Quotes by American Authors - Page 2496

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.
Theodore Roosevelt
Where there is great love there are always wishes.
Willa Cather
I believe my mother was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers.
H.W. Brands
Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking
Lois Farfel Stark
Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.
Lera Auerbach
To share is precious, pure and fair.Don't play with something you should cherish for life. Don't you wanna care, ain't it lonely out there?
Marvin Gaye
All of life and history is holding you on its shoulders so you can stretch one atom further.
Bryant McGill
...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybody’s time to think about it. So what do we do?In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by:(1)  making it still harder;(2)  redefining what we mean by ‘solving’ it, so that it becomes something we can do;(3)  inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
E. T. Jaynes
Be yourself and think for yourself and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
Elbert Hubbard
Birds chirped and hawked in the distance. A group of them, maybe vultures, circled the sky. Rae glanced at the blanket. Those damn birds could probably smell Marissa, and the second everyone left, they'd pounce on her.
Yawatta Hosby
Have you listened to your heart?
Larry Kramer
Laugh, and the world longs to be your friend.
Richelle E. Goodrich
What has happened, and is happening, to our under-standing of what law is for is subtler but no less portentous: we have come to mistakenly define what law is for. These mistakes do not result from unsuccessful efforts to get the matter right, unfortunately. Instead, lawmakers have lately deemed the truth about persons, marriage, family, and religion to be irrelevant to law. What these goods re-ally are does not matter, they say. Worst of all, the irrelevance of moral truth has been carefully cultivated: not considering who is really a person, or what marriage really is, or how religion truly works, has been celebrated as a great virtue of American public life, a trend that has be-come dominant since World War II.More exactly, under the influence of contemporary liberal doctrines about moral “neutrality,” our determination of what law is for has become the creature of consensus, not of what is, of what is true.6 The desideratum is not to get what law is for right, but to fit it all comfortably within dominant cultural mores and conventional morality. Our lawmakers have resolved that avoiding controversy is the overriding end of law, especially when it comes to considering what law is for. Our lawmakers correctly see that law’s moral foundation is potentially a source of great controversy. What they fail to recognize is that getting it wrong promotes the greatest injustice of all.
Gerard V. Bradley
But the question is, historically, part of the group that you're a part of - whether it's racial, gender, religious, whatever - how has your group fared historically? The groups that you're a part of? Like, for me, as an atheist, Jew, I'm gonna go on, uh - oh and Emma Goldman is one of my great heroes and I really think that anarchism is a fantastic principle by which to fashion a utopian society even if we can't get there. Like historically, that does not go well.
Jacob Appelbaum
Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway.The decisions you make today don't need to last forever. If circumstances change, your decisions CAN change. Decisions are temporary.Pay attention to today and worry about later when it gets here. Otherwise, you'll waste energy, time and money fixating on problems that may never materialize."~ An excerpt from the awesome book, "Rework
Jason Fried
I'm really too young to go out into the world alone," he thought as he lay down.
E B White
The space reminded me of the small hay-bale clubhouses and scrap-wood tree forts that my brothers and I had made as kids - high up spaces where you could see things differently, where you could get your bearings.
Dee-Williams
It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.
Bill Bryson
As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
John Steinbeck
To be a leader, take action and be an example. To be an adviser, be wise.
Debasish Mridha
Think about people in your own life who you have envied for one reason or another. It may surprise you to know that they do not see themselves the way that you do. Maybe they are all smiles on the outside but have personal struggles and trials that you would never guess from first glance.
Lindsey Rietzsch
Soon, nobody was leaving their cubicles to talk anymore, and we were either e-mailing each other random thoughts or scheduling meetings, or speaking over an instant message chat.
Christopher Herz
To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.
John Scalzi
When you are secure in yourself, know what turns you on, and enjoy watching your partner watch you experience sexual pleasure, you have a highly novel relationship grounded in love. The experience of seeing and being seen fuels lust and desire. This is exactly the way you integrate healthy lust and love into your sex life. It’s relational sex, not the old pornographic sex of past addictions.
Alexandra Katehakis
O gouvernment francais, I think it was not very clever of You to put this terrible doll in La Ferte; for when Governments are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back at the microscopic knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts.
