Quotes by American Authors - Page 2321

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Maya Angelou
I feel virtuous because my soul is at ease.
Frances Wright
Instead of looking outside for happiness, become the well of happiness within and share it with others instead.
Franklin Gillette
Perfect the art of the pause for this is when the Holy Spirit speaks. Pausing creates white space in a conversation that enables the Holy Spirit to sort out our thoughts before we let out our words of life or death.
John M Sheehan
It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
Henry Ward Beecher
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
Michael Finkel
In this country our principles should not be silent.
Dan Groat
A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.
Meg Rosoff
Just because your pain is understandable, doesn't mean your behavior is acceptable.
Steve Maraboli
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
Paolo Bacigalupi
If the traditional Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are the basics that we want our children to master academically, then reverence, respect, and responsibility are the three Rs that our children need to master for the sake of their souls and the health of the world.
Zoe Weil
The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.
Tim Wu
I'm not copying you!" Luke said. "A werewolf is totally different than a vampire! You're creepy all the time. Mine is just, like, a monthly thing....""Like PMS?" I suggested. "Shut up!
Flynn Meaney
Accepting Christ" is only the beginning, not the ultimate goal. Likewise, evangelism is vital, but so is discipleship. To go no deeper is to risk being like the seed that fell not on good soil but on rocky ground, sprouting up but bearing little or no fruit. Focusing solely on God's gift of free salvation is focusing on the minimum.
Ann Spangler
God will fight your battles if you just keep still. He is able to carry you through. Trust Him. Keep standing, keep believing and keep hoping.
Germany Kent
Imagine, and it shall be.There are no limits.⁠⁠⁠⁠
Evelyn Skye
That's the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You've got no New York to run away to.
Amor Towles
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.
Betsy Lerner
Law enforcement are the facilitators of corporate fraud.
Steven Magee
and I said, 'That is why you don't climb mountains, Gwen.' But now I wonder. You aren't afraid of heights.""No", she said. "Not particularly.""Only missteps."She paused midstroke. Did he mean to imply this had been a misstep? "I was afraid," she said carefully. "For a very long time. But no longer." "So was I," he said, and lifted her chin and kissed her.
Meredith Duran
She's the kind of girl who brings you to the moon without you even being aware. The kind of girl you trip on love with. The kind of girl you never forget.
Melody Lee
Unzip your life right now, air out the putrid and bleach the infection, then invite your childhood dreams back, beckon the best of you and breathe deeper than you have in a very long time. Believe in the holdings of your heart. You can become anyone and anything your heart desires once you clear the clutter and stuff yourself with positive power and intentions.
Toni Sorenson
While a kind man was working up the nerve to ask me on a date, I was working up the nerve to kill him with my bare hands
Amy McAuley
A truth is what it is. A lie, a thought out deception more brutal than a truth could ever be.
Charlotte Armstrong
Good strategy, keep the conversation going until a guard notices the bodies outside the door. Maybe burst in to save you. Not a bad idea.
C.M. Hayden
In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.
Garth Stein
Uh, got into a fight with the kitchen or something?” he asked, smirking. I ran my hands through my hair and felt remains of the fruit as I did and cringed. Well, this must be attractive. I motioned for him to come into the living room and shut the door behind him.“Something like that,” I replied coolly. He walked past me and went to the kitchen, probably to get a better look. “Well, I see you won. The fruit won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe the apples. Those look like they need some more killing.
Christie Cote
Worldly possessions didn't matter much to him, but his freedom did. He could come and go as he pleased, with nothing more than the backpack underneath his seat. It was a simple existence for a simple man.
Rose Wynters
When you speak, be sure of what you are speaking. Don't be rambling full of words that have no integrity or truth. Nobody wants to confide in you when they doubt what you say. If you are filled with untruths, those characteristics make it hard for anyone to believe in you.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.
Rick Perlstein
A true best friend loves you even when it seems like you've gone off the deep end.
Liz Fenton
If you keep going with a definite purpose, you will find the way and reach the destination.
Debasish Mridha
Categories No. 1 and No. 2: Rolled-up trips and three cards to a low straight flush.
Ray Zee
Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can't fully understand.
Sarah Dessen
Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.
Rick Riordan
We will find it increasingly difficult to believe that we've been set free from sin, from the law's power to condemn, and that God's smile is resting upon us if we continually give ourselves over to what we know we should avoid. Sin strips our faith, and it leads to ultimate deadness in our lives.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You'll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You'll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate small successes, that's what you'll do in adversity.
Gretchen Rubin
I believe marriage was designed to do what only marriage can do - point us to Jesus by modeling his love for us. This, though, isn’t easy or even preferable. This means the sin in us, the pride and selfishness and anger and stubbornness and greed and lust in us, will be revealed through our partner. A spouse can help us grow in a way that no one else in this world can.
Cole Ryan
He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
W.H. Auden
They have influence, but no power." "In my experience, influence is power.
Orson Scott Card
You may as well know, right here, that you can never have riches in great quantities, unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money, and actually believe you will possess it.
Napoleon Hill
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Thomas M. Disch
Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.“Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
Ted Chiang
If you have to support yourself you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.
Katharine Hepburn
If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him all day does not mean that you are necessarily devoting any time to com- munication of his choice.
Ruth Minshull
I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking.
Beatrice Wood
Felix wasn't sure of his limits, if he had limits. After he'd been dead a while, he began to suspect he could swim to the bottom of the oceans. Beyond that. He suspected that he could swim so far down that he'd eventually go through the center of the earth and come out the other side. He could swim into the clouds, into the stars. Maybe there were ghosts on the other planets. Maybe there were ghosts laughing and splashing each other with the heat of the sun. He wasn't brave enough to find out.
Lauren DeStefano
You can't build a foundation of sin now for a life of purity later.
Craig Groeschel
The progress of a struggling teen has less to do with the application of specific parenting techniques than with the parents’ own patient, persistent efforts to construct relationships with their son or daughter.
Marian Sandmaier
Behavior is the substance of religion. Belief is the substance of relationship.
Charles F. Stanley
The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me.
Leila Sales
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
Toni Morrison
Corpses were real. He had heard about these cannibal dead walkers in the northeast, but they were in fact real. Rumor had it that one - just one - had made its way down towards the Mid-Atlantic.The rumored Dead Walker lived.
Laurel Coleman
They're a little strange, but I'm pretty sure neither of them is going to try to make me uncomfortable by stripping naked.
Suzanne Collins
People spend their entire lives fearing the very thing you apparently crave. They do anything they can to delay the process or fool themselves into believing it’s farther away than it actually is. With every passing year, with every milestone, they only feel more anxiety, more inclination to defeat this inevitability of nature, only to realize that they’ve fostered an entire life of crippling fear, wasted on the fixation of its end. And there you sit, begging for it.
Luna DeMasi
Too much profit is being made at the expense of unsuspecting patients.
Melissa Cady
Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself but do not relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you.
Stewart E. White
Well, banks are the biggest mafia, you know, except for the government of course.
Kenneth Eade
If you come away with me, I can promise you pain and disgrace,” I said. “But I will love you like no other can.
Steven E. Wedel