Quotes by American Authors - Page 2573

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.
Laini Taylor
We are always people that are in the making, constantly adapting to accommodate the roads we walk. As we learn, it changes us. As we go about our course, we grow, and prune everything around us; friends, beliefs, desires. Our past experiences plant the seeds needed for our future roads, with all its turns, speed, and treachery.
Kat Lahr
Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new forms again and again. At present we are living in an era when many of the basic tenets of Christianity, which has supported Western spiritual values for almost two thousand years, have come into conflict with the conclusions of science and philosophy. While religions have lost much of their power, science and technology have not been able to generate convincing value systems to replace them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere.
Bill Wilson
If your faith doesn't remove the mountain... Get to climbing.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as 'Father' at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.
Donald Miller
Fear is the soul's signal for rallying.
Henry Ward Beecher
You will not pass!” Roman thundered.Great. Now he had decided he was Gandalf.
Ilona Andrews
We are entrusting thousands of strangers with our innermost thoughts and feelings, and then we're expecting them to be careful with those feelings. As much as we want it to be, the Internet is not a safe space. It is not a place where we can lay our burdens down and heal. Why? Because there are too many people there who do not give an ounce of a shit about our well-being. They do not deserve our rawness, and they will not treat it with care.
Luvvie Ajayi
You don't know what you can get away with until you try.
Colin Powell
Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.
Tom Hanks
I stood like Adam in his lonely gardenOn that first morning, shaken out of sleep,Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
Mary Oliver
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be assured that there is no sin you have ever committed that the blood of Jesus Christ cannot cleanse.
Billy Graham
Children run everywhere for a reason--it's fun. Grown-ups can forget that sometimes.
Jim Butcher
Even though Sean still held my head down I was the only one who thought to ask"Who's driving the boat?" Over the motor I heard girls screaming at us the instant before we crashed.
Jennifer Echols
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear-end collision and Man will never know that what hit him from behind was Man.
James Thurber
There is such a thing as too much couth.
S.J. Perelman
In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.
Chuck Klosterman
Demane: "Gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”"Do doubt," Comalo nodded mellowly. "No doubt. I'd always maybe thought it was something like that.
Kai Ashante Wilson
I mostly felt fortunate, to have lived here, in this house, in this town, with this family and these parents, and tried to think of all the things that had influenced me along the way.
Jason Gay
In your tragedies you will find your most magnificent opportunities for rebirth.
Bryant McGill
Gage is waiting on the makeshift bed when she enters the room she’s been sleeping in. The small lantern in the corner barely lights his features. His shoulders are hunched, his hands clasped together before him, and when he looks up, his face is downcast. There are a number of reasons why he would look this way, but the worst possible thing comes to mind first.Someone is dead.
Laura Kreitzer
Every day give yourself a good mental shampoo.
Sara Jordan
It is so beautiful to be loved as Laurie loves me; he isn’t sentimental, doesn’t say much about it, but I see and feel it in all he says and does, and it makes me so happy and so humble that I don’t seem to be the same girl I was. I never knew how good and generous and tender he was till now, for he lets me read his heart, and I find it full of noble hopes and impulses and purposes, and am so proud to know it’s mine. He says he feels as if he ‘could make a prosperous voyage now with me aboard as mate, and lots of love for ballast.’ I pray he may, and try to be all he believes me, for I love my gallant captain with all my heart and soul and might, and never will desert him while God lets us be together. Oh, Mother, I never knew how much like heaven this world could be when two people love and live for one another!
Louisa May Alcott
A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.
Gary Lutz
...vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.
Thomas Jefferson
There’s often a reason why people and dogs bite. It’s about self-protection. If we respect what we may not know about the suffering of others and look at them compassionately, we open the door that can lead to understanding.
Jennifer Skiff
There’s a huge difference for taking responsibility for one’s actions, and taking credit, and in this scenario I think we need to give credit where credit is due. I won’t take responsibility for my teacher’s drinking problem, but I will take credit for it.
Benjamin Tomes
It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don't? Now she was me - the familiar stranger. She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair - long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma’s had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth - more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I’d always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn’t that my skin was suddenly so white ... maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting. I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness ... as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger ... more barbaric. From this day on my life would never be the same. And for a moment — just an instant—I forgot about the horror of not belonging and felt a shocking burst of pleasure, while deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother’s people rejoiced.
P.C. Cast
When nothing seems to help I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two and I know it was not that blow that did it but all that had gone before.
