Quotes by American Authors - Page 2265

We'd all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we'd survive.
Suzanne Johnson
Gabe held my face between his hands. “What you two have — it’s a once in a lifetime — you fight for him, sweetheart. Fight for him with every last breath. No regrets, okay?
Rachel Van Dyken
Half the secret of getting along with people is consideration of their values the other half is tolerance in one's own views.
Daniel Frohman
Poem to Be Read at 3:00 A.M.by Donald JusticeExcepting the dinerOn the outskirtsThe town of Ladoraat 3 A.M.Was dark butFor my headlightsAnd up inOne second-story roomA single lightWhere someoneWas sick orPerhaps readingAs I drove pastAt seventyNot thinkingThis poemIs for whoeverHad the light on
Donald Justice
Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.
Jack Henry Abbott
PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
There are a thousand paths into the future, forks after forks in the road ahead. Who knows, if one road closes, maybe another opens in another universe . . . and your soul, your consciousness, leaps over to continue that journey ever forward, always finding the right path.
James Rollins
If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.
Oliver Sacks
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.
Gore Vidal
It was any wonder how a wave could withstand such a look from eyes like that and continue to build towards him. His eyes were her ocean in those brief seconds.
Lindsay Chamberlin
Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.
Dan Groat
Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.
Elizabeth Gilbert
We dream of him and in the morning we tell each other our dreams where he is living with us again, fixing salads, whistling, standing in doorways. Our mother tells us there was a time before they thought to marry when he wrote her every day, long letters with a date and a time in the upper right corner, the hour always late and the pages sometimes stained purple by wine that had spilled as he lifted the glass and drank while he wrote … Our mother says not to throw the letters out, they are all that’s left of the love she’ll never feel again.
Yannick Murphy
Sometimes in life you just have to take a leap of faith.
Abby Clements
Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
Goldilocks in the flesh. He zoned out for a second, lost in the smooth texture of her skin, so he had zero time to react when the bikini top flying through the air hit him in the chest....She contemplated the ground for a second. "I'd like my top back, please.""I don't know," he teased. "It could be construed as a deadly weapon.
Robin Bielman
She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened—it didn’t change anything.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.
Aberjhani
When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel
She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.
Miranda July
Breathe in, breathe out. Over and over again.Just to prove a broken heart can't really kill you.
Kelley York
The time of my departure is here. Place your hand gently on the soil beside my own, and feel the rumble of the earth beneath. The power of a thousand thousands is coming... evil warriors fighting against the Noble One. Here I stand with Him. Take up your sword and come with me, for the Prince is calling. And if you do not go... who will?
Chuck Black
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
Agnes De Mille
Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Patrick Mendis
A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.
Nicole Krauss
True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself--the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.
Bruce Lee
And like a favorite old movie, sometimes the sameness in a friend is what you like the most about her.
Emily Giffin
I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hoursbecause the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.
Malcolm X
At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ..."You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone.
Helen Simonson
Too much reading is a bad habit. No one likes a girl who squints.
Kathleen Tessaro
She was thinking of doing a little Cuervo therapy.
Kelly Moran
Howie brought her hand to his lips. “You stepped in front of me,” he said in wonder. “I didn’t need you to. I can handle Prudence Morgan.” “But you didn’t.” She tapped his chest. “You stayed quiet for the longest time before responding.” “Quiet is how I handle difficult people….” “You don’t handle me that way.” Her voice came out sounding breathless. Howie slipped his arms around her. “If it were up to me, this is how I’d handle you.” Butterflies danced in her stomach. Not a fearful battering of wings, but a sparkling mating flight, making her heart soar into her throat. “Why isn’t it up to you?
Debra Holland
So, what are you?""What I am is someone who doesn't want you to jump out of the window. The rest are details.
Cassandra Clare
I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
William Stafford
What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?
