Quotes by American Authors - Page 2550

Why don't you check out those teenagers in the middle row? They've been going at it like dogs in heat ever since the previews. They're probably both werewolves. And even if they aren't, you should throw them out on principle alone.
Rusty Fischer
When do we stop crying over our own injuries? When we get old enough to swallow our tears, or when the people we love stop responding to our cries of pain?
Carol Cassella
[I]t takes so little effort and money to get rid of malaria, to bring in clean water, to give people a chance at an education. When you don't have hope, that's when people start to do weird, horrible, violent things. That's at the bottom of it. It's just a question of prioritizing. The funds are t
Susan Sarandon
I don't know what it is, but even when I pretty much like a man, after I date him a while, he gets to seem kind of tiresome. I just can't be bothered to act interested anymore, and then I finally tell him I don't want to go out anymore. They always get upset. - Lillian
Charlaine Harris
You may think you've hit rock bottom in your life but guess what—there's more crud underneath those rocks.
Richelle E. Goodrich
When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife.
Laini Taylor
To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.
Truman G. Madsen
When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.
Shirley Jackson
Desire is the key to motivation, but determination, commitment, and actions are the keys to success.
Debasish Mridha
How can it feel so perfect with someone one second, but then the next second everything’s suddenly all wrong?
Susan Colasanti
The thought of being with Shay Wilder makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a butter knife
Lisa McMann
...this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world's lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.
Liz Moore
And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...
Ray Bradbury
The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
Dan Simmons
It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
John Pipkin
She stood on the ledge of his smile and looked over the edge.
Maggie Stiefvater
His finger pressed my lips to silence me. “So, tell me, my beautiful, little demon, how does it feel? Did you enjoy seducing Caleb to get what you wanted? Or were you so enraptured by the green of his eyes that you longed for his tongue in your mouth and his hands on your body?” I gasped, but he went on before I could respond. “Truthfully, I’d prefer the former, because it would mean since he’s bailed on the deal, I’m the only one left to help you. I must warn you, however, it’s going to take a whole lot of seduction to get me to help you now.
L.J. Kentowski
I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees' lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human.
Sue Hubbell
The life you want is a manifestation of self-realization.
Bryant McGill
The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.
Kristen Henderson
Red in the head, Silver in the heart
Victoria Aveyard
Eternity is not just looking to the future and our place with God in Heaven, but it is looking at our Eternity as if it were only moments away.
Beth Nimmo
Sometimes I’m asked to list the most important steps in preparing for an evangelistic mission, and my reply is always the same: prayer . . . prayer . . . prayer.
Billy Graham
Without making a conscious decision to do so, Drew grabbed a fistful of her ridiculous blond wig and tugged.Some of her hair came with it and he felt a moment of satisfaction when she howled. Bianca’s real hair was a matted mess against her head. He looked at the wig in his hand and moved his gaze to the water fountain.Bianca’s eyes widened. “Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.” “Don’t do what? Don’t do this?” He dangled the wig above the fountain.She raised her hands and crept toward him. “Just give it back, Drew, and we’ll be even. Okay?”“Aaawww, is Bianca getting worried? Poor baby.”“Come on.”“Say you’re sorry.” He shook it up and down.“What? No way.”With a shrug, he tossed the wig into the water fountain.
Lindy Zart
You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.
Craig Ferguson
Anyway, in those years, I was happy, as to one extent or another I have always been happy. The forest was not a wilderness to me, but served instead as my private garden, comforting in spite of its vastness, and endlessly mysterious.The more familiar a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.
Dean Koontz
He firmly pulled her body against his and he brushed her lips with his. Staring into her eyes, he lightly slid his tongue across her bottom lip. She drew a deep, staggered breath in response to the wave of heat she felt flushing through her. Derrick smiled at her. Then, he softly kissed her. He lightly swept his tongue between her lips, pressing his warm, soft lips to hers. He slid his hands up her body and cradled her face with his hands. Then, he passionately kissed her, tickling her tongue with his. He sucked her lips, gently, as though he was sampling nectar on a delicate petal. Then, with an intense urgency, he dipped his tongue past her lips, caressing her tongue with his. She felt fluttering inside. Anne’s body craved him. A shallow hum escaped from within her in response to how he was making her feel. She could feel his body responding to her. He was breathing heavier which was waking Anne’s primal needs. The tidal wave of lust that had just churned within her was slowly calming as his kiss became more subtle and tender. He gently pressed his lips against hers. He pulled back a little and looked away, exhaling.
