Quotes by American Authors - Page 2598

Love has no limitations. It cannot be measured. It has no boundaries. Although many have tried, love is indefinable.
Steve Maraboli
How long since he'd been back home? Ten years? Fifteen? He'd stopped keeping track around the time he'd finally stopped looking over his shoulder. At the time, leaving had seemed too good to be true. He'd spent months feeling like he was half a step ahead of some nameless specter; like if he let his guard down, even for a second, whatever it was would drag him right back where he'd come from.
Laura Oliva
It's like an addiction, one I battle every day. It appeared at first drink. I was becoming the very thing I feared---my father's son. I wanted to be as far away from that Threshold as possible. I swore I'd never take another sip, no matter how crazy it made me. No matter how much it called to me. Resisting became easier with time.
Sara Ella
I guess it's better to have a chalk smile, than an ink smile. Where chalk changes with the direction of wind, ink stays as a deep stain. Like rain, sun and hail against a fake plant.
Anthony Liccione
A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought.
Joel Salatin
Always something new, always something I didn't expect, and sometimes it isn't horrible.
Robert Jordan
Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.
Laura Anderson Kurk
I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.
Jen Pollock Michel
[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.
Christopher Hitchens
Much of our lives involves the word ‘no.’ In school we are mostly told, ‘Don’t do it this way. Do it that way.’ But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
Marvin Bell
All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister... all the way up to “God.
Hunter S. Thompson
Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.
Barbara W. Tuchman
The dog looked up in entreaty. Liquid brown eyes begged: Take me with you. I’ll be good. Oh, the lies that dogs told.
Courtney Milan
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.
Thomas Ligotti
I am not a fan of books.
Kanye West
One has various things in the back of one's mind. Occasionally an opportunity presents itself to bring one forward. Most of these opportunities come to nothing. Once in a very great while one -- or two -- do come to something.
Robin McKinley
I picked up the nearest weapon I could lay my hands on: a stapler. I lifted it, going for “menacing.” I admit it lacked a certain elegance, but hey. It was worth a shot. David placed his hand on my arm and pushed it back down.“What?”“Just . . . that’s embarrassing for all of us,” he replied.
Rachel Hawkins
WORTHYIf you ever decide to feel— feel this:I love you. I always have. I always will.Not because you're charming, beautiful or lovable.But because I choose you.Everyday I wake up and I choose you— again, and again, and again.But if you cannot feel, and if you never feel this, then know:I do not love you. I never have. I never will.Because you're not worth my love.(Come back my love, I am drowning.)
Coco J. Ginger
Evelyn stared into the empty ice cream carton and wondered where the smiling girl in the school pictures had gone.
Fannie Flagg
One disease, long life; no disease, short life.
Benjamin Hoff
It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.
Deb Caletti
Love is not insatiable. What is insatiable is the need for love.
Marty Rubin
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
T.S Eliot
[Jack:] 'I was twenty-four when I met Walker. Do you know I've never lived alone? I'm forty-four years old and I've never lived alone. The first few weeks Walker was gone, I didn't know what to do with myself. I'd stay in the store until late, pick up some takeout, and just watch television until I fell asleep.'[... Melody:] 'Sounds kind of great right
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Anyone who tells you life has greater value when it comes with an expiration date is full of shit. Immortality is worth the fortunes of galaxies.”She regarded him too intently. “But it’s not worth everything. You gave it up for your freedom.”His forced bravado faltered. That truth still petrified him today. “I did.
G.S. Jennsen
And your own heart generates enough pressure as it pumps blood throughout your body that it could squirt blood up to 30 feet. (I’ve never tried this, and I don’t recommend it.)
Francis Chan
The music video will die when we all go blind, and music will never die, because even when you can't hear it, you can feel it.
Maggie Stiefvater
Our lives are made up of time, and the quality of our existence depends on our wise use of the moments we are given.
Alexandra Stoddard
Love and hate had their own secret languages, and Mark and Kieran were speaking in them now.
Cassandra Clare
Death might be a blessing if it means you never have to face this kind of grief.
Carol Cassella
Have a clear goal and plan. Waste no effort in your journey. Be strong, committed, and effective and you will experience a level of success few will ever know.
