Quotes by American Authors - Page 2298

I mean only that I hope they find darkness or paradise without fear of it, if they can.
Erin Morgenstern
The woman at the next table is making eyes at you,” Lanie said, whispering conspiratorially.“Really? What does she make them out of? Cloth?
M.K. Schiller
Ant 1: So, uh, do you ever worry that your itsy little neck is just going to snap under the weight of your head? Ant 2: Stop asking me that. You ask me that, like, every five minutes. Ant 1: Sometimes I notice my antennae out of the corner of my eye and I'm all, like: AHH! Something is on me! Get it off! Get it off! Ant 2: Yeah, the antennae again. Listen, I just remembered, I have to go walk around aimlessly now.
Jim Benton
When you chose to follow the way of purity, did you expect it to be easy? When you decided to wait for the best, did you think that waiting would be fun? Did you think that your faith would not be tested? When you decided to take the narrow path, did no one warn you that difficulties, hardship, and tears would be part of the journey, and that you would often face rejection from others and be forced to walk alone? My daughter, that which you wait for the longest you treasure the most, and through much struggle the prize is won.
Sarah Mally
If I don't make it to heaven, at least I know what hell feels like with this heat!
April Mae Monterrosa
The practice of deep listening is the practice of open inquiry, without assumption or judgement.
Sharon Weil
It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone's genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.
James D. Hornfischer
By focusing on possibilities, you can see more than a potential light at the end of the tunnel. The light doesn't have to be at the end of the tunnel; it can illuminate an opportunity wherever you are.
John B. Arden
Police and prosecutors are morally and professionally obligated to make every effort to identify specious rape reports, safeguard the civil rights of rape suspects, and prevent the falsely accused from being convicted. At the same time, however, police and prosecutors are obligated to do everything in their power to identify individuals who have committed rape and ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. These two objectives are not mutually exclusive. A meticulous, expertly conducted investigation that begins by believing the victim is an essential part of prosecuting and, ultimately, convicting those who are guilty of rape. It also happens to be the best way to exonerate those who have been falsely accused. Rape victims provide police with more information--and better information--when detectives interview them from a position of trust rather than one of suspicion.
Jon Krakauer
Not knowing you can't do something, is sometimes all it takes to do it.
Ally Carter
We’re all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The stakes for us are high and real 6) We accept remuneration for our labor 7) We do not overidentify with our jobs 8 ) We master the technique of our jobs 9) We have a sense of humor about our jobs 10) We receive praise or blame in the real world
Steven Pressfield
Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
Steven Johnson
We take to the breeze, we go as we please.
E B White
Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.
Tennessee Williams
It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.
V.S. Ramachandran
I always find heroes who are just like me, I forget they’re only human, and like me, broken
Terrence Alonzo Craft
Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?
John Green
She’d found that holding on to him was the easiest and simplest thing to do, not thinking about the bomb, not thinking about the people it killed, not thinking about her family, and not thinking about whether or not she would die. Instead, she’d held tightly around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder. She’d thought the entire world was coming to an end and holding on to him seemed to be the only thing she wanted to acknowledge as real.
Jettie Necole
Why not risk your life, if you don't want to live anyway? Why not risk your life if you'll never be happy no matter what you do?
Cassandra Clare
Being authentic means to be who you are, discover your strength and uniqueness, be yourself, even if you are not perfect, and nobody is.
Pearl Zhu
A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)
T.S Eliot
She wants her freedom.
Kenya Wright
Only on a few occasions had I ever been comfortable showing my body off, and now here I was, taking a job where Asian boobs and ass ran free.
Teresa Lo
Do whatever you want. Break stuff, touch your penis or boobs to anything, whatever.
Eugene Mirman
The purpose of the bayonet training, Sergeant Gerheim explains, is to awaken our killer instincts. The killer instinct will make us fearless and aggressive, like animals. If the meek ever inherit the earth the strong will take it away from them. The weak exist to be devoured by the strong. Every Marine must pack his own gear. Every Marine must be the instrument of his own salvation. It's hard, but there it is.
