Quotes by American Authors - Page 2402

It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting—other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He sighed and moved his hands under water, linking with mine. “You are like a drug to me. Dangerous. Addicting. I can’t get enough of you.” He brought our hands above water and kissed one of my hands, linked with his. “But I want more, more than just a night, more than just a few touches. And I have a feeling that once we cross that line, you will run away.
Whitney Barbetti
All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.
Orison Swett Marden
Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche.
Michael Jackson
The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, and they would feast upon the corpse until they were fat and could feast no more. The young would come with the old to see this trick and glory in it. No worm knew where the gravedigger got his corpses, but they were always succulent and nourishing. They praised the gravedigger’s generosity. -- From "Worms
L. Joseph Shosty
We view men’s gifts as vital to the church. In contrast, we caution women to exercise their gifts discreetly to avoid causing problems or trespassing some invisible line — which changes location from church to church, sometimes even within the same denomination.
Carolyn Custis James
As soon as they were alone, Ioan’s face softened. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Christian?” “We are in need of an army.” “Done,” Ioan said without hesitation. “My men are yours.” “We’ll have to go back through the Holy Land,” Phantom said. “That bothers me not.” It was Adara’s turn to frown at the man’s blasé acceptance of their mission. “Don’t you want to know why we need your army?” Ioan shrugged. “I assume it is to fight.” “Aye,” she said slowly, “but don’t you want to know why you’re fighting?” “I am fighting because Brother Christian needs me.”-Ioan, Christian, Phantom, & Adara
Kinley MacGregor
Let the power of your love change the world, but never let the problems of this world change the beauty of your love.
Debasish Mridha
Nevertheless, likin' is a tender plant, and never thrives long when watered with tears. Let the 'arth around your married happiness be moistened by the dews of kindness.
James Fenimore Cooper
There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it—you’re done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers’ face.
David Levithan
It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well.
John Steinbeck
Remember laughing? Laughter enhances the blood flow to the body’s extremities and improves cardiovascular function. Laughter releases endorphins and other natural mood elevating and pain-killing chemicals, improves the transfer of oxygen and nutrients to internal organs. Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!
Patch Adams
But you have said it too often, Mr. Benedict!" said Mrs. Perumal in an imperious tone that was quite out of character. "And if you continue in this vein, I'm afraid we'll be compelled to cut our visit short. Surely there are other establishments that would host an entire troup of guests - indefinitely and without reward - and not feel obliged to apologize for it!
Trenton Lee Stewart
Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
Wendell Berry
I never intended to become a zombie huntress; I had only intended to protest prom, high school’s last bastion of patriarchal society.
G.G. Silverman
We no longer have the luxury of spending our energy on anything that does not lead us and our families to Christ.
Sheri Dew
To love--to fall--is not a question. To touch--to kiss--to speak--those are questions. There is nothing worse than a ruined friendship. There is nothing better than a companion. Somewhere in between lies risk. Somewhere in between, lies.
David Levithan
No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.
Siri Hustvedt
Henry and I have always talked about partnership, working together to make things work. He's always said he'd never divorce. That divorced rich men are inevitably poor men. That any marriage can be fixed, that love fluctuates.
Kate Moretti
It's not the number of contacts you cultivate but the diversity and depth of connections that leverage your opportunity to use best talents more often to accomplish more.
Kare Anderson
If you don't know for sure, then what's the big thing about trying stuff out?" Jamie said, looking not at me but looking out at that statue, just like Hennitz.I still didn't have any of the right words. "It's more like maybe I do know and I'm still confused too, at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it's like how you noticed this thing about me tonight, you saw it, or you already knew it - it's there. But that doesn't mean it's not confusing or whatever.
Emily M. Danforth
Teaching kids to count is fine but teaching them what counts is best.
Bob Talbert
Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world; that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and goodwill among all men.
Octave Chanute
The blossoms fall just once each winter, yet in our memories, they fall every day.
David Kudler
We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
Irving Stone
The dear girl, I fear, may be contemplating some alarming, disruptive perhaps dangerous project. In which case, I would naturally do all in my power to keep her from any such rash or foolhardy enterprise – unless she wished me to accompany her.
