Quotes by American Authors - Page 2258

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.
Martha Gellhorn
The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward.
Richard Feynman
Sometimes you just gotta wear the tinfoil hat.
Gary Hopkins
Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child.
Alison Espach
It is hard to accept being different, hard to have people avoid looking at you, and still believe in yourself.
Patricia Briggs
Where do you prefer to sit, Sir?" (Lady Alexandra to William, the Duke, during her mail-order bride interview.)
Lisa M. Prysock
terrorism n.Violence for political purposes or the politically motivated threat of violence which, either intentionally or unintentionally, challenges the state's monopoly on political violence.
Leslie Starr O'Hara
When words can't make it better, hold my hand and don't let go.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Apologizing to me again, thought Miles miserably. For me. He keeps telling me I'm all right—and then apologizing. Inconsistent, Father.He shuffled back and forth across the room again, and his pain burst into speech. He flung his words against the deaf door, "I'll make you take back that apology! I am all right, damn it! I'll make you see it. I'll stuff you so full of pride in me there'll be no room left for your precious guilt! I swear by my word as Vorkosigan. I swear it, Father," his voice fell to a whisper, "Grandfather. Somehow, I don't know how . . .
Lois McMaster Bujold
I've read this same sentence about twenty times since you came in."Anybody else except Ackley would've taken the goddamn hint. Not him though..."What the hellya reading?""Goddamn book."He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name on it. "Any good?" he said."This sentence I'm reading is terrific.
J.D. Salinger
Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.
Rachel Klein
Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.
Sam Killermann
Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly.
Anthea Carson
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Socrates: Yes mercy and grace are all linked with Love. Let your tears of gratitude wash away the dark dirt of ignorance obscuring your own dear Self which is Love.Charmides: So Love has nothing to do with lust then?Socrates: No! Lust is from the selfish false sense of a ‘me’ desperate for some pleasurable, momentary relief from its anguish and boredom. Love is refined, and her amorous advances are from the spirit, not the body.
Alan Jacobs
The mind is limitless, in its creations.
T. Scott McLeod
For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.
Michelle Latiolais
Our eyes will know the heavens if our lips stay for each other.
Roman Payne
...You are my compass star." And he was hers.
Diana Peterfreund
[T]he dozen or so items I wished to return to XXI Forever could only be traded in, and the store had a strict BOGO policy: Buy One, Get One (Free). This means that the 12 items I had but did not need could only be returned by trading them in for 24 different, new items; I tried, of course, to eschew that "one free" I didn't need. Not allowed. (Everyone I knew got glittery spangles as holiday gifts that year.) The garment industry, it seems, is now inventing new ways to give this stuff away.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.
Robin Hobb
And though it be not so in the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities,—the eternal past, the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one echoes and answers in her own expecting nature.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
He said, 'They're only whores,' as though their very availability rendered them worthless.
Ellen Kushner
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
Margery Williams Bianco
Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It's a big business, I am told.
Philip K Dick
It’s really simple. Sell high-value stuff to people who value high-value stuff.
Richie Norton
You are a soldier. A fighter. And now you must fight. Not for the emperor, not for France . . . but for yourself.
Rachel L. Demeter
Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy - period! Not happy "because of".
Maxwell Maltz
we should live like we smoke— inhale the present and exhale the past.
Cora Carmack
Honestly—who puts a hamburger next to diet tofu curry unless they’re trying to buy your soul?
Amy Lane
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.
George Saunders
Most institutions demand unqualified faith but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Robert K. Merton
You think you walk, Lucy? I think you fly. You see yourself in a uniform? I see you in a cape. You're a hero, of the quietest but most genuine nature.
Kiera Cass
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
James D. Watson
Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket," she said. "There's no reason to share it with me.
Lemony Snicket
Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.
William J. Federer
For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.
Henry Miller
I believe in the immeasurable power of love that true love can endure any circumstance and reach across any distance.
Steve Maraboli
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T.S Eliot
It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts except the small smiles and blushes that flash across the room like tiny sparrows.
Laurie Halse Anderson
I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
John Green
The fact that my circumstances had changed drastically but my behavior hadn't was beginning to wear on me.
Anthony Kiedis
I can explain myself: If you want to be safe, walk in the middle of the street. I’m not joking. You’ve been told to look both ways before crossing the street, and the sidewalk is your friend, right? Wrong. I’ve spent years walking sidewalks at night. I’ve looked around me when it was dark, when there were men following me, creeping out of alleyways, attempting to goad me into speaking to them and shouting obscenities at me when I wouldn’t, and I suddenly realised that the only place left to go was the middle of street. But why would I risk it? Because the odds are in my favour. In the States, someone is killed in a car accident on average every 12.5 minutes, while someone is raped on average every 2.5 minutes. Even when factoring in that, one, I am generously including ALL car-related accidents and not just those involving accidents, and two, that the vast majorities of rapes still go unreported […] And, thus, this is now the way I live my life: out in the open, in the middle of everything, because the middle of the street is actually the safest place to walk.
Emilie Autumn
Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
John Steinbeck
For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality.
Paul Allen
[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Ursula K Le Guin
As a youth, I listened to the rain from the bowers of pleasure houses,Red silk drapes translucent in the glow of candlelight.In my prime, I listened to the rain as a traveler,The sky low, the river broad, the calls of the wild geese harsh and cold.Now, grey at the temples, I listen to the rain beneath the eaves of an abandoned cloister.Has mine been a futile life?I have no answers, only the sound of raindrops upon worn stone steps,And long hours yet to pass before the light of dawn.
Sherry Thomas
Table of Contents
Joe Haldeman
Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.
Anaïs Nin
There's no question winter here can take a chunk out of you. Not like the extreme cold of the upper Midwest or the round-the-clock darkness of Alaska might, but rather the opposite. Here, it's a general lack of severity - monotonous flat gray skies and the constant drip-drip of misty rain - that erodes the spirit.
Dylan Tomine
We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.
Michael R. French
If we don’t know who we are, we’ll never know how we ought to live.
Billy Graham
Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
Ron Chernow
Yes, I'm broken. And yes, he's broken. But the more we talk about it, the more we share our sadness, the more I start to believe that there could be a chance to fix us, a chance that we could save each other.
Jasmine Warga
By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.
Ada Calhoun
I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.And those people are artists. They're the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that's Sonia's poetry or Ta-Nehisi's rather startlingly clear prose, it's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.
Toni Morrison
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
Khaled Hosseini
I wish I could just fling myself into bed with you, but I can’t. I don’t want to be used that way and I don’t want to use you! Can’t you understand that?
Sherrilyn Kenyon