Jacob A. Riis
Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication
Jonathan Gottschall
With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
Harper Lee
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Ivy Baker Priest
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
Charles Bukowski
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
Ronald Reagan
[Christ] has accomplished your salvation. But He has not yet perfected your circumstances. Do not be confused in the two.
Kristen Heitzmann
I thank You God for this most amazing day for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
E.E. Cummings
If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It’s a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.
Gary L. Francione
In the mind of the kid in skinny jeans leading the worship band, there isn’t a large enough gap between holiness and sinfulness, truth and error, demons and angels, or heaven and hell.
Kevin Swanson
Will doesn't have to be struggle!
Tae Yun Kim
The point of dreams was never to be the affordable option, it was the one everyone else saw as a mistake and every creative person saw as an opportunity.
Anastasia Bolinder
Get scared later, and if you're scared now remember what Kit always said. If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery. And you want to be brave, don't you, Snicket?
Lemony Snicket
We want to help you regain clarity about your individual power. Everyone has it. No one can ever take it away from you. No one can ever do anything "bad" to you. No one can assert into your experience. Everything, without exception, comes only by your individual invitation to it. Do you understand the process of asking? When you give something your attention and it becomes your dominant vibration relative to the subject-that is your asking. So, deliberate creating is not so much about looking out into the world and saying, "Oh, there are things that are good that I want to create or attract into my experience, and there are things that are bad that I don't want to create or attract into your my experience." Deliberate creating is more about deliberate allowing. Deliberate allowing is more like deliberate vibration.
Abraham-Hicks
To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Live your everyday extraordinary!
Charles F. Glassman
There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells to art?"Artists come together with the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities. Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it's not art. Your job is to draw a line from your art to your life that is straight and clear.
David Bayles
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Sinclair Lewis
I have rubbed, knocked and brushed up against a thousand windows, trying to get an image.
Anthony Liccione
One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.
Joseph Campbell
Fearlessness is not what you do to win, but what you don't do. When you love yourself as much as your God, you won't see other people as the source of your pain. Rather, you will see who you have become because you honestly believed that your chains would be broken through hatred, instead of kindness.
Shannon L. Alder
The minute we moved in (1712 North Crescent Heights), Dennis Hopper decided to give a party for Andy (Warhol), who was coming out to Los Angeles, and he decided that the one thing that would really make the house stand out, fabulously, would be billboards. So he papered the downstairs bathrooms with billboards. He had also decided that the food at the party would be hot dogs and chili. So we had a hot-dog stand! And Dennis had found huge papier-mâché Mexican figures with firecrackers hanging on them.
Brooke Hayward
Redefining moments offer us the opportunity to perpetually re-invent ourselves, and as long as we occupy a human body, these opportunities will continue to present themselves. You were born to be you, to unfold the truth of who you are. The same is true for everyone else. Every moment has the potential to be a redefining moment when we utilize the opportunity to look more deeply into the mystery of the true Self and learn how to actualize Its qualities in our daily lives. The goal is to increase our awareness that, irrespective of where we are or what we are doing, there stands before us a door in every present moment that, when consciously opened, invites us to step into a deeper knowing of who we truly are. In other words, every encounter (chance or otherwise), event, or circumstance, be it good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, is a portal to a redefining moment and who we will choose to be in that situation. The question to consider is, will we be consciously present enough in the moment to recognize the opening when it occurs and step through the door, or will our mind be too full of distractions?
Dennis Merritt Jones
We must think beyond ourselves
Kevin J. Anderson
Life is always speaking to us at every moment.
Bryant McGill
In choosing a mate, don't pick the tallest and most handsome or the most beautiful. Don't choose one just because that person raises your physical passions. Look for the person who is good from within, the one with substance and worth.
Helen Quist Milligan
The king should be the servant of his people, and seek to uplift them and their lives.
Aleksandra Layland
I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.
Ernest O. Lawrence
Identify your Radar – it’s your brain functioning optimally; not a vague intuition or cosmic sixth sense.Train your Radar in key areas like: evaluating people, personal safety, healthy relationships, physical and mental well-being, money and credit cards, career choice, how to get organized.Meet the Radar Jammers. They have the power to turn down or turn off our clear thinking Radars.
Some are well known: alcohol and drugs, peer pressure, infatuation, sleep deprivation.
Others are surprising: showing off, fake complexity, anger, unthinking religions, the need for speed, dangerous personality disorders, and even fast food!
Learn reasonable approaches and specific techniques to deal with them all.
C.B. Brooks