Quotes by American Authors - Page 2353

The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth—a carrot on a stick, if you will.
D.R. Silva
He's an egotistical dickhead who's going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don't feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don't still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you've spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you.
Jodi Picoult
Your everyday actions will define you and your virtue.
Debasish Mridha
But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.
Aspen Matis
When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else.
Anne Lamott
A couple you do not recognize - visitors, strangers - come to the door. How are you to view these people and what is your responsibility towards them? ... To assume that these visitors are really like you, that there are no real difference between you and them, and that the highest goal possible is that you and the other members of your congregation will become intimate friends with them and invite them into the private spaces of your life.
Thomas G. Long
Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event.
Cyndi Lee
When someone is hard on you it may have very little to do with you.
Bryant McGill
People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.
Michael Jackson
A camera is a save button for the minds eye.
Roger Kingston
You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.
Ben Fountain
He smiled. "How kind of you to confirm what I already know. Perhaps next you will introduce me to myself. I hear I am quite popular.
Meredith Duran
While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top,spreading his laugh across the water. Laughing at the girl,at the guys, at George,at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He know's there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.
Ken Kesey
It is unimpressive to not hold a door open for the next person coming through. After a satisfying workout at my gym, I was walking behind a man who was exiting at the same time. He was only about two feet in front of me. As he walked through the door, he let it close behind him, almost hitting me in the face. Was he being intentionally rude? Was he preoccupied and focused on other things? No matter whether an offender is being a jerk intentionally, or is simply oblivious to how his behavior is affecting others, rude behavior instantly makes a negative impression. Be aware!
Susan C.Young
I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Magic is an honor, until it's a shackle.
Melissa de la Cruz
Joy is something we can’t manufacture. Joy happens to us not because of us.
Todd Stocker
We always have enough to be happy if we are enjoying what we do have- and not worrying about what we don't have.
Ken Keyes
When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret.
Shannon L. Alder
My gaze moved to Vance. He was looking up at me and I could read nothing in his eyes."Another pop?" I asked.He shook his head but kept watching me. I looked at the floor and started from the room.I had to pass Vance's chair to get to the kitchen. As I did, I slowed and as if it had a mind of it's own, my hand came out and I ran the backs of my finger's along Vance's jaw.
Kristen Ashley
At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.
Dan Simmons
Terminus sniffed. “I guard borders. I don’t kill giants. It’s not in my job description.
Rick Riordan
I think I’m always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself.- Celine
Richard Linklater
Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.
Chuck Klosterman
In his book, Networking is a Contact Sport, Joe Sweeney advises that when you attend networking events, act as if it is your party and you are the host or hostess. By doing this, you will help others be at ease and demonstrate a heart of service and generosity.
Susan C.Young
Johnathan had known he wouldn't be able to simply shut off his thoughts and go to sleep. His entire body - everything he could feel, at leastleast like a tightly coiled spring.
Lyn Ducoty
The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.
Anneli Rufus
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
Hannah Arendt
To be a leader you have to jump into the ocean of uncertainty and lead the followers toward the known or unknown destination.
Debasish Mridha
In the context of today, this WAS heroism.
John Howard Griffin
Henry narrowed his eyes at me. "You going somewhere?""Lacrosse field trip," I said. "I enjoy whacking the hell out of people with mallets.
Robin Benway
An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as (we) were taught to believe that we were loved.
Bell Hooks
They say never say never but we'll make an exception because: never would I change you never would I leave you never would I bring you downnever ever will I stop loving you. Now change those woulds to "wills" and you'll have a better idea of me.
Hope Alcocer
And he looked lonely enough that she said, 'If you like, you could be my friend'.
Sarah J Maas
The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.
Stephanie Coontz
A sign of a hard worker is one who works without complaint. God favors those who toil while others play.
Sarah Price
There is something magical and transformational about saying “yes” to God. When you take His hand, step out of that boat (your ordinary, comfortable life), and be brave. Instead of spending your lifetime living in fear and playing it safe, you boldly walk in obedience. God makes you brave.
Dana Arcuri
Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.
Kristin Cashore
Explain to me again why we’re at a whorehouse?”Gwenvael sighed around his ale. “Because, my thick-headedbrother, if you want information about human men then you go to theone place all human men come to eventually.
G.A. Aiken
I watch what I eat every day. I mean, who actually eats with their eyes closed?
Brian Celio
The evangelist is the world's hopeless romantic, and just like a hopeless romantic, he must hope for the miracle of God more than the romance itself.
Criss Jami
She was halfway through the second yard when she heard Cyprien fall and curse.No man in the world will turn down a blow job, Alex thought as she dodged through yards and around the houses, putting as much distance between them as she could. And no man, not even Cyprien, could chase a girl with his pans down.
Lynn Viehl
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
Robert Frost
Learning to be and learning to be creative are two sides of the same coin.
Elaine St. James
Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
Mary Doria Russell
The most genuine acts of kindness are done without fanfare and when no one is looking.
Jason Pollock
In what areas are you learning and growing? If the answer is none that means you're stagnating or regressing. Learn more, earn more, know more, grow more!
Rob Liano
And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.
Jack Kerouac
Struggle forms character
Lauren Groff
My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends? 
Elizabeth Gilbert
If you are as happy my dear sir on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home you are the happiest man in the country.
James Buchanan
Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
Thomas C. Foster
I believe theology should be about one's way of life, a kind of gaze into onesself and others, and a mode of one's profound existence in the world.
Namsoon Kang
Stories are one of the greatest gifts we can give to our children. Stories are equipment for life.
Matthew Knisely
There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
Amy Bloom
Religious figures, gargoyles, and grotesques, she though, looked fine on Gothic cathedrals, but she'd always spent more time looking at the murals inside the buildings than the carvings outside.So why did this one seem to have captured all her attention?
Christine Warren
I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.-Poul_Anderson
Poul Anderson
We will be judged according to the secret motives and the character of our work. If we have done our work for selfish motives or personal gain, even if the results looked noble to our friends and family, God knows our hearts.
Billy Graham
There has to be beauty left in the world, Julia," said Kiyu. "Otherwise we have nothing.
Erica Lindquist
Idiot," I said, before grinning broadly and crushing his mouth to mine. "We need to pick new pet names for each other," he muttered as I hefted myself up from the ground.
Molly Harper