Quotes by American Authors - Page 2611

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Toni Morrison
I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.
Bill Bryson
Everyone wants to be happy and live mindfully. Books teach us how to resuscitate the body and soul and how to recognize what in our own personal lives is worthy of noticing. Writers’ considered opinions and subtle observations regarding the joys, paradoxes, pains, tragedies, and truths of living provide us with a jumpstart in analyzing how best to integrate our personal experiences and disjointed thoughts into a cogent belief system. An artistic person understands their passions demand a struggle. Reading allows me unobtrusively to discover how other people freed themselves from suffering a destructive life of attachment, delusion, and disablement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.
Pat Cadigan
The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.
Tennessee Williams
Truth is a continuous examination, and Fact... always supersedes belief.
Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert Mayer
At the end of every diet the path curves back toward the trough.
Mason Cooley
Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman.
Woody Allen
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Don DeLillo
Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future.
Robert Collyer
When blondes have more fun, do they know it?
Lois Greiman
Do not go where you don’t belong. I scoffed. That sounded like an invitation if I ever heard one.
Dinah Katt
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
Samuel R. Delany
A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.
Robert Henri
Time is nothing absolute its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.
John Draper
While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.
Timothy J. Keller
It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.
Jean Kwok
People will stop trying to prove their something special when they finally realized their already unique in God's creation.
Ron Baratono
In fact, being a unique individual is as much of a farce as trying to be like everyone else. Maybe more.
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
Walter Cronkite
You deserve respect and appreciation. A person who doesn't have respect for themselves will more than likely not give it to you. You have to set the standard for yourself by not allowing the insolence.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Things worth telling - take time
Nicholas Denmon
Ragnor [was] always happy to see chaos, but not be involved in it.
Cassandra Clare
If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase--not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been--what would you take? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?
Jodi Picoult
Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.
Michael Pollan
-to me, the future doesn't seem real. It's just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don't have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at eight hundred miles per hour.
Allie Brosh
As I like to put it, we have hit pay dirt. The effort to cure the resource curse is a good example of what private foundations working with NGOs can accomplish.
George Soros
This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Alan Watts
Please open please if there's any justice in this world.
Maggie Stiefvater
What could be more exciting than an October day? It's your birthday, Fourth of July and Christmas all rolled into one.
Peggy Toney Horton
Jesus didn’t die to save me from God. Jesus died to save me from myself.
Ricky Maye
...love is a chemical imbalance, too. That perilous highs and desperate lows and extravagant flurries of mood are not always symptoms of a broken mind, but signs of a beating heart.
Terri Cheney
Never, baby. Between us, the sun is never going down.
J. Kenner
I wish I had done everything on earth with you
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Rebecca Solnit
Convictions in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.
Adam Grant
Raff,' Katsa said, 'your problem is that your heart's not in it. We need to find something to strengthen your defensive resolve. What if you pretended he's trying to smash your favorite medicinal plant?''The rare blue safflower,' Bann suggested.'Yes,' Katsa said gamely, 'pretend he's after your snaf
Kristin Cashore
Could you imagine a windstorm without the rustling of the leaves? You are made of the same stuff as the leaves–and the wind. You are meant to be rustled and sung.
Tehya Sky
The happiness in our hearts is there for we dare to dream in light when the world tells us to scream in the darkness.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.
Owen Gingerich
It's expectation that differentiates you from the dead.
Sheila Ballantyne
That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion.
Brandon Sanderson
... to undertake a gargantuan task: calculate the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world... they came up with a number- $33 trillion a year- a headline-grabbing figure that was almost twice the global gross national product.
Joe Roman
You cannot have a beautiful life if you always focus on ugliness in others.
Debasish Mridha
I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.
Jack Kerouac
Your life is a reflection of how effectively you balance potential and kinetic energy.
Steve Maraboli
We have to improve life not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.
Dorothy Height
Jesus Himself was the first missionary . . .He pledged His followers to be missionaries too!
Billy Graham
Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
He came to me through faith in him.
James Pinnick
Promises, like gardens need weeding from time to time to produce healthy results.
Soul Dancer
Even a clock that's broken is right twice a day.
Marcia Clark
Some days making it to the end of the day is quite the victory. -- Bea
Jennifer Brown
If he took her into his arms, he would keep her. He wouldn't let her suffer the way the other mortals had when he'd left them. He would keep her, with his court's permission or without it. Irial wouldn't take her, and Keenan wouldn't stand between them.
Melissa Marr
Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.
Don Marquis
Streams of consequence flow from every action, and from every conflict there are two paths by which events may go.
Stephen R. Lawhead
Be unapologetically you.....Don't apologize for who you are or what you are. Just be YOU and those that matter will be drawn to you and those that aren't will not matter.
Nanette Mathews
Bravery comes one day at a time.
Courtney C. Stevens
We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.'So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked.'Sometimes people live there for years,' I said.
Elizabeth Gilbert