Laney Smith
Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.
Alfred Korzybski
She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
Khaled Hosseini
Like vampires and extremely rich people, black folk can sense one another. Use your Spidey Sense (Blacky Sense?). Use your blackdar to inspect the workplace for signs of Other Negroes. They may be working security for the building. They may be in administrative support. They may be among the associate pool, or they may even be in upper management. Black folk can be anywhere. After all, you're here. But one of the biggest mistakes you can make as The Black Employee is to assume you are the only one.
Baratunde R. Thurston
Christmas is about change. It’s a time we open our hearts before we open our presents.
Toni Sorenson
For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.
Michael Shermer
But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.
Jhumpa Lahiri
But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
Mitch Albom
I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
Wallace Stegner
Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art.
Libba Bray
They told me it was impossible so I tried and failed. Then I tried again and again until I made it possible.
Debasish Mridha
And you? Did you find the doorknob?”Hadrian picked up a jug and downed several swallows, drinking so quickly some of the water dripped down his chin. He poured some in his palm and rinsed his face, running his fingers through his hair.“I didn’t even get close enough to see a door.”“Well, look on the bright side”—Hadrian smiled—“at least you weren’t captured and condemned to death this time.”“That’s the bright side?”“What can I say? I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy.
Michael J. Sullivan
I was born with an adult head and a tiny body. Like a 'Peanuts' character.
Jon Stewart
I would rather live short and right then long and wrong.
John Paul Warren
The perplexity, the potential— God’s own crucible was not for angels.
Johnny Worthen
Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.
Ambrose Bierce
For love to work, each spouse has to realize his or her freedom. And boundaries help define the freedom we have and the freedom we do not have. Marriage is not slavery. It is based on a love relationship deeply rooted in freedom. Each partner is free from the other and therefore free to love the other. Where there is control, or perception of control, there is not love. Love only exists where there is freedom.
Henry Cloud
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein
We must question every inner-belief we possess without fear or attachment.
Bryant McGill
She wondered if he thought this was all a lark, a game. She'd been to Disney World once. There the fairies were cute and sweet and didn't attempt to kill the visitors. Living here wasn't anything like the human faerie fairs or theme parks.
Terry Spear
The vice president (Nixon) seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.
Ann Whitman
Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
Julia Cameron
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
Herman Melville
Remember, we all make our work available in a commercial transaction, the terms of which we, ourselves, dictate. If we give it away for free, that’s our decision, and there is no refuge in the lame defense, “what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opi
Pete Morin
They did not realize what a supreme effort of courage it required to make this young girl go out alone into the wide world, and face its vastness and its strangeness.
Constance Fenimore Woolson
I can fly around the world in one night. I can wink and go up a chimney in a split second. I can be in 500 shopping malls on the same weekend. I can even fit enough gifts for the entire world into one tiny sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, but I CANNOT FIX THIS CONFOUNDED COMPUTER!
Bobbi A. Chukran
In discovery- driven planning, learning is the essential unit of progress. A course correction isn’t equivalent to failure, it’s an opportunity to re-calibrate so you can move more quickly up the learning curve.
Whitney Johnson
There's sometimes a tugging feeling you get to push further when you aren't being challenged enough or when things get too comfortable.
Criss Jami
To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact
Peter Singer
If we do not objectify, and feel instinctively and permanently that words are not the things spoken about, then we could not speak abouth such meaningless subjects as the 'beginning' or the 'end' of time. But, if we are semantically disturbed and objectify, then, of course, since objects have a beginning and an end, so also would 'time' have a 'beggining' and an 'end'. In such pathological fancies the universe must have a 'beginning in time' and so must have been made., and all of our old anthropomorphic and objectified mythologies follow, including the older theories of entropy in physics. But, if 'time' is only a human form of representation and not an object, the universe has no 'beginning in time' and no 'end in time'; in other words, the universe is 'time'-less. The moment we realize, feel permanently, and utilize these realizations and feelings that words are not things, then only do we acquire the semantic freedom to use different forms of representation. We can fit better their structure to the facts at hand, become better adjusted to these facts which are not words, and so evaluate properly m.o (multi-ordinal) realities, which evaluation is important for sanity.
Alfred Korzybski
There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.
Marilynne Robinson
The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: “expensive = good.
Robert B. Cialdini
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault.""You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.
Norton Juster