Gustav Hasford
Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy…You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any.And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering……Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more.So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself.And hoping.
Jim Thompson
That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me." - Hyrum Graff
Orson Scott Card
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.
Anatole Broyard
First of all I express sincerity. There's also that sense of humor, by which people sometimes learn to laugh about themselves. I mean, the situation is so serious that the people could go crazy because of it. They need to smile and realize how ridiculous everything is. A race without a sense of humor is in bad shape. A race needs clowns. In earlier days people knew that. Kings always had a court jester around. In that way he was always reminded how ridiculous things are. I believe that nations too should have jesters, in the congress, near the president, everywhere.....You could call me the jester of the Creator. The whole world, all the disease and misery, it's all ridiculous.
Sun Ra
I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wishing them to come. They might have wished and wished for an unnatural evil to fall upon them but, for a while at least, nothing happened. Then the wishing stopped, the old wishes were forgotten yet at the same time gathered in strength, distilling themselves into a potent formula (who can say!), until one day the terrible season began. Because had they really told the truth, this artistic crowd might also have expressed what a sense of meaning (although of a negative sort), not to mention the vigorous thrill (although of an excruciating type), this season of unnatural evil had brought to their lives.("Gas Station Carnivals")
Thomas Ligotti
Folk can’t learn their lessons if they skip school.
Peter V. Brett
Live for the lovers, not the haters!
Scylar Tyberius
None of us knows what the next change is going to be what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner waiting to change all the tenor of our lives.
Kathleen Norris
You think I am very cute, you think me sexy, as well. I can read your thoughts, remember.” I hoisted myself up and slid across his body. You are conceited, arrogant, and domineering, everything I dislike in a man. And you are independent, stubborn, and heedless, everything I dislike in a women. I slid my hands under his back and kissed his dampened lips. So why is it that I love you so much? He smiled a smug, masculine little smile and captured my legs with his. Because I love you, and to be loved by a Dark One is enough for any woman.I pinched him in a particularly vulnerable spot and allowed him to kiss me with all the sexy arrogance he had.
Katie MacAlister
When you stop giving attention to someone that takes you for granted, they will notice...trust!
April Mae Monterrosa
The road was new to me as roads always are going back.
Sarah Orne Jewett
You can't change the past, you know? You can't change who you were, but you can change who you're going to be.
Rose Christo
The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
Chuck Palahniuk
[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.
Clay Shirky
Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, “Power. If I’ve got power or authority over someone, it’s my responsibility to use that only to help them. It’s my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are.
Derrick Jensen
The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
Adam Gopnik
Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died.
Robert E. Neale
Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.
Carl Rogers
I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.
Theodore Roosevelt
One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.
Maureen F. McHugh
Shoes are like society. Once in awhile they have to replace the worn out souls.
Kate McGahan
I think that when every person in this room looks at Ze’ev and Scarlet, they don’t see a Lunar and an Earthen. We don’t see an agenda, or two people trying to make a statement. I think we see two people who were lucky enough to find each other in this vast universe, and they weren’t going to let any boundaries of distance or race or even physiological tampering get in the way of a happy life together.
Marissa Meyer
The value of secrets is ever fluctuating although ladies who have been in society for a long time learn that a secret kept can be worth more than a secret told.
Anna Godbersen
Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Failing sucks. But it's better than the alternative.""Which is?""Not even trying." Now he did look at me, straight on. "Life's short, you know?
Sarah Dessen
Music is not my life. My life is music.
Criss Jami
Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on.
Richard Hell
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
When you have true love in your heart,You will never be depressed or fall apart.
Debasish Mridha
There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T.S Eliot
As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
Moderate desires constitute a character fitted to acquire all the good which the world can yield. He who has this character is prepared in whatever situation he is therewith to be content and has learned the science of being happy.
Timothy Dwight