Quotes by American Authors - Page 2468

If I had to describe the scent of Michigan in spring and summer, it wouldn't be aparticular smell – blooming wildflowers or boat exhaust off the lake – it would be a color: Green.
Viola Shipman
When the moon kisses the stas in the silence with her lights of love, my heart dances with ecstasy and beauty of life.
Debasish Mridha
I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn't know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It's not too late. The first days were strange. I had to practice smiling in front of the mirror. But it came back to me. It was as if a weight had been lifted. I let go, and something let go of me.
Nicole Krauss
Go Slow to Go Fast in Growing a Stronger Bond With Others: When you see someone's interest rise in the conversation, you have a glimpse of the hook that can best connect you together. Ask follow-up questions, directly related to what that person just said. If you do just this much, recent research shows you are among the five percent of Americans in conversation. In so doing, you accomplish two things. You've increased their openness and warmth toward you, because you've demonstrated you care. And you've had a closer look at the hook that most matters to them in the conversation. Now you can speak to their hottest interest, in a way that can serve you both.
Kare Anderson
Weird people don't care if they're weird. They are the most entertaining to converse with because nothing is off-limits.
Donna Lynn Hope
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Neal Stephenson
We can help pave the roads of those around us, but we can't choose their direction.
Michelle Moran
She had no idea how she was supposed to act, no idea how to feel. Julian had just made incredible love to her, but he wasn't *in love* with her. He'd stamped himself forever on her--body, heart, and soul--but a year from now he probably wouldn't remember who she was. He'd rocked her world, and yet he was only temporarily a part of it. What was a woman supposed to say? "Thanks, stud"?
Pamela Clare
Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.
Anna Godbersen
...Data itself... was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.
Dan Simmons
Happiness is a Swedish sunset it is there for all but most of us look the other way and lose it.
Mark Twain
Children see things very well sometimes-and idealists even better.
Lorraine Hansbury
Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature–not as rulers over it, but as participants in it.
Larry Dossey
Without peace, life loses its prime purpose.
Debasish Mridha
The backside of mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
Mitch Albom
There are so many professing Christians who are walking hand in hand with the world that you cannot tell the difference between the Christian and the unbeliever. This should never be.
Billy Graham
*Appendix usually means "small outgrowth from large intestine," but in this case it means "additional information accompanying main text." Or are those really the same things? Think carefully before you insult this book.
Pseudonymous Bosch
I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
Thomas Jefferson
By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...
Kathleen Norris
If to have breasts is to be human, then to save them is to save ourselves.
Florence Williams
Here I am," I say to the palm trees. "I can do this. Watch me.
Eileen Granfors
When our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are considered both different and inferior in the eyes of the God we worship, this belief tends to permeate society and everyone suffers.
Jimmy Carter
There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be successful rich and famous but if those are our goals we're off on the wrong foot. ... I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.
Phyllis Whitney
I can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point find yourself doing something that at one point you swore you'd never do. You'll do it for the sake of getting high, either directly or indirectly. Trust me. It will happen. You might think you know yourself better than anyone, but you have yet to become acquainted with your addiction. It will introduce itself in ways that you never thought were possible.
Ashly Lorenzana
This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.
Dave Eggers
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice—of the world, my body, others—in a way never before experienced. I noticed boys, or rather they noticed me, at 16.
Chila Woychik
I believe that a person's taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know.
Leila Sales
The space is appropriately shoe-boxy and all the shelves are there. I've set them up with a coordinate system, so my program can find aisle 3, shelf 13 all by itself. Simulated light from the simulated windows casts sharp-edged shadows through the simulated store. If this sounds impressive to you, you're over thirty.
Robin Sloan
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed with his chest to both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation. A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.
James Sallis
I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.
Sonia Sotomayor
Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.
Holly Black
I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
Robert H. Jackson
What is valuable is not new and what is new is not valuable.
Daniel Webster
The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable decisions is a cornerstone of our system of compulsory, closely monitored education.
Peter O. Gray
When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.
Annie Dillard
To be honest, Briec doesn’tconsider fights with humans as battles. I think he sees that more ashunting. Or a snack that runs.
G.A. Aiken
We do not require man’s religion for salvation. We do not believe in anything that forces people to keep their places in this world.
Thomm Quackenbush
The most critical risk of all, is not taking the risk if means be dangerous.
Anthony Liccione
Just as people asked ‘Why do they hate us?’ after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’ He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. ‘The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us’ This hate was not because we had armies in the Middle East or because we supported Israel or for any of the reasons people easily turn to today. It was because we were Christians, infidels. As a child, I was just too young to understand all the political implications, but I understood one thing: people wanted to kill me simply because I was a Christian.
Brigitte Gabriel
For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.
Franz Werfel
According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.
G.M. Jackson
So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well.
Alexandra Kleeman
Carlos: So, what, were they psychos, or... Seth: Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like? They were vampires. Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!
Quentin Tarantino
Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule.
Carl Sagan
Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.
Terry Tempest Williams
I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia.
William T. Vollmann
For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...
Ray Bradbury
Self-hatred is the best vehicle for making people do as they’re told because they are hungry to get approval.
Melinda Gebbie
I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant.
Thomm Quackenbush
He dunked his tea bag and watched the results critically. “I really must get a new supplier. This tea is pathetic. America just doesn’t understand tea at all.
Rachel Caine
Don't hold onto things, it will only bring you pain.
Ellen DeGeneres
But I regret to inform you that you are probably not dying''As you will.' I take a swig from the bottle of brandy, my teeth chattering against it. I don't have the energy to argue; I must save my strength for my imminent demise.
Janet Mullany
Maybe the reason nothing seems to be "fixing you" is because you're not broken. Let today be the day you stop living within the confines of how others define or judge you. You have a unique beauty and purpose; live accordingly.
Steve Maraboli
The high prize of life the crowning fortune of man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Producing obituaries is a way of creating a legacy to remember important people of our times and their contributions. No matter whose obituary it is, I look for something inspirational about each person.
Laurie Nadel
Writer. Another word for poor.
Buffy Andrews
Mirrors are liars. They tell us what we expect to see.
Susanna Fraser