Quotes by American Authors - Page 2255

But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, I intuit it. But -- they are purposelessly cruel... is that it? No, God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction : race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, hounor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time.
Philip K Dick
Prepared for the worst,but still praying for the best
Lil Wayne
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
The Holy Spirit can rejuvenate a tired Christian, captivate an indifferent believer, and empower a dry church.
Billy Graham
Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.
Judith Clancy
I must be getting back to my rooms,” Silence said and stood.Mick frowned with displeasure. “Why?”“Because of Mary Darling.”He shrugged. “One o’ the maids is watchin’ her.”“But if Mary wakes she’ll want me.”“Why?” he asked again, biting into a sweetmeat. This discussion wasn’t to his fancy, but sparring with her was.“Because,” she said slowly, looking at him as if he were lack-witted, “she’s only a baby and she loves me.”“Babies,” Mick pronounced, “are a great trouble.”She shook her head, not bothering to reply this time, and started marching to the door.
Elizabeth Hoyt
God wants to bless us in many ways that require faith. We must trust that He is answering our prayers even when we can’t see it.
Stormie Omartian
A thought enters your brain and lasts an average of five seconds. The only way to keep it is to grab hold of it and claim it. The same applies to dreams. We forget most of our dreams because we never take the actions needed to make them our own.
Toni Sorenson
The collective sensation is one’s perspective, experience, memory, imagination, and perception.
Pearl Zhu
Influence creates affluence. Affluence does not create influence. Affluence makes you more of who you already are.
Richie Norton
You understand what I’m telling you, Tommy? You have a light inside you, and the only person who gets to decide whether that light shines or not is you.
T.L. Martin
Boredom is the price one pays for not enjoying everything.
Marty Rubin
But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.
Orson Scott Card
For I had loved Seid even in his darkest hours, even as he cursed me and we rode upon a fine line between ardor and abhorrence
Jennifer Silverwood
What would you suggest?” one of the Italian officials asked.“We do have a highly-advanced biological device called the Illuminator,” Joseph chimed in
Laura Kreitzer
I know little of magic, Lady,' he said haltingly. 'I am but a woodcutter's son, and there is much that is not given to men to understand; but of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it.
Sylvia Engdahl
What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield — the territory of all violence — all power — all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer’s son. She sees her. . brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion.
Lidia Yuknavitch
You'll never know the the outcome unless you just go out there and just do it.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
He realized he needed strength, sustenance that couldn’t come from bread alone. He desperately needed God.
J.E.B. Spredemann
Stop worrying about what tomorrow may bring. Focus on what you can control. Stay positive. Enjoy today. Expect good things to come.
Karen Salmansohn
Grind until you get it no matter what the haters say and never look back, keep striving cause its your life.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
He held up his index finger. "Rule one: in any dispute between mates, themale is always to blame, even when he is clearly blameless. Rule two"—his middle finger joined thefirst—"whenever in doubt, refer to rule one.
C.L. Wilson
God breaks, molds, shapes & fills U not 1ly for U to be blessed but to make U a blessing 2 al even UR foes, remember HE LOVED YOU WHEN YOU WERE HIS ENEMY.
Thomas Sam
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.
Jennifer Weiner
Being alive is having what I want, that is my joy, my happiness.
Marty Rubin
To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown.
Karen Horney
If you relax your mind, it can begin working for you.
Bryant McGill
I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
Willa Cather
I don't think you can reach your potential as a writer unless you're a passionate reader, AND read passionately.
Michelle D. Kwasney
She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.
Lisa Genova
Eaton looks to the man next to him, who licks his lips before saying, “There are rules on paper and rules too big for paper.”It takes me a moment to realize what this means, which is that there really is no rule against it, but they’re not going to let me ride anyway. This is like when Gabe and I would play games when we were younger — as soon as I got close to winning, he would change the rules on me.And just like back then, the unfairness of it makes my chest burn.
Maggie Stiefvater
I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.
John Kennedy Toole
Brick and blood built Astapor, and brick and blood her people.
George R.R. Martin
If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.
Hugh Prather
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
Ellen Hopkins
I cannot stress this enough: content creators need to stop comparing their work with that of total strangers. Furthermore, we need to stop seeing ourselves as content consumers and realize that, as producers, we need time and distance from what is already out there in order to create truly innovative work. If you are always exposing your mind to others’ work, when will you gain the strength to create your own? Find a balance between inspiration and creation, and make sure that the first is indeed inspiring. What might start as a journey to gather ideas can quickly become a shortcut to discouragement. Know when to stop.
Laura Busche
You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.
Colson Whitehead
Kat had already seen the amazing things God had done on her adventure so far, and she could hardly wait for the next chapter.
Mona Hodgson
Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.
Robert A. Heinlein
The man was allergic to sleep.
Scott Westerfeld
they'll reregulate within ten years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.
Michael Crichton
... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Check my riddle, and I’ll let you play my fiddle.
Zack Love
We're surrounded by people who don’t make that distinction. If you say to them ‘there’s a monster living in my closet, you can’t see him, but you gotta have faith that he’s there’ people would say ‘well that’s ridiculous, you’re out of you’re mind, you should be locked up’ but the same thing does not apply to a guy living on a cloud... We suspend our powers of logic.
Seth Mcfarlane
Imagine if we were all magical leprechauns, and every wish ever made on a four-leaf clover obliged us to help others obtain their wishes. Now imagine if people simply lived like this were true.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence
Sana Krasikov
Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.
Philip K Dick
Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.
Maureen Corrigan
a penny for my thoughts oh no i'll sell em for a dollar their worth so much more after im a goner and then maybe you'll hear the words ive been singing funny when your dead how people start listening
The Band Perry
And my heart is breakingMy heart is lying on the floor in a pool of tearsI keep asking the same questions only to have them unanswered
Paula Heller Garland
Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream…The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
Ta-Nahisi Coates
A lot of teenagers today are influenced by the media’s depiction of perfection. I want readers to understand they don’t have to follow the unofficial laws society creates, to be liked by others.
Erica Sehyun Song
If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions, but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.
Richard Wright
When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being in the wilderness for a while, you may come around to feeling sociable. Maybe you could try living in a community of “like-minded” social deviants. However, they had better be so alike that they are clones of one another or the day will come when someone steps over the line and factions begin to teem. Our brains will always discriminate—that is their nature. They fix on superficial differences we spy in one another, redundantly speaking, since all differences among us are superficial.
Thomas Ligotti
I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at theworld.
Susan Abulhawa
I know that I am not always right to the perception of some, but I am not daunted of being wrong. That's the effectiveness of confidence.
Lionel Suggs
Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.
Dan Brown
You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don't strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by doing so, we diminish slavery's ability to stand.
Gregory Boyle
Yes. She got into a right state when she realized no one could read them, though. She's setting up some sort of literacy curse. Some of the boys want to know--is that like gypsy magic? Can you curse someone to read?
Anne Mallory