
[The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues.… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry Truman
I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.
Nikola Tesla
Helen’s secretary’s phone was ringing off the hook as Clavier and I passed through the antechamber and into the hallway. Once we were outside, I rounded on him.“I’m not going to apologize. What you did to me was unconscionable, and now that Alexa is sick—” The urge to strike out at him welled up in me like a flash fire, and I braced my hand against the wall so as not to give in to the impulse. “I want access to everything. And your full cooperation. I am going to make this right, damn it, whatever it takes.”He stared at me coldly. “Save your self-righteous invectives for someone who will be moved by them.”I took a menacing step forward, despite my determination to remain poised. “Hoping for a repeat performance? You must get off on asphyxiation.” At the spark of anger in his eyes, I laughed. “The first thing that’s going to happen is that I am going to talk to Sebastian. And you are going to call whoever you need to call to make that happen. Right now.”Without waiting for a response, I turned sharply and headed for the stairwell.
Nell Stark
Honor doesn’t revise according to company just as integrity doesn’t diminish due to circumstance.
Donna Lynn Hope
People seem to overlook an old man losing his mind if he occasionally made light of it.
Marissa Meyer
More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I’m glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I’d fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I’d finally open my eyes, it would feel like I’d just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I’d collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I’d lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven’t even left yet? That is my greatest fear.
Beth Revis
. . . death isn’t anything I need to be afraid of. I’m not a perfect man. But I think I’m a good man. I’ve lived a hell of a life, even with all the heartache. Millie told me once that the ability to devastate is what makes a song beautiful. Maybe that’s what makes life beautiful too. The ability to devastate. Maybe that’s how we know we’ve lived. How we know we’ve truly loved.”“The ability to devastate,” I repeated. And my voice broke. If that wasn’t a perfect description of the agony of love, I didn’t know what was.
Amy Harmon
They wouldn’t have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.
Thomm Quackenbush
The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
Edgar Allan Poe
The world was fucking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring - a moving oasis. He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that's what being a magician was. They weren't ordinary feelings - they weren't the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.
Lev Grossman
But the good thing about life is that we can fix our mistakes sometimes. We learn from them. We get better.
R.J. Palacio
I'm trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I'm going back to the starting line.
Glennon Doyle Melton
Theo was so pleased with her, so proud of her. In love with her, whatever love was.
Annabel Joseph
If you don't feel it, flee from it. Go where you are celebrated, not merely tolerated.
Paul F. Davis
If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.
Gina Barreca
But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Action is the bridge between thought and reality.
Richie Norton
He snuffles. Oh, no.He's not going to cry, is he? Because even though it's sweet when guys cry, I am so not prepared for this.Girl scouts didn't teach me what to do with emotionally unstable drunk boys.
Stephanie Perkins
Sometimes what may appear as unfair, may actually be a huge favor from the Universe, pushing you in the right direction to live your dreams.
Julieanne O'Connor
Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
Aimee Bender
Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.
Ashim Shanker
When God Created Mothers"When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one." And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands." The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way." It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have." That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded. One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word." God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...." I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower." The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed. But tough!" said God excitedly. "You can imagine what this mother can do or endure." Can it think?" Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator. Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek. There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told You that You were trying to put too much into this model." It's not a leak," said the Lord, "It's a tear." What's it for?" It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride." You are a genius, " said the angel. Somberly, God said, "I didn't put it there.
Erma Bombeck
I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!
Dr. Seuss
[BURR]I am the one thing in life I can control.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.
Joyce Carol Oates
When you seek love in every steps of life, love will seek you every moment of life.
Debasish Mridha
Life is made of moments. and choices. Not all of them matter, or have any lasting impact. Skipping class in favor of a taste of freedom, picking a prom dress because of the way it transforms you into a princess in the mirror. Even the nights you steal away from an open window, tiptoe silent to the end of the driveway, where darkened headlights and the pull of something unknown beckon. These are all small choices, really. Insignificant as soon as they’re made. Innocent.But then.Then there’s a different kind of moment. One when things are irrevocably changed by a choice we make. A moment we will play endlessly in our minds on lonely nights and empty days. One we’ll search repeatedly for some indication that what we chose was right, some small sign that tells us the truth isn’t nearly as awful as it feels. Or as awful as anyone would think if they knew.So we explain it to ourselves, justify it enough to sleep. And then we bury it deep, so deep we can almost pretend it never happened. But as much as we wish it were different, the truth is, our worlds are sometimes balanced on choices we make and the secrets we keep.
Jessi Kirby
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
Chuck Palahniuk
You don't have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is.
Red Haircrow
Leaning in, he brushed his lips on Holly's cheek, and whispered in her ear, "You okay?"tShe gave him a sidelong glance. "You might not promise adventure, but you sure do deliver.
Tracy March
It's a pity. I don't know who he is to you... But you are disgusting. To claim you fight for his honor, when all you do is bring shame to his name.
Charles Lee
[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.
Chuck Palahniuk
Nice dress. Take it off.
Janet Evanovich