Quotes by American Authors - Page 2569

It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands.
David Wroblewski
Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.
Criss Jami
Joseph, you’re out of clean towels.” Lucia poked her head into the living room, the rest of her hidden behind the wall. Her red hair dripped water onto my wooden floors.“She’s in the buff.” Jenna guffawed. Gabriella rolled her eyes, beaming.I rose. “Go back to the bathroom. I’ll bring you a towel,” I ordered Lucia. She disappeared down the hall.“You have naked angels running around your house,” Jenna continued through her laughter. Gabby laughed louder.
Laura Kreitzer
Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place.
Alfie Kohn
I have no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table. Given the subtleties of sin and the persistence of evil, we would soon be living in moral anarchy and political chaos if there were no provision for justice.
Eugene H. Peterson
I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
Diane Arbus
You have so many relationship-worthy qualities. Either the guys around here are complete idiots or you’ve never shown them the real you.
Wendy S. Marcus
When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first period of real independence, one's senses are so alert, one's sentiments so finely attuned that every conversation, every look, every laugh may be writ indelibly upon one's memory. And the friends that one happens to make in those impressionable years? One will meet them forever after with a welling of affection.
Amor Towles
What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
Jon Krakauer
Nah. I'm a tough cookie. Except for the cancer, I'm fine.
Lisa Scottoline
Racism doesn't have to fit our stereotypes for what it is in order for it to hurt - but it also means that tools for dismantling the system don't have it fit our stereotype either.
Simon S Tam
There's a thread that binds all of us together pull one end of the thread the strain is felt all down the line.
Rosamond Marshall
Corporations turned the human into a robot a long time ago.
Steven Magee
In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.
Garth Risk Hallberg
We met less than a week ago and in that time I've done nothing but lie and cheat and betray you. I know. But if you give me a chance...all I want is to protect you. To be near you. For as long as I'm able.
Marissa Meyer
What are you? The pregnant MacGyver?” “Best compliment I’ve had in a while.
Cristin Harber
I must admit that when I chose the name, 'vitamine,' I was well aware that these substances might later prove not to be of an amine nature. However, it was necessary for me to choose a name that would sound well and serve as a catchword, since I had already at that time no doubt about the importance and the future popularity of the new field.
Casimir Funk
While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.
Mary Roach
While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.
James MacDonald
You know you're getting old when you start watching golf on TV and enjoying it.
Larry Miller
But so often, things of great beauty are full of great corruption.
Francine Rivers
In the space between waves, we have the choice. To jump, to dive, to ride, to play. To face what's coming without running away.
Patty Chang Anker
I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid 'us vs. them.
Aspen Baker
I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to the worlds unknown. 'I could just live here,' I said.
Maggie Stiefvater
Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.
Criss Jami
There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Next to the first Henry and Meg, Henry had written, “Promise?” Well, that genie’s out of the bottle and there’s no stuffing her back in.
Laura Anderson Kurk
Your perception about the world creates your thoughts, your thoughts create your desires and intention, and your intentions manifest as your reality.
Debasish Mridha
Never be afraid to offer a smile; sure the risk is that a few foolish people may misinterpret your kindness as weakness, but the sweet reward is that as you make new friends and encourage others, the foolish will learn the error of their ways because you did at least show them your teeth.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
He was an animal. Everyone knows never to corner one that's injured...even if it is just his pride.
Kayla Krantz
Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.
Jodi Picoult
I shivered as the cold was all encompassing, not just from being outdoors, but from being read as well. He had a way of seeing through me. It was as unnerving as it was bonding and I couldn't figure out how the two could co-exist.
Donna Lynn Hope
Because Niall Lynch was the biggest liar of them all, and he’d stuffed all of that into his eldest son. There was not much difference between a lie and a secret.
Maggie Stiefvater
A cat never discusses his business with humans, not even Princesses. A cat never explains and never apologizes. A cat never alibis. You must accept a cat as it is and for what it is and not expect more than the pleasure of its company.
Terry Brooks
So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment.
Criss Jami
Were it not for my little jokes I could not bear the burdens of this office.
Abraham Lincoln
Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?
James S.A. Corey
Corporate media rarely reports the fact that police internal affairs uphold hardly any complaints from the masses.
Steven Magee
God is merciful cant we all be on the right track of faith but just using different roads?
Ali Al-Ahmed
Am I afraid of ghosts? My life experience has taught me to be much more afraid of what a human is capable of in broad daylight than what a ghost is capable of at night.
Steve Maraboli
Though Abdul had been as afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did not disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.
Katherine Boo
Rich or poor it’s nice to have money
Alan Sheinwald
What If Following Her HeartMeans Rose Could Lose Her Best Friend Forever?
Richelle Mead
I saw myself.... In the time I watched, I saw strength—and frailty. Pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly, much. Of intentions, many good ones; but many more left undone. In this, alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this, too, I saw.... Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same. You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.
Lloyd Alexander
Life isn't always about fireworks. Your fireworks will come, Sarah. And they'll fizzle out just as fast. Life's an experience, not a destination. All of us have the same destination, but not one of us has an identical experience. You'll find someone who will be there when the fireworks fizzle out and the sky turns black and love you just the same. That’s the one to hold onto.
Marilyn Grey
We want to believe that this life is longer than it is, but in the grand scheme of the universe our existence equals the amount of time it takes a warm breeze to blow through your hair on a spring day.
Paul S. Anderson
Those are exactly the kind of memories I try to avoid, but they're like abestos: invisible and deadly. You need special gear to get rid of them.
Kristin Hannah
The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.
David K. Shipler
Balance: a dance with how and when.
Soul Dancer
It is the vocation of the Christian in every generation to out-think all opposition.
Elton Trueblood
If you are allowing something to upset or anger you, try this: Before giving in to those negative emotions, try and think of one positive thing, one learning that you will gain, a single glimpse of something that you can use to build a positive future. Here’s a nudge to push you along: You own your mind. You choose to be either a victim or to take control.
Michael Holbrook
I wonder what else I could do that I never thought I could.
Wendy Mass
Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
John Green
Every once in a while I don't think it's a bad idea for lawyers to remember that what goes on, at least on some level of our brains, is that we have to imagine everything coming apart. ... It's what we are. Out of control, always prepared, Boy Scout control freaks.
Lawrence Joseph
Jealousy is not a result of love. It is a result of crossed relationship boundaries. Love and relationships should not be confused.
Julieanne O'Connor
Fixed stars govern a life
Sylvia Plath
Real secrets mean more than hiding that card game from you daddy. Real secrets can be hurtful. Make people do bad things.
Augusta Scattergood
People in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say,'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.'Or they can be in negative sentiment override, said that even a relatively new tool thing that a partner says get perceived as negative. In negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change their states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.
John Gottberg
Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.
David Brion Davis
We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose.” School—from pre-K to postdoc programs—exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues.
Marc Aronson