Lloyd Alexander
Let's carpe the hell out of this diem.
Alexandra Bracken
Most people do not see their words as power.
Kent Alan Robinson
I learned that within the confines of God’s story, nothing had been stolen from me, but rather everything was given to me. My life, which felt so out of control, was in reality in complete control – God’s control.
Wendy Blight
You are the apple of Love’s eye.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
Hatred is self-punishment.
Hosea Ballou
I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.
James Dickey
Being a werewolf, an alpha more so, isn't about being aggressive over others but controlling yourself, the wolf's wild virus inside my DNA, and emotions that comes with the beast.
Jazz Feylynn
I’ll tell you what,” she said, prepared to make a deal. “Let’s see how your ‘diplomacy’ would profit us. If you can give me a decent solution to a pretend situation, I’ll agree to have you accompany me instead of Shanks. Although, I don’t know how wise it is to leave a Viidun captain on the Kemeniroc in your absence.”tDerian agreed to the test. “Okay, what’s your question?”tShe thought hard for a moment; her eyes scrunching in concentration, lips pulled down to one side. Then, as a crooked grin spread across her lips, she set up an imagined scenario.t“Pretend we’re down on the planet with this King Wennergren when he graciously offers to walk us through his cherished garden. While we’re there he begs me to touch his favorite, award-winning flower, hoping my powers will make it thrive and blossom. But for some strange reason it doesn’t respond to me the way plants do on our world. Instead of thriving, the flower withers and dies right before his shocked and furious eyes. Now pretend he’s easily offended and has a horrible temper…”tDerian cut it. “You have no idea what his temperament is li
Richelle E. Goodrich
I am blessed out! I make time for joy every day. I commit to seeking healthy pleasure and reveling in it.
Amy Leigh Mercree
If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?
RuPaul
For of those to whom much is given, much is required
John F Kennedy
Politics. The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.
Ely Culbertson
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner.
Frank Herbert
I was the solitary plovera pencil for a wing-boneFrom the secret notesI must tiltupon the pressureexecute and adjust In us sea-air rhythm"We live by the urgent waveof the verse
Lorine Niedecker
All I wanted for Christmas was a New Years Eve party that I would never forget. Too bad I got too drunk to remember it.
Carroll Bryant
Give me the grace to believe that you really do know what is best for me and that I do not. May I cling to Your character and rejoice in Your pursuit of me.
Kenneth D. Boa
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.
Priya Ardis
The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.
Sergio de la Pava
When a physical illness or other adverse circumstance arises, humans tend to add to the problem by worrying and increasing the mental anxiety in their situation. Let’s take illness as an example. We have to face the fact that life is not always perfect and that disease occasionally happens. When you fall into a painful situation or get sick, the best thing to do is to think about the greater anguish being suffered by so many of our fellow creatures. This is more productive than being concerned about one’s own suffering and compounding it with worry, giving too much attention to the pain
Doug "Ten" Rose
If you don’t have regular and accurate financial statements, you’re driving your business 100 miles an hour down a one-way street the wrong way, at night, in the fog, without lights.
Jim Blasingame
Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All my life I've been competing-and competing to win. I came to realize that in this way this cancer was the toughest competition I had faced yet. I made up my mind that I was going to lick it all the way. I not only wasn't going to let it kill me I wasn't even going to let it put me on the shelf.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
She's familiar. My only familiar thing in a world of inconsistency and confusion.
Colleen Hoover
There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
Chuck Palahniuk
You are free. Your mind belongs to you. Your thoughts are yours. Honor the sacred territory of your freedom and individuality.
Bryant McGill
My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.
Isaac Marion
When you face a great problem in life, don’t get scared. Consider it a great adventure. Ultimately it will shape your life with charm.
Debasish Mridha
The best way to be appreciative for your life is to live it; don't die for any other reason but love. Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.
Mike Norton
Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.
Benjamin Franklin
A clever trick does not a concept make.
Larry Brooks
Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....
Kristen Henderson
Let only the young come, Says the sea. Let them kiss my face And hear me. I am the last word And I tell Where storms and stars come from.
Carl Sandburg
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.
Andy Warhol