Quotes by American Authors - Page 2593

According to the Talmud, loshon hara kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is told. 'Kill' may strike the modern reader as a bit hyperbolic, but when you think of all the friendships lost, careers stunted, and opportunities thwarted as a result of gossip among women, violent language seems appropriate. We cause serious collateral damage to the advancement of our sex each time we perpetuate the stereotype that women can't get along.
Rachel Held Evans
If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?
Louis L'Amour
Each of you is a daughter of God. Reflect on all the wondrous meaning of that one paramount fact.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Love is not the answer, peace is. Throughout my whole life I have experienced and seen others use love as a reason to treat people with unkindness by being controlling, jealous, shouting in anger, and projecting guilt and shame. If you love someone but there is not peace in your heart when you think of that person then your work is not done. Do not stop at love, continue all the way towards the freedom of inner peace. Love starts when peace begins. Without peace love is simply a mask for our insecurity, judgment, and egoic attachments.
Alaric Hutchinson
It's funny how you can become something merely by forgetting who you once were.
Chrissy Moon
A lie told in the service of truth is virtue.
Brent Weeks
Madison sparkled like the words on her oversized chest. There was glitter embedded in her eye shadow, in her lip gloss, in her nail polish, hanging from her ears in shoulder grazing hoops, dangling from her wrists in blingy bracelets. If the lights went out in the hallway, she could light it up like a human disco ball.
Danielle Paige
I must have been chosen because I know it all from beginning to end. I am certainly not the story itself. I am only the grass that tattles on the wind.
Alfredo Véa
Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.
Marilynne Robinson
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.
Mark Twain
She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.
Rufi Thorpe
We must strive to become more daily. We must honestly assess our weaknesses and overcome them. We must work toward the highest possible version of ourselves. This is a worthy use of our time, but it is only when we do so with the ultimate aim of service to our fellow man that we really connect with something greater than ourselves. To contribute to the world in a positive way, this is the gift of life.
Chris Matakas
We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.
Virginia Satir
I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earlierst sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.
Frederick Douglass
Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?
Chuck Palahniuk
Happiness isn't complicated. It is a humble state of gratitude for simple pleasures, tender mercies, recognized blessings, and inherent beauty.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
John Quincy Adams
One cannot lead well until one learns to follow well.
Jacqueline Patricks
Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
Mark Twain
The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.
Dan Simmons
I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
John DeFrancis
We care (about prison education), very simply, because (prisoners) get out. Almost everyone who is locked up now is going to be set free one day. If we treat prisoners like animals the whole time they are locked up, that's what we'll get when they're back on the streets: wild, dangerous animals.
Christopher Zoukis
To challenge humanism in any field, you must possess a uniquely biblical view of God, man, law, and time.
Gary North
I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.David
Jeana Kendrick
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
Wendell Berry
You need to see a future with such clarity and desirability that you will go through all the uncomfortable things like throws at you to attain it.
Michael Hyatt
Our [theological] study informs our prayers, and our prayers enliven our study. We cannot choose between prayer and study; faithful theology requires prayerful study.
Kelly Kapic
A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.
Rachel Kushner
He considered telling her that she could, and often, if she married him.
Melanie Dickerson
- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
Richard Russo
We have to be willing to acknowledge the good, or all we bring is bitterness to the bad, and that doesn’t help make things any better.
Scott Stabile
And there were some things I didn't know I had until I lost them.
Veronica Roth
When you lose someone who's as close as your own skin, the only place you can find him again is hidden inside your memories.
Deborah Blumenthal
The mind, at length bereftOf thinking and its pain,Will soon disperse again,And nothing will remain:No, not a thing be left.Only the ardent eye,Only the listening earCan say, "The thrush was here!"Can say, "His song was clear!"Can live, before it die.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points.
Shannon L. Alder
Even then, I could still appreciate the moment of simply making sounds with a group of people. There is another place you go to in those instances, and it feels vast, refreshing, like you're creating your own air to breathe. And even though it's never going to happen again and there's a palpable sense of mediocrity, there's still a connection that you wouldn't have otherwise, to the sound, to the people.
