Quotes by American Authors - Page 2474

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
Carl Sagan
For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.
Phil Knight
But the truth, I realize now, is that I always hoped. Even if I knew my hope was a lie, I held on to it.
Joshua David Bellin
I didn't even notice that my shoes were full of mud by the time I reached the rocky shore. There was ragged yellow police tape tied to some branches, dancing in the wind. It was as if the tape was waving, welcoming me back to place where I would have died.
Richard P. Denney
Thoughts are the imagination of the conscious mind and dreams are the imagination of the subconscious mind.
Debasish Mridha
It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes with starting your own business. It really is so much work in the beginning that you lose yourself in it. You lose your sense of time, and you can’t believe how quickly the days go by because there’s no time to focus on much of anything else. But then you open the doors, and it’s like you’ve given birth to this new thing that didn’t exist before. Then when it starts to flourish, well, that’s just icing on the cake. To get to see it live and breathe and to know that this thing you created out of thin air can put a smile on other people’s faces is such a blessing.
Joanna Gaines
This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Always be truthful. When you lie to others, you are really lying to yourself.
Batya Maman Sabag
People sell their soul in such small quantities - a seemingly trivial compromise here, a rationalization of a minor evil there - that they don't realize what they're doing until it is too late.
Mike Klepper
Was it possible this one would be a son too? She hoped so, but not because she favored men. Her husband modeled the seriousness, the stoicism, that she hoped her sons would inherit, but she had nothing to teach a daughter. She could teach her to dream—say, to be a painter, as she herself had been trained—and then teach her to let it go. Teach her to cloister herself in dark hallways, admiring how the light fell through the rice-paper doors while knowing that there was no point in putting it on canvas.
Shawna Yang Ryan
Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
Allie Condie
Placing one last kiss over her heart, he lifted his head to find her staring at him with The Look—the one that told a guy when a woman was leaving Let’s Screw For Fun City and headed straight for Let’s Pick Out China Town—written all over her pretty face.
Gina L Maxwell
She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.
Kristen Henderson
I just read this great quote by Junot Diaz, he was talking about true intimacy, and he was saying that it was the willingness to be vulnerable and to be found out. That’s what I felt that YA did. It wasn't pretentious, and it wasn’t hiding its heart. It wanted to be found out...It felt like those moments when you go to a party and you're standing around for a long time, going, I don't fit in here, what am I going to talk to these people about? And everybody's getting drunk, and then you find this one person, and you end up sitting in some corner talking about all these arcane things.And then before you know it you're having a conversation about the meaning of life and it's four o’clock in the morning. That kind of feeling, that kind of intimacy — I felt like that's what I got from YA.
Libba Bray
It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings." (p. 16-17)
Rollo May
There is this fine line between presenting to You all of my weakness and thinking that it can't be done. In Your strength, I find my own.
Joni Eareckson Tada
I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don't wrinkle!
Madeleine K. Albright
The fact is that some things will be lost in our new way of life. It is useless to pretend that the transformation to a lower-energy, lower-consumption society will always be painless and easy. Thus, the only possible way we can bring it about is to replace some of the pleasures we are losing with new ones -- with rituals of non-consumption that offer us something to replace what is lost.
Sharon Astyk
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Paul Krugman
Think as if failure is not a possibility.
Debasish Mridha
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.
Wallace Stegner
The major events in our lives receive the entire spotlight, but ultimately your life will be defined by the same handful of choices you make each day.
Chris Matakas
Fear is like fire. If controlled it will help you if uncontrolled it will rise up and destroy you. Men's actions depend to a great extent upon fear. We do things either because we enjoy doing them or because we are afraid not to do them.
John F. Milburn
A loving woman finds heaven or hellOn the day she is made a bride
Lena Lathrop
Christmas seems to say that paradise lost and longed for does not have to be paradise given up on.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Not the action, but the expectation creates results.
Debasish Mridha
If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...
Alice James
It's all messed up," she said.t"What is?" he asked quietly from behind her.t"Us."t"We're doing okay."t"I didn't set out to trap you or anything." Keith had accused her of that a hundred times.t"I don't feel trapped."t"Why?"t"I'm a simple guy. I have a beautiful woman in my arms. What's there to complain about?"t"I'm hardly beautiful. I look like an eggplant."t"Purple is my favorite color."t"There's a really annoying dinosaur you might want to watch with Justin over breakfast." But she smiled into the darkness.
Dana Marton
It wasn't as if she was terrified of heights, she simply preferred to be closer to solid ground, where words like plummet and plunge did not linger in her mind.
Victoria Alexander
There were times he thought he might not want to live the life he saw before him. It was a life of obstacles and hardships—challenges and tests of will he could not yet predict. But he couldn’t stop. He had to endure. The path had not changed. It was he who had changed.
Matt K. Turner
The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass............Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended, and the train took you away to another...
Justin Cronin
History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.
Howard Zinn
Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.
Sarah Vowell
the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
Dan Savage
A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?
John Irving
I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.
Neal Stephenson
Love is not a consequence. Love is not a choice. Love is a thirst. A need as vital to the soul as water is to the body. Love is a precious draught that not only soothes a parched throat, but it vitalizes a man. It fortifies him enough that he is willing to slay dragons for the woman who offers it. Take that draught of love from me and I will shrivel to dust. To take it from a man dying of thirst and give it to another whilst he watches is a cruelty I never thought you capable of.
Colleen Houck
He's heard tales of the Clone Wars -tales spoken by his own father. He knows how war goes. It's not many wars, but just one, drawn out again and again, cut up into slices so it seems more manageable.
Chuck Wendig
Fighting to protect the people you cared for was one thing. Trusting someone you loved to fight for themselves took a different kind of strength and bravery.
Martina Boone
The first week is the hardest. Then little by little the world opens up, and you realize there are all these people around you with their own needs that have nothing to do with you. Then you forget, and everything’s about you again. And maybe that cycle continues for the rest of your life. Maybe the world keeps expanding and contracting. Maybe you know you’re well when it finally stays the same size.
Amy Reed
Control Master Theory suggests that our psychological problems come about in much the same way: our decision to make ourselves unhappy because one or both of our parents were unhappy is just as altruistic as our friend's decision to run through flames to save his daughter.
Lewis Engel
Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Some days simply lay on you like stones.
Patrick Rothfuss
I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.
Mark Twain
There are some beliefs and places in this city that are incomprehensible to some-hell-to most, and it's best to leave them alone.
Sandy DeLuca
The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.
James Madison
...he seemed to grasp a deep understanding of the unfolding drama in which he had been caught. He seemed to understand something that few of even the wisest men of his day understood...God wanted a broken vessel.
Gene Edwards
Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.
Jodi Picoult
[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.
James D. Watson
I may be lost, but I'm traveling the right way.
Melody Lee
Every dew-drop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The only way that I could figure they could improve upon Coca-Cola, one of life's most delightful elixirs, which studies prove will heal the sick and occasionally raise the dead, is to put bourbon in it.
Lewis Grizzard
Deep down, he's shallow.
Peter De Vries
No man is poor who has a Godly mother.
Abraham Lincoln
The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes.
David Handler
What deep violence does the mind invent / As polar opposite to love. (In 'Hat Love').
Tony Williams
Christ did not die by accident. He died voluntarily in our place.
Billy Graham
A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.
Donald Kingsbury
She was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her. She tried to speak and his mouth was over hers again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast.
Margaret Mitchell