Chuck Palahniuk
Because you are not scared to admit out loud that you're afraid. Or to ask questions... and because you know that your husband is in pain, you will go to him and not threaten his ability to provide with words that cut and burn in another's mind forever, until death do you apart. Because you will tell him that its right for him to change profession and that it is not his fault that the shoe he first brought to your marriage no longer fits. You'll say that you don't care what your parents think , or people think, and material things can always be replaced, but not him. And because you will have the patience and wisdom to understand everything that he is afraid of, you'll kiss his boo-boos instead of rubbing salt in the wounds of his failures...
Leslie Esdaile
One grateful thought is a ray of sunshine.  A hundred such thoughts paint a sunrise.  A thousand will rival the glaring sky at noonday - for gratitude is light against the darkness.
Richelle E. Goodrich
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs jolted by every pebble in the road.
Henry Ward Beecher
Our lives are the only meaningful expression of what we believe and in Whom we believe. And the only real wealth, for any of us, lies in our faith.
Gordon B. Hinckley
The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
George R.R. Martin
I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life -- in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.
Frank Sinatra
My country ... gave me schooling independence of action and opportunity for service. ... I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.
Herbert Hoover
Which do you want to be: a proficient manager or a Leader of Character? The first creates compliant employees. The second leads committed followers!
Dave Anderson
...the whole configuration of human development needs to be reconceptualized. A lifetime ought not to be thought of in linear manner, an ascending upward gradient, or a kind of bell-shaped curve in which persons develop from one stage of helplessness as an infant through a lifetime to a final stage of helplessness in old age... In...God resides the ultimate coherence from whom each passion for understanding, each new insight, new stage, new vision of the universe, derives its ultimate intelligibility and toward which all such phenomena point.
James E. Loder
Dear sirs, The cold war isn’t over. When national borders fail, the epidermis is the last line of defense. We are counting on you.Sincerely,Patriot
Benson Bruno
When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.
Mary Higgins Clark
Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person.But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit.All I'd asked was that it be better managed.
Jess Walter
Just because a person successfully steers a voyage through hell doesn't mean he ever wants to sail that route again.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Are the returns on my journey equal to the length of the road behind me? And if not, have I realized the pressing need to surrender to God the road in front of me?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.
Allison Burnett
Trees are like people and give the answers to the way of Man. They grow from the top down. Children, like treetops, have flexibility of youth, and sway more than larger adults at the bottom. They are more vulnerable to the elements, and are put to the test of survival by life's strong winds, rain, freezing cold, and hot sun. Constantly challenged. As they mature, they journey down the tree, strengthening the family unit until one day they have become big hefty branches. In the stillness below, having weathered the seasons, they now relax in their old age, no longer subject to the stress from above. It's always warmer and more enclosed at the base of the tree. The members remain protected and strong as they bear the weight and give support to the entire tree. They have the endurance.
Ralph Helfer
The world of business is becoming one of the great cathedrals of spirit. Businesses are becoming places in which meaning can be created, in which mutuality begins to happen. Business is the force in the world that is fulfilling every major value of the great spiritual traditions: intimacy, trust, a shared vision, cooperation, collaboration, friendship, and ultimately love. After all, what is love at its core? It is the movement of evolution to higher and higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace.
Marc Gafni
the courage it took to get out of bed eachmorningto face the same thingsover and overwasenormous.
Charles Bukowski
You worry me, Mags, so self-contained and quiet. Hazelton would not have been my choice for you.""Why not?""He's a man who dwells in the shadows and appears to like it there. You have enough shadows of your own.""Maybe he sees me as I really am because shadows don't deter him.
Grace Burrowes
Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . . . if only to reach but a few.
James D. Maxon
When in doubt, reinforce your self-trust.
Laurie Nadel
What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.
Jeff Sharlet
I sat up in bed. "What did he say?"Tyson groaned, still half asleep. He was lying facedown on the couch, his feet so far over the edge they were in the bathroom. "The happy man said...bowling practice?"I hoped he was right, but then there was an urgent knock on the suite's interior door. Annabeth stuck her head in--her blonde hair in a rat's nest. "DISEMBOWLING practice?
Rick Riordan