Quotes by American Authors - Page 2415

A wish is a single unit of hope. It’s a single request for something I dearly desire.
Sharon Weil
Sometimes the worst failures in our lives turn out to be for the best. Sometimes our path leads through darkness, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't walk it. Sometimes our path leads to loss. But that doesn't mean we've gone astray.
Anne Elisabeth Stengl
While the classic conversion story involves desperation, hitting bottom, and a plea for help, I think now that it was gratitude, as well as the suffering I'd seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new.
Sara Miles
She's all brute force and '90s clichés.
Rainbow Rowell
Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.
Robert Allen
The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and communicates this understanding to the client. When functioning best, the therapist is so much inside the private world of the other that he or she can clarify not only the meanings of which the client is aware but even those just below the level of awareness. This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
Carl R. Rogers
The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
Learned Hand
Now when you say staring, are you including yourself in this assessment? I recall you taking in the view on several occasions.""For the last time, I was not staring at you." I was a terrible liar. "Now, if you're done, I'd like to finish asking my question.
Stacey O'Neale
Behind every face lies a mask. Behind it lies another onion layer of mask. If you peel the skins, you may cry.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?
Bernard Cornwell
But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.
Dexter Palmer
People are always doing things for my sake and strangely enough, I'm the one who suffers for it.
Robert Masello
Without dreams, life is a desert.
Richard Paul Evans
Sophia could just as well have gutted me. In Allah's name, I drank beer for you. I dismantled my entire value system of holding Allah's word above all for you. I reinterpreted my Islamic teachings to justify being with you.
Sam Wazan
There are 2 kinds of artists, essentially: those who want to make something popular, and those who want to make something dignified. But then there is still that rare hybrid case, and perhaps by that unintentional stroke of genius, in which one's work uncontrollably becomes both popular and dignified yet beyond its time.
Criss Jami
There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord’s word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly “king’s portion” of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God’s great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body.If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with “king’s meat and wine,” even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can “run and not be weary and walk and not faint.” If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God.
Harold B. Lee
We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.
Rex Stout
I wish the army had taught us how to navigate feelings as easily as they did a starless night sky.
Sherri L. Smith
And you, are Ruin, the chosen Carnificem, and WOE is what you're all about, it's your purpose. Doom and Gloom. ~Caliber Creed
Lucian Bane
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.
Malcolm X
I'd much rather have a brain of my own than be popular.
Dori Hillestad Butler
As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Whom one is speaking to - or which aspect of their character - fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. 'Indulge Your Desires' comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it.
CrimethInc.
But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.
Anne Fadiman
I want my kids to enjoy romance as part of the entirety of marriage, when it has been earned with commitment and hard work.
Amy E. Spiegel
Customers are human and humans can view situations in unexpected ways.
Marilyn Suttle
I've poured my heart out on this page. Now burn it and destroy the evidence that anyone ever cared this much for you.
Kate McGahan
The reality is that people reach for a Bible when they're feeling lost. But if they hadn't shelved it, maybe they wouldn't have gotten lost.
Crystal Woods
Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.
Steve Rasnic Tem
We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn’t have any letup in him.
Tim Tharp
If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Magic to be its best must be unexpected.
Kristin Hannah
In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.
Laurell K. Hamilton
I was especially perceptive to all things beautiful that morning—raspberries in blue china bowls were enough to make the heart sing.
Irene Hunt
Where did you learn that?Casing the joint 101 at the school for Mischief and Shenaniganry, of course. I think I pass you in the hall on the way to Entrapping the Eligible Billionaire Bachelor......I was too busy in my Entrap Your Man with Hot Sex lab....They have a lab for that?
Denise Grover Swank
It's better to risk being disliked for living your truth than to be loved for what you are pretending to be.
Dawn Gluskin
I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
Rebecca Solnit
When someone can love without judging, he is truly wise.
Debasish Mridha
Life is about refinement, not perfection. And you still have refining to do.
Dan Millman
The world is quiet here.
Lemony Snicket
I have come to understand that every day is something to cherish.
Kerri Strug
Dream 2 Defy! Extreme is not a style but a way of life.
Jeff Hardy
Call me a proud American, if you want, but I truly believe that no other nation on Earth possesses the capabilities to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism.
Dave Barry
Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.
T.S Eliot
So, a word to all you Femin-Idi-Amins: Stop “liberating” moms by trying tomake them join the workforce. They’re already doing the job that God putthem here to do: Everything.
Stephen Colbert
Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
Tom Robbins
I'm telling you, Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral.
John Green
He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh.
Diana Gabaldon
Life isn’t about being perfect; it’s about improving. It’s not about achieving more, acquiring more, or even about actually being more. It’s about becoming better…better than you were.
Toni Sorenson
Best wishes to all the fonts in all the texts in all the books that make for a world of unfolding stories.
Michael Ray Smith
Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.
Renata Adler
One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain element—a plot device, an image, a noticeable phrase—once, readers may or may not notice it consciously, but it doesn’t disturb the flow of their reading. If you use that element twice, they won’t notice it consciously—but they will notice it subconsciously, and it will add to the resonance of the writing or to their sense of depth and involvement (and if it’s a plot device, it will heighten the dramatic tension). But if you use that element three times, everybody will notice it the third time you do it.
Diana Gabaldon
But trust me, men are never worth it. Behind every great man is a woman who gave up on greatness and tied herself into an apron. Romance is for saps, Abbie. You’re sharp and you’ve got pluck. Don’t waste it.
William Ritter
When going for your goals, staying motivated, enthusiastic, and flexible are daily deeds of daring.
Beverly K. Bachel
Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
John Gardner
However, if we don’t confront the seed of lies, it gives place for them to take root in us and we become bound to the “prison cell” that those lies create.
E'yen A. Gardner
Don’t do that? This is your sage advice?”“Yeah.” He burped and blew it out the side of his mouth. “Sorry, the burritos we had for lunch are kinda comin’ back on me.
Mary Calmes
Everything we do for God will be the overflow of intimacy with God.
Dan Baumann