Quotes by American Authors - Page 2579

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary
William S Burroughs
Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.
Rube Goldberg
Being compassionate can be an exciting exercise of embracing life if you let it be.
Amy Leigh Mercree
She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.
Lorrie Moore
No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.
Eleanor Roosevelt
One of the most remarkable contributions of humans to the world is our capacity for ideas.
Richard J. Borden
We share that misfortune, reaper...
Rachel Vincent
We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.
Ronald Reagan
Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.
Siri Hustvedt
Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe.
George R.R. Martin
The only way he could truly stick out in New Orleans was if he were walking down the street on fire. A businessman in suit and tie would stick out more than the characters Jackson passed on those old streets.
Hunter Murphy
Why do you care?" His eyes looked casually over my shoulder, down the hallway then flicked back to me. "Are you jealous?" his left eyebrow rose sli
Leah Spiegel
A fool thinks that he can cheat others, but a prudent man knows that he can only cheat himself.
Debasish Mridha
It's true what they say, you know. First fuck. First love. First kill. You never forget your first.
Nenia Campbell
Wisdom may teach you that all places are one, but love shows you how to get there.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
There are really two essential things in campaigning. First, you must be in good humor. If you're going to be a raffle, you are to stay home. Second, you are to make sense in your speeches. These aren't the two things you must do. Unless you're saying, if you can be in good humor when you're exhausted. – Henry Cabot Lodge
David Pietrusza
DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist?EA: It didn't -- it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth.
Emilie Autumn
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
Truman Capote
We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.
Jesse Cozean
Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Because after a time having a secret and nobody knowing you have a secret is no fun. And although you don't want others to know what the secret is, you want them to at least know you have one.
E.L. Konigsburg
Olivia, I’ll put on a show in front of your friends, at your work, whenever we’re in public. But I’m growing tired of pretending when we’re alone. Don’t tempt me.
Jessica Hawkins
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
Kahlil Gibran
It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have 'something worth fighting for' they do not feel like fighting.
Eric Hoffer
Education and Training For Life
David Dweck
It is said with truth that every building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of knowledge, extracted and compiled by many learned men, each of whom builds upon the works of those who proceeded him.
George R.R. Martin
Did I mention really, really jealous.
Molly Ringle
Every action or perceived inaction shapes credibility.
Mindy Hall
When faith simplifies things that need to remain complex, instead of giving us strength to live with complexity, when it gives us answers where none exist, instead of helping us appreciate the sacredness of living with questions, when it offers certainty when there needs to be doubt, and when it tells us that we have arrived when we should be searching-then there is a problem with that faith.
Brad Hirschfield
We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood or exaggeration in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.
Christopher Hitchens
Wanderlust is incurable.
Mark Jenkins
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
Music fills the infinite to give us infinite joy.
Debasish Mridha
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Janis Joplin
I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.
Arthur C. Danto
We have little power to choose what happens, but we have complete power over how we respond.
Arianna Huffington
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.]
James Madison
I think she's afraid to even hug me now. It's my fault, but I miss it, Andrew. I miss it so much it aches sometimes, you
J.H. Trumble
Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance.” His smile broadened. “Mine.
Patrick Rothfuss
TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Howard Zinn
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
His mouth captured hers with a strong, soft heat and Celine discovered something far sexier than this man’s voice or his body. His kiss. She never had the chance to think of a protest. To think at all. She had been kissed before, but never like this. It was neither awkward and teasing nor forceful and overpowering, but long, slow, confident, and devastating. It was as if he were binding them together, deftly drawing her soul into his.
Shelly Thacker
If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.
Baratunde R. Thurston
Once you get people laughing they're listening and you can tell them almost anything.
Herb Gardner
Help me out,” I pleaded. “You’ve left me alone to deal with this situation, and now we’re being dealt the consequences.”I swore I heard Tom growl. I actually pulled the phone from my ear to stare at it to make sure it hadn’t turned into a tiny lion.
Laura Kreitzer
Broken doesn't mean we're valued any less, it just means we've loved someone so much and so fiercely that losing them feels like we've lost part of ourselves.
B.N. Toler
I am constantly amazed when I talk to young people to learn how much they know about sex and how little about soap.
Billie Burke
If you do not direct your path, the world will. Don't ever let anyone make you go where you do not want to be.
Toni Sorenson
I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.
Pat Conroy
Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.
Gary Kowalski
If you work hard and get help from good friends, together you can overcome almost any challenge, no matter how great.
Mike Massimino
He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein
We can disagree with one another without being raging, judgmental, spiteful, self-righteous lunatics. Can’t we?
Scott Stabile
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
Tim O'Brien
I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters’s death was Augustus Waters.
John Green
The truth is there are always three choices: the right one, the wrong one and the one that is called "No Choice". As you may guessed, the "No Choice" one is a rule of a bad interpreter.
Galina Nelson
To become a lifelong reader, one has to do a lot of varied and interesting reading.
Kelly Gallagher
Speaking of tongues, they are the main reason I'm a nervous wreck. Ryan is a senior and well, sadly, I'm not all that experienced with boys. I mean, I'm a freshman and have been to dances with boys my age and even have gone out with boys, but I've never really kissed them. Not like I hope to kiss Ryan anyway. Bobby Robinson did shove his tongue into my mouth one time, when we were kissing under the bleachers at a football game, but it didn't feel so good. I'm pretty sure he didn't have it exactly right. So I talked to my friends, Katie and Lisa, about how to properly make out. But, well, here is just a bit of their unhelpful advice.Just let him take the lead, do what ever he does.Um, couldn't that get me into a lot of trouble?Just sort of kiss his tongue, but try not to drool.Don't open your mouth too wide.And then, just open your mouth wide.See?Stupid, conflicting information.And this from girls who supposedly know how to do this!I feel like I'm an undercover CIA agent trying to wrestle vital information out of a ruthless double agent, and the fate of the free world depends upon it. All the while, the President is yelling at me in a panic, saying, Somebody! Anybody! Just get me the truth!
Jillian Dodd
A statement made from the heart has an aroma, it has lights, it has earth andsun and moon. It is colorful and it grasps the attention of those around you,like the sunset.
Beth Johnson