E.E. Cummings
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
Hope is the most evil of all emotions
Charity Parkerson
I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them
Maurice Sendak
Gripping her wrists, he pinned her tight to the vanity. “That sex as a weapon thing can only get you so far, Tess.”Wanna bet? “I’m not damaged, cowboy. I don’t have hang-ups about my body, I don’t use sex to mask my problems”—much—“and right now, if you don’t touch me in some very hot, very wet places, I might die.
Kate Meader
You are okay?" he asked. "Not eaten by monsters?""Not even a little bit." I showed him that I still had both arms and both legs, and Tyson clapped happily."Yay!" he said. "Now we can eat peanut butter sandwiches and ride fish ponies! We can fight monsters and see Annabeth and make things go BOOM!"I hoped he didn't mean all at the same time, but I told him absolutely, we'd have a lot of fun this summer.
Rick Riordan
When you´re at the point you feel you have nothing to live or thrive fo, be like a camera, use your negatives to develop
Jared Leto
Henry lifted his head and looked directly at me. I froze where I stood, feeling as if he had just told me a secret with that look. It was new . It was a question and a statement and a quick, hidden secret all at once..
Julianne Donaldson
Any problem, and I emphasize "any" problem, represents our inability to consciously connect to our Source in the moment.
Wayne W. Dyer
Ten years from now, make sure you can say that you CHOSE your life, you didn’t SETTLE for it.
Mandy Hale
You are beautiful. You are unique. Your heart holds celestial love which flows like a mighty river through you to nourish the universe.
Debasish Mridha
We are here to love. Everything else is distraction.
Scott Stabile
We're on a hunt, Cooper. When you're on a hunt, you do whatever it takes.
Tamora Pierce
Over half a million women are raped in this country every year, and only a fraction of them report it because they're too ashamed. It’s a really screwed up world, but its not your fault, and what happened to you, it doesn't make you the monster.
Mariska Hargitay
When man penetrates the mysteries of Nature, the "facts of Nature" become transparent symbols, revealing the "divine energies" and the "angelic" state which fallen man has lost, and which he may recover only for a moment, as when he is enraptured by the beauty of music or of a lovely face. At such moments man forgets his limited self, his individualistic dream, and participates in the cosmic dream, thus becoming freed from the prison of his own carnal soul.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
In my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting
Joanna Russ
Look upward to himLook upward on our goalKeep your eyes on himLook upward to him
April Nichole
You have to actively listen to your clients and provide the service they’re looking for!
John Di Lemme
Beckendorf closed eyes tight and brought his hand up to his watch.from that distance, the explosion shook the world. Heat seared the back of my head. The Princess Andromeda blew up from both sides, a massive fireball ofgreen flame roiling into the dark sky, consuming everything....I stared out the window into deep blue water. Beckendorf was supposed to go to college in the fall. He had a girlfriend, lots of friends, his whole life ahead of him. He couldn't be gone.
Rick Riordan
One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?
Gregory Maguire
The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. [Chomsky in an interview with Chris Hedges in 2010]
Chomsky Noam
I think it’s the whole ‘bad boy who’s so good but destined to break your heart’ fantasy. Which doesn’t sound like much of a fantasy when you put the broken heart part in the picture, but it is. It so is.
Lisa Renee Jones
MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time
Lisa Cron
I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance
Jon Stewart
My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like hers, a life of promiscuity, rootlessness, and substance abuse, resentment and fear tend to replace all reasonable and proper emotions, and the world becomes your enemy.
J. Robert Lennon
You did what you did out of love. I can't be mad at you over that. It was stupid, but that's how love is. Do you have any idea what I'd do for you? To keep you safe?
Richelle Mead
I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.I know how they make up my thoughts.These thoughts.
Ted Chiang
I swallowed hard. It was my life. And it was my choice how I decided to live it.
Heather Brewer
Rules should always be bent, if not broken. It's the only way to have any fun.
Alyson Noel
How one responds in these dire circumstances says a lot about one's faith and the strength of one's beliefs.
Tim Hiller
Jenifer always taught me that starting a job was one thing―—and admirable―—but that following through and completing―—well, that’s where the bravery is.
Valerie Estess
Get married because you can’t imagine another day without talking with that person, because that person makes your day sunnier. Don’t get married because you don’t want to be alone.
Lynne Silver
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
Henry David Thoreau
His lips tasted cool and sharp, peppermint, winter, but his hands, soft on the back of my neck, promised long days and summer and forever.
Maggie Stiefvater