Steve Maraboli
It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American
Naomi Wolf
Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best.
Dinesh D'Souza
There is no greater loan than a sympathetic ear.
Frank Tyger
People need each other. Our well-being is tightly tethered to the well-being of people we do not know, most of whom look nothing like ourselves. Happiness, I realized right there in breathing class, requires engagement.
Paula Poundstone
A problem is an opportunity to see your life through another window.
Debasish Mridha
From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.
Colson Whitehead
When we flood our creative problem-solving mind with the endorphins of gratitude, we are open to receiving the spectacular solutions that are needed now to ensure that generations to come will enjoy this beautiful blue ball that we call home.
Natalie Pace
There was a new simplicity to what I did, a door that had opened before me to worlds I had not imagined. From where I sat, if you watched carefully you could marvel at it, like the impossible birth of a cottonseed or the slow rise of a wooden house: the steady construction of a man, built brick by brick from the shadow of a boy.
Michael Johnston
Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
the decisive movement toward corporate capitalism began in 1895-1896.
James Livingston
Over the years, numerous times, too many times to count, just as I was about to reach my breaking point, just when I thought I couldn't take another minute, another second, out of nowhere-at the grocery store, at the park, at restaurants-angels, Ethan's angels, would appear and save us: strangers in stores would stop to talk to Ethan; neighbors took him for a walk...
Jim Kokoris
How do we listen to his voice? With the ear of our heart. With love. Love has ears, as love has eyes. Just be there, and love him, and let him love you." (35). Easier said than done. "What will happen then? What will we hear? Let God take care of that. Seek only him, do not use him as a means to seek any other end. He is not your Santa, he is your Savior. I cannot tell you what he will give you, except for one thing: he will give you himself. He will give you more of himself the more you want him, that is, the more you love him. He wants to pour infinite riches into your soul; prayer is a way of opening up your soul so more of God can enter.
Peter Kreeft
I think Dad wanted to feel the pain, to feel his body cry, an urgent reminder that he was still alive. I pretended not to notice.
Raquel Cepeda
But that was last year,” I protested as we walked through school on Tuesday, three days beforeHalloween. “I’m serious, you know how people are. They forget about things.”“Oh, really?” Roux said, then turned and smiled at a brunette passing us. “Hey, Julia, what’s up?How are things?”“Slut,” Julia responded, and kept walking.Roux just looked back at me knowingly. “You were saying?
Robin Benway
If you were dying...If you were sixteen and dying...If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying...If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying...Wouldn’t you say yes?Yes, turn me.Yes, I want to live.Yes... make me one of you.
Tamara Summers
Because this law could mean so much or so little, it held potential for causing great mischief in the world of art and politics. We needed to reduce its uncertainty, and the best way to do that, I believed, was to force a court to interpret it, which would either void or narrow the law. To make it as broad a target as possible and to assure that someone would sue us, I reproduced the Helms amendment verbatim in the terms and conditions for grant recipients. It could not be ignored there, and if it was to be declared unconstitutional, it had to appear where the courts could not ignore it either.
John Frohnmayer
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig
Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware.
Louis L'Amour
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Warren Buffett
Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us,Showing us how to see things in new waysInstead of always thinkingThe same old thoughtsThat have been passed along by strangersDay after day, year after yearWithout any spirit of amazementOr wonder,
Margarita Engle
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".
Deb Caletti
It was too familiar to Cody. He placed his arms around his wife trying somehow to shelter her from the reality she was facing. There was another reason for his closeness; his desperation to show her he was not one of them, that the tribes of cruel men did not recognize him as one of their own, and to show his wife that his promise to create a safe place for her was a promise she need not fear would be broken. In the innermost part of him, from the secret child that lives within all men, was a scared cry, “Please don’t think I’m bad too.” From the other innermost part of him, the secret animal that prowls in some men was a raging wolf ready to kill. The battle line within the man had been drawn. The boundaries of faith rose up around the rage, warning the soul against righteous anger morphing to blood lust.
Lee Goff
My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?
Bob Hope
I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye.
Alessandra Torre
You will be loved as much as you expect.
Debasish Mridha
Her mouth connected with his. Everything inside her collapsed and was constructed, simultaneously.
Georgia Clark