Quotes by American Authors - Page 2274

I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.
Billy Joel
Stupidity is actually in a way the mark of intelligence - if you're not doing stupid things that defy logic you're probably not taking enough risks.
Gregor Collins
At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. The young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len's and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded- those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers- and I would wish to intervene somehow. Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in that bait-'n'-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she'd grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them hang heavy and hopeless inside her mallowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed and revived him. ~Len Fenerman on stepping back/letting go/giving uppgs 271-272
Alice Sebold
Have you taught her to kill, Priest? Can you teach her such a thing? She's so wise in her innocence, so innocent in her wisdom.
Anne Bishop
Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
How can I love you if I don't know what hurts you?
Julius Lester
Im gonna be a pretender the rest of my life. Pretending i dont wish every girl i kiss isnt you. Pretending i dont wish every girl i sleep with isnt you. Im gonna have to pretend i dont wish my next relationship wont be with you. Pretend that i dont wish the girl i get engaged to isnt you. Pretend i dont wish the girl i marry isnt you. Pretend i dont wish the mother of my kids to be you. Pretend its not you i want to spend the rest of my life with. Everything will be a lie the rest of my life. Thats so hard to accept.
Michael A. Perez
...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.
Chinelo Okparanta
Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.
Shannon A. Thompson
There was also the fact that sometimes vampires committed crimes worse than murder. They commited crimes against fashion.
Cassandra Clare
Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
Mary Oliver
You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.
Susan Abulhawa
Every working mother has the things she dreads, things that keep her up in the night – pink eye, an ear infection, the parent-teacher conference, the school play – all forcing her to remind the people she works with that she is not, in fact, wholly devoted to business enterprises, but has another secret life. For me, the night terror is the 5 a.m. phone call from the nanny.
Emily Roberson
Bible publishers are not selling Bibles. What they're selling is that iconic idea of the Bible. Their value-added biblical content promises to provide answers to questions, solutions to problems, and speaks in no uncertain terms about God's plan for your life and how to live it. Adding value to the Bible almost always means adding "biblical" values that are either missing or really hard to find in the Bible itself but that provide that feeling of Bibleness so many seek.
Timothy Beal
I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
Truman Capote
What have they done to the earth?What have they done to our fair sister?Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit herStuck her with knives in the side of the dawnAnd tied her with fences and dragged her down
Jim Morrison
I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.
Jennifer Egan
Dr. Webb says that losing a sibling is oftentimes much harder for a person than losing any other member of the family. "A sibling represents a person's past, present, and future," he says. "Spouses have each other, and even when one eventually dies, they have memories of a time when they existed before that other person and can more readily imagine a life without them. Likewise, parents may have other children to be concerned with--a future to protect for them. To lose a sibling is to lose the one person with whom one shares a lifelong bond that is meant to continue on into the future.
John Corey Whaley
I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.
Wallace Stevens
Good-hearted laughter is a tribute to the happy God, who created laughter and delights to enter into it with us.
Randy Alcorn
So you should remember that, when you're thinking about what other people can deal with. Maybe it's not so bad.
Sarah Dessen
When silence is a living thing, it can be a friend, sometimes even a comfort.
Dot Hutchison
It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.
Ludwig von Mises
Breathe, Believe and Bounce Back
Julie Clinton
Caregivers had to take care of themselves, and part of that meant having a life beyond whatever illness had put them in their cole.
J.R. Ward
The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed.
Mark W. Muesse
Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.
Jill Ciment
Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependent lives.
Francis Chan
To realize the importance the imagination could have in friendship, to understand its immense power for bringing us together in a way.
Stuart Miller
We can create a different future - one simple, beautifully mundane, daily decision at a time.
Patti Digh
For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.
John Holt
Spending time with you showed me what I’ve been missing in my life.
Nicholas Sparks
At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.
Stephen King
That man is blest who does his best and leaves the rest do not worry.
Charles F. Deems
Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. "How long do I have to remember it?" Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near. "Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Your heart is the beacon, your heart is the storm. Dare to embrace it; you'll never be torn.
Vanna Bonta
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
Ray Bradbury
The clearest sensation that a human being has when he experiences the holy is an overpowering and overwhelming sense of creatureliness. That is, when we are in the presence of God, we are humbled and become most aware of ourselves as creatures. This is the opposite of Satan's original temptation, "You shall be as gods.
R.C. Sproul
A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.
Harry Browne
We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.
Elizabeth Gilbert
I am the wind...I am death.
Scott Sigler
Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.
Edward Humes
It is most remarkable that Lincoln, when he saw so much that was vulnerable in the leadership of the Church, did not move to the opposite error and become a scoffer.
Elton Trueblood
You can make more friends in two months by becoming more interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.
Chuck Klosterman
I am called by many names: Destiny, Fate, Fortune; however, I prefer Moira, for it sounds as if I have a heart. I do not.I oversee human destinies, and all things happen exactly as I intend. Some try to deceive me, but I am Moira. I will not be cheated.
Jeri Baird
Every day, do one thing to help someone without expecting anything in return.
Debasish Mridha
Biblical spirituality means powerlessness, living without embellishment or pretense, free to be faithful in the gospel, and free from anxiety about effectiveness or similar illusions of success.
William Stringfellow
You can't edit a blank page
Nora Roberts
The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.
Henry David Thoreau
The gods of the realms are many and varied -- or they are the many and varied names and identities tagged onto the same being. I know not -- and care not -- which.
R.A. Salvatore
In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...
William S Burroughs
A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Avoiding life, avoiding making any concrete plans for your life--that's just one way you're pretending you can keep bad things from happening to you again.
Susan Vaught
Supplementing the far, remote Glory-of-God expression in his face, the glory-of-doughnuts shone suddenly very warmly.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.
Barbara Kingsolver
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
Barack Obama
Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.
Jonathan Franzen
The assertion that there are an infinite number of homosexualities is a political statement rather than an observable fact.
Rictor Norton