Quotes by American Authors - Page 2526

It gets kind of zen after awhile, life is a journey, time is a river, the door is ajar.
Jim Butcher
No matter what your spiritual condition is, no matter where you find yourself in the universe, your choice is always the same: to expand your awareness or contract it.
Thaddeus Golas
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.
Padma Venkatraman
On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.
Carl Elliott
A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
She had always found villains more exciting than heroes. They had ambition, passion. They made the stories happen. Villains didn't fear death. No, they wrapped themselves in death like suits of armor! As she inhaled the school's graveyard smell, Agatha felt her blood rush. For like all villains, death didn't scare her. It made her feel alive.
Soman Chainani
What haunts me far more than anything I’ve ever done are the things I haven’t done.
Dan Pearce
The mindset, vision, competency, capability, culture and marketing opportunity are all great starting point for business model innovation.
Pearl Zhu
The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.
Abraham Lincoln
The languid transition from soft, pink-orange sunlight to deep blue darkness clashed with the clusterfuck that was my emotions.
Dan Elconin
The older you get, the harder it is to lose weight because by then your body and your fat have become super good friends.
Sariah Wilson
You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.
Jodi Picoult
What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises others make the decision.
Jeannette Rankin
Unsolicited advice is usually more about the needs of the giver than the receiver.
Charles F. Glassman
Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for -- annually, not oftener -- if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.
Mark Twain
The man was married to a half-fae, half-human woman, a banshee, who'd' just delivered twins. It was a wonder his hair wasn't completely prematurely white.
Erin Kellison
Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.
Abraham Verghese
We are all imperfect and no one is without flaws. And fortunately, ministry is not about leading people to ourselves, it’s about leading them back to the One who saved us. How tragic…that we often allow the image of perfection to cloud the need to show where His strength is made perfect in us.
Sarah Jakes
It's like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don't please her - I get shut out.
John Green
Happiness absolutely depends on how you think.
Debasish Mridha
The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
Spider Robinson
For the record, I do have genitals; and they are functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Chuck Lorre
Manager! Have brain - use it!
Gerry Geek
Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Mark Twain
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error.....The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy....Mass leaders in power have one concern wich overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.
Hannah Arendt
One never knows when one is going to get ambushed into learning something.
David N. Perkins
Plan to make good choices.
Leslie Monroe
The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life.The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage.Dare to breach the surface and sink.
Vera Nazarian
The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.
Jay Samit
Death is not a trip, but a destination.
Billy Graham
What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou
A = A is a simplification, one so radical that it sometimes utterly distorts reality. It skins reality alive. Is A = A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A = A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are just that - very, very simplified representations. Symbolic systems with massive powers. But symbolic systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to the richness of that which they attempt to represent. Symbol systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to science's greatest mystery, cosmic creativity.
Howard Bloom
The very fact that 'the mystical' is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes toward power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision!
Richard King
You are my world, my everything You stupid girl, you're gonna be the death of me So let me go, just let me be You stupid girl, I love the way you're killing me (killing me) You stupid girl (killing me) You stupid girl
Framing Hanley
The only way to rise above is to rise above. The only way to respond to wrong is with right. The only way to deal with injustice is to be just.
Nafisa Haji
I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.
Tony Magistrale
In the ten houses the police had scouted, I hadn't sensed anything more dangerous than a pot that prevents over-boiling.
N. E. Conneely
In two weeks my skin will have no memory of Olly's hand on mine, but my brain will remember. We can have immortality or the memory of touch. But we can't have both.
Nicola Yoon
Kids chase the love that eludes them.
Mitch Albom
We are accountable only to ourselves for what happens to us in our lives.
Mildred Newman
I was a married woman! she said. Why does every generation believe it is the discoverer of pleasure? Your father was a spectacular lover. Even through the wall, I could hear the triumph in her voice.
Karen Essex
Too many Christians reverse New Covenant commands as we seek, through condemnation of the world, the return of the never-existent, demonic myth of the "Christian Nation"!
Gary Patton
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late.
Marie Beynon Ray
Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.
Stewart Stafford
People simply feel better about themselves when they’re good at something.
Stephen R. Covey
I'm here because all fairy tales take place in the woods, King Cole, even those that don't.
Bill Willingham
Miracles can only happen when you expect miracles with all of your heart.
Debasish Mridha
I couldn’t live with myself if I thought nothing could get better.
Gloria Whelan
It doesn’t take great wealth or social influence to be faithful, but it does take obedience and endurance.
Billy Graham
My calm is like the tides: never at rest.
Marty Rubin
He’s America in action — opposed to quality.
James Purdy
My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it.Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.
Amy Fusselman
Don't spend your life wondering "what if" and worrying over something you have no control. What's done is done. Looking backwards will cause you to miss out on new blessings ahead. Move on.
Germany Kent
Betrayal converts our innocence to wisdom if we can let go of pain, bitterness, and fear and create enough self-love and safety for ourselves to allow it to do so.
Jewel
Now that’s true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.
Franny Billingsley
I felt afraid. No one would know that, not Mother and not Mike. I’d keep the fear pushed down inside of me, and no one would know it was there. “I’m awfully happy,” I wrote. I was. Awfully happy and awfully in love, and tomorrow I was marrying Mike.
Benedict Freedman
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
Chuck Klosterman
When she walked by the two officers, they didn't recognize her. "Have you seen the luscious bonbon with the golden braids?" She grinned up at them with such impish mischief that they almost forgot their quest for the singer. "She is with her lover," Hannah said. "But she can always handle one or two more." She winked at them. "Go there, through that door." She made her escape while the uniformed hobbledehoys gawked and gaped and finally burst into the dressing room where Franz, the three-hundred-pound juggling strongman, was adjusting his loincloth. "I ought not do it," Hannah said aloud to herself as chaos erupted behind her. "I just can't seem to help myself. it is a shame, really.
Laura L. Sullivan
I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa