Quotes by American Authors - Page 2470

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.
John Green
The central feature of pride is enmity—enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen. Enmity means “hatred toward, hostility to, or a state of opposition.” It is the power by which Satan wishes to reign over us.
Ezra Taft Benson
May you always find your intuitive voice and may the language of your intuition sing.
Jodi Livon
We were a galaxy exploding into a million pieces, creating a whole new world, as we crashed against each other on the soft surface of his mattress, a cloud in the darkness, our bodies finally falling together like rain.
Emme Rollins
If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I was examining the perfumed, coloured candles guaranteed to bring good fortune with continued use when a lovely mocha-skinned girl came in from the back room and stood behind the counter. She wore a white smock over her dress and looked about nineteen or twenty. Her wavy, shoulder-length hair was the colour of polished mahogany. A number of thin, silver hoops jingled on her fine-boned wrist. "May I help you?" she asked. Just beneath her carefully modulated diction lingered the melodic calypso lilt of the Caribbean.
William Hjortsberg
Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?""Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's.
Susan Hubbard
Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
It would be easy to become a victim of our circumstances and continue feeling sad, scared or angry; or instead, we could choose to deal with injustice humanely and break the chains of negative thoughts and energies, and not let ourselves sink into it.
Erin Gruwell
And I didn't choose it, Kat. I chose you.
Ally Carter
cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event
Harold Rosenberg
It is the city that is wrong, and its creations can never be right; they may be improved; they can never be what they should.... Until the whole atrocious system of herding working people in close-built cities, by way of making them serviceable cogwheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding out rent and profit, comes to an end, the physical education of children will remain at best a pathetic compromise.
Voltairine de Cleyre
Jace's eyes sparkled, but he said calmly, "Not at all. the Silent Brothers can help her retrieve her memories.""You hate the Silent Brothers," protested Isabelle."I don't hate them," said Jace candidly."I'm afraid of them. It's not the same thing.""I thought you said they were libarians," said Clary."They are librarians."Simon whistled. "Those must be some killer late fees.
Cassandra Clare
The most important things are the hardest things to say, because words diminish them...
Stephen King
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Moths," repeats Will. "You're afraid of moths?" "Not just a cloud of moths," she says, "like...a swarm of them. Everywhere. All those wings and legs and..." She shudders and shakes her head."Terrifying," Will says with mock seriousness. "That's my girl. Tough as cotton balls.""Oh, Shut up.
Veronica Roth
For the first time in his centuries of life, doing the right thing didn’t seem like the right thing to do.
Marissa Clarke
After my first experience via yoga, I became incredibly focused on experiencing that sense of stillness again. The stillness that reminded me that I could be a better person, a better friend, a better citizen of the world, as well as a better businessman.
Russell Simmons
Never stop writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it’s integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how much time you spend doing it, whether it’s for business or pleasure. Integrate your craft into your every day life, and you’ll be as good as gold.
Leigh Hershkovich
Right now, I had everything I could ask for. It wasn't a long list, but it was a very satisfying one, starting with the love of my life back in my arms.
Becca Fitzpatrick
Pretending is one of our greatest pleasures. But you have to know you're pretending.
Marty Rubin
That was a good mark in Latin, and I am pleased with your steady improvement in it.
Theodore Roosevelt
The sadness ― the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ― isn't over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I pray and say, fuck it, then. I choose this. It chooses me. I choose it back.
Emma Forrest
Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s allhuman relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out newways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what;and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accusesus of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates thebicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.”“And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?”“I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poorenough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have somecommon sense!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If sex were food, Rhage would have been morbidly obese.(Dark Lover)
J.R. Ward
God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.
Thomas Harris
I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
Bernard M. Baruch
You may think my jealousy would have been enormous during those days after Peter gave Tiger Lily the smallest kiss on the neck. And you would be right. But these moments were swallowed by a bigger emotion, my tenderness for Tiger Lily, which had grown to take up most of the space in my body, without me knowing it. I can't say I didn't dream that this was a passing moment of infatuation, and that eventually Peter would notice and pick me-as impossible as that might have seemed considering my size. But I felt protective of Tiger Lily. I felt that just by watching over her, I could somehow keep her safe. And I wanted to keep Peter safe too.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
Dammit, I couldn't stop her from following me into danger, but I sure as hell was going to protect her while she was here. I would throw myself in front of the dragon if it came down to that. My heart pounded, and I kissed her deeper, my stomach twisting as she parted her lips, letting me in. Her tongue teased mine, and everything that had brought us here — Keirran, Annwyl, the Fade — rushed out of my head. I'd never felt anything like this before: these crazy, swirling emotions, all centered around the girl in my arms. Kenzie scared me, infuriated me, challenged me, and faeries or no, I couldn't imagine a world without this girl. I loved her more than anything else in my life. My heart turned over, and the air caught in my throat. I pulled back, breathless with the realization. I... was in love.
Julie Kagawa
Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.
Ben Marcus
Do you see the labyrinth out there?" She waved a graceful hand toward the garden. "Life is like that labyrinth, full of pathways that seem like the right way, but end up being detours. We go one way and then another until we find our true path.
Belinda M. Gordon
Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.
Stephen King
The real dawah to Islam is the character of a Muslim.
Nouman Ali Khan
Seduction is merely encouraging a man to do something he already wants to do.
Lisa Kleypas
Our God is Greater, Our God is Stronger, God, you are Higher than any other, Our God is Healer, Awesome in Power, Our God,Our God.
Chris Tomlin
To Whom It May Concern-- Only four words of advice: It can be done.
Kira Salak
Mournier defined his own position as one of 'tragic optimism--' a Christian attitude of absolute engagement in the struggles of history, despite the fact that the Absolute cannot be contained in history.
Robert Ellsberg
This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.
Cormac McCarthy
In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.
Ted Chiang
More than attitude, posture has also been used throughout history to communicate one’s status in society.
Cindy Ann Peterson
Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.
Barbara Kingsolver
The Prince of Hell shrugged. 'Shit Happens
Jana Oliver
The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.
Larry McMurtry
Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.
Judith Lewis Herman
On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.
David G. Wells
There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.
William Gibson
There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.
Rose Pastor Stokes
Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?
Patricia Highsmith
Have as much fun as you can in life because you never know when it will end.
Stuart J. Scesney
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
Fablehaven's awesome!!so is the candy shop war!
Brandon Mull
I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We must discover our own path to joy and a sense of leading a purposeful existence. I spent the first part of life attempting to discern what a man ought to be, and spent the latter years attempting to reconcile why I was not the man whom I always aspired to be. A person endures a tragic consumption of the spirit when they discover that they are not what they desired to become.
Kilroy J. Oldster
My love is for you life after life, for infinite time, my love is for you, forever.
Debasish Mridha
The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being sense its kinship to God and leaps us in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God.
A.W. Tozer
This woman might have a daughter, but she was as innocent and pure as newly fallen snow.
Gena Showalter
A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live.
Bob Hope
If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Richard Feynman
He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular.
Scott Lynch