Carrie Brownstein
Positiveness of Soul is favourably gained through the Love Nature, rather than through mental prowess. Though attaining positiveness of Soul through the mind is possible; it is inferior to the positiveness that has been developed through the Love Nature (one's inner Soul nature to love and have affection.)
C. JoyBell C.
You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.
Orson Scott Card
The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.
Madeleine L'Engle
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Peter Singer
I didn't ask to be born!""No, but I asked." He was breathing hard. His eyes hard and glinting with a fire that burned straight through me. "I asked for you every day of my life!
Airicka Phoenix
Success is something you experience when you act accordingly. Success is not something you have, it's something you do.
Steve Maraboli
If you want to see and feel magic first hand, read a book to your kid before bedtime. —Richard Due
Richard Due
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
Excerpt from Winning Streak, Las Vegas Sinners Book 3, coming later this year:Tonight’s ensemble was typical Madden. Dark and faded but expensive jeans, a fitted, black Vegas is For Lovers t-shirt and some Doc Martin boots. Okay, those were a little unusual. “We’re not going for a hike in the desert, are we?”“Not exactly.”“What is ‘not exactly’? I’m not a pee-behind-a-tree kind of girl.
Katie Kenyhercz
I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.
Robert Goolrick
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
Oliver Sacks
We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.
Sally Mann
He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books— a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone— when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure— but nothing more.
Erich Maria Remarque
Change is not always easy when patterns in our lives have existed so long.
Lolly Daskal
I think more people would stay active in church, if they didn't get so offended by the actions of members. Sometimes, you have to view places of worship as free mental health clinics, in order to deal with the piety or hypocrisy. Parishioners are a wounded souls in various stages of healing, who are being treated by angels, with credentials from the University of Hard Knocks. Some take their therapy seriously and try to practice what they learned. Yet, others down the sacrament like a healing dose of Prozac, with no other effort required. When you keep this in mind, you won't feel so annoyed by the personalities you encounter.
Shannon L. Alder
You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly."You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful.""Memory does play tricks on us.""No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake.
Orson Scott Card
I am kissing David Drucker. I am kissing David Drucker. I am kissing David Drucker. I Was wrong. I had assumed this would be his first kiss, that it would be fumbling and a bit messy but still fun. No way. Can’t be. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. How to cradle the back of my head with his hands. How to move in soft and slow, and then pick up the pace, and then slow down again. How to brush my cheeks with even smaller kisses, how to work his way down my jaw, and to soften the worry spot in the center of my brow. How to pause and look into my eyes, really look, so tenderly I feel it all the way down in my stomach. He even traces the small zigzag scar on my eyebrow with his fingertips, like it’s something beautiful. I could kiss him forever. I’m going to kiss him forever.
Julie Buxbaum
When you reach out to those you need to forgive, it is you that will be touched and healed.
Bryant McGill
I've heard many say "I'll sell my soul to the Devil"in hopes of gaining money, power or fame.Why do they think that they have that much worth over any other person?And the Devil if there is one wouldn't simply wait for them to condemn themselves on their own
Stanley Victor Paskavich
However, he was happy. He felt he was conquering nature. He laughed aloud. He felt he was stronger than the elements. In this type of weather animals hid in their holes and did not come out. He was out, fighting the elements. He was a man, master of the world.
Jack London
In trials of ir'n and silver fain“The dead will rise and walk again“The blesséd few that touch the light“Will aid the war against the night.“But one by one they all will die“Without a cause to rule them by“As Darkness spreads across the land“He'll wield the oceans in his hand.“Five warriors will oppose his reign“And overthrow the Shadow Thane“They come from sides both dark and light“The realm the mortals call “twilight.”“A magus crowned with boughs of fire“Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre“A beast of shadows touched with sight“Will claim a Dark One as her knight“The next, a prophet doomed to fail“Will find her powers to avail“The final: one mere mortal man“Who bears the mark upon his hand“The circle closes round these few“Made sacred by the bonds they hew“But if one fails then so shall all“Bring death to those of Evenfall.
Nenia Campbell
If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it.
Richard Bach
The deeper you love, the deeper you can feel, and the deeper you will understand love.
Debasish Mridha