Quotes by American Authors - Page 2605

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.
Sarah Miller
Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible.
Ludwig von Mises
Sometimes it would be nice not to have to do my best. Sometimes it would just be nice not to have a crisis to deal with. - Anita Blake
Laurell K. Hamilton
Most people are about as happy as their self confidence will allow them to be.
Shannon L. Alder
Growing older is mandatory, but growing up is optional.
Heather Brewer
It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.
Julia Cameron
I think that a lot of the time, people are generous towards those whom they pity; but only find fault in those whom they see as better than themselves. There is a fake kind of goodness; and that is the goodness that is only good towards other people that make the givers feel better about themselves. Would you be good to someone you think is so much better than you are? Or who has so much more than you have? Or is your goodness only reserved for those who make you feel like a god because you give to them? Too often, there are shining, beautiful people, who suffer so much in this world, because there would be so many others willing to snuff out their flames! Goodness of a person is not measured by sympathy or compassion; rather, goodness is measured by empathy. Empathy goes beyond all the physical things you see with your two eyes. It’s easy to be good to those you pity; much harder to be good to those whom you envy!
C. JoyBell C.
The only job a parent has is work themselves out of a job.
Holly Gates
I hate organized religion. I hate that people use it to justify their crappy, bigoted beliefs.
Hannah Harrington
Because that's the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don't want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It's mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.
Stephanie Perkins
Kids are flat-out freaking hilarious if you are paying attention. Not just my kid, but every kid.
Dan Alatorre
from the Basement tapes Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him."Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live.""If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!
Dave Cullen
Happy people think about how to help others and not how to get from others.
Debasish Mridha
Education itself is Marketing--marketing tools and perspectives to people who don't necessarily realize why they need them, how it will serve them, what they might accomplish with them. And, ensuingly, Marketing itself is Education (with no attempt to assess the value of what is being marketed).
Shellen Lubin
But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.
John Kenneth Galbraith
There's our excuse... we'll blame everything on the round-headed kid!
Charles M. Schulz
This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.The practice of meditation helps us to get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warmheartedness, and we begin to figure out for ourselves what is poison and what is medicin, which means something different for each of us.
Pema Chödrön
Acts 16:9 is the meddler's motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.
Sarah Vowell
Shut up. Take down your pants. I'm going to mark you as mine."Nick squeaked and held onto his belt, fighting Damian for possession of it. "Here? Everyone will hear. They'll know!""I want them to know," Damian said, winning the wrestling match for the belt as was inevitable that he would."London!" Nick gasped. "London!"Damian stopped, his eyes clearing as he noticed how terrified Nick looked. After a long minute, he pulled him into a hug. "I'm sorry, baby. I didn't mean to scare you. I thought you'd like it.
Catt Ford
Gifts become curses when they’re not given their due respect.
Dannika Dark
I fell into a deep sleep tucked in that little cocoon, a deeper sleep than I might of had in years.Right up until someone kicked me and said "Gotcha!
James Patterson
There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.
Raymond Chandler
I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do," I breathed, trying hard to pretend I wasn't fazed by what just happened. "You weren't listening to me."He stared at me with intensity for several seconds. "That's an interesting way to get my attention.
Alicia Kobishop
Sometimes we have to meet people where they are, Ollie. Honor their desires, regardless of out own.
Tess Hilmo
The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.
Mark A. Noll
The enduring life is the one that begins once we awaken from this world. And it is in that awakening that we realize… It was only a dream
Yasmin Mogahed
The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong.Because that opens your mind to the realization that the world is different than you thought it would be, and you have to begin to open your mind to the possibilities of existence.And opening your mind frees you, it doesn't constrain you. It makes the world more wonderful, more exciting, and more worth living in.
Lawrence M. Krauss
It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding--something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing.
Deb Caletti
To create abundance in life, travel and touch everyone you meet with your infinite love.
Debasish Mridha
Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.
Aldo Leopold
[Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.
Chris Kraus
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
Arthur Golden
God will give you more than you can handle because it is in your surrender that He gives you your victory!
Todd Stocker
Unlike Kim Cardassian or Donald Trump, Montaigne regarded the inward glance as an adventure in self-effacement not self infatuation. He was a charming and perceptive critic of his own foibles, especially alert to his weakness for inconsistency.
Danny Heitman
It was the exact oppositefor me. At first all Iwanted was sex with her,but soon I wanted more.More sex, yes, in unusualplaces, and all different kinds.But that wasn’t all. I wantedher to fill the empty spacesleft by a father who neveronce praised me, ‘friends’ whoused me, an ice princess momwho raised me with glass kisses.
Ellen Hopkins
How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement - no matter how temporary.
Craig Thompson
Reap, reap the grain and gather The sweet grapes from the vine; Our Lord's mother is weeping, She hath nor bread nor wine; She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven, She hath nor bread nor wine.
Adelaide Crapsey
Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.
Steven Wright
Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true name? to respond when called.Ever wonder why?.
Vera Nazarian
You can go back to blacksmithing in Hintindar and live a quiet happy life. Do me a favor and marry some pretty farm girl and train your son to beat the crap out of imperial knights.""Sure," Hadrian told him. "And with any luck he'll make friends with a cynical burglar who'll do nothing but torment him.
Michael J. Sullivan
Games? War is not a game, my friend. Games are for small children and old men like me. War is a young man's blighted delight
Renee Ahdieh
Zombies weren't the true plague of the world, laziness was.
Faith McKay
The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
Chris Hedges
What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.
Jay Michaelson
I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.
Pat Conroy
Concerning the popularity of vampire books:I don't get it. I think people should read about bloody, heart-singing, mind-searing spirituality. Live your heart’s song, not its drippings.
Sandy Nathan
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.
Tim O'Brien
As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.
Diana Gabaldon
Writers live twice.
Natalie Goldberg
Silence is the small man’s only defense.
Karan Mahajan
One reason we never tame the busy this beast is that we are unwilling to kill anything.
Kevin DeYoung
My God had not spoken to me again. But neither had He forsaken me. I knew that. For damned sure, I knew that.
Marcus Luttrell
There is a safety mechanism in place [to ensure the perambulator doesn't turn back into a purse with a baby in it] : if anything weighing more than a pound and a half-about the weight of a three-volume novel-is in the carriage of the perambulator, it will not transform.
Lev A.C. Rosen
I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field, nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.
Hank Aaron
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
Vladimir Nabokov
They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.
James Jones
Letting go of the past, is like opening the flood gates of healing to be set free.
Asa Don Brown
Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.
Sharon Salzberg
To fill the hour that is happiness to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
Ralph Waldo Emerson