Quotes by American Authors - Page 263

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown--laughed at, persecuted and despised--playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority.
Tom Robbins
The worst is, I remain so stone cold. Does this war make you an 'alive-dead person'? Is it not possible to remain yourself in this chaos? How long still?
Diet Eman
...I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.
Charles Frazier
Leadership is the capacity to turn vision into reality.
Warren Bennis
Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer.
Pittacus Lore
Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren’t doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they’re contagious. They are, I believe.
Darnell Lamont Walker
By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.
Rabih Alameddine
No matter how challenging the ensuing process may become at times, the inner light and love in the human heart always has the power to dispel darkness and ignorance.
William Keepin
When you are loving someone, that someone is loving you, too. That is the universal law. No exception.
Debasish Mridha
Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
All along, I was less concerned about walking a path of integrity and more caught up in a compass calibrated by greed. And with a compass such as this, how is it that I’m having a hard time understanding why I am where I am?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.
Marilyn Johnson
The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.
António R. Damásio
Am I more afraidOf taking a chance andlearning I'm somebodyI don't know, or of risking new territory,only to find I'm the sameold me? There is comfortin the tried and true.Breaking groundmight uncover a sinkhole,one impossible to climb outof. And setting sail inuncharted watersmight mean capsizing intoa sea monster's jaws.Easier to turn my back onthese thingsthan to try tjem and fail.And yet, a whisper insistsI need to know if they are oraren't integral to me.Status quo is a swamp.And stagnation is slow death.
Ellen Hopkins
Forgiveness is a revolving door positioned in your path.  You must step through it to move on, but it takes both timing and choice to escape walking circles inside.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I think when men hear that women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that's not it. It's a commitment to not floating around anywhere. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life.
Mindy Kaling
Do others see something of Christ in your life? Do they see a “family resemblance” to Him by the way you live?
Billy Graham
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Harold Bloom
It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...
Bob Dylan
The never-ending task of self improvement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me liberty or give me death.
Patrick Henry
Feel compassion for your own heart that was broken open by grief or confusion.Then tune in to the other level of that experience. Some part of you was heroic inside that moment of your life.Some part of you was looking out for you, wanting you to make it through, encouraging you to love and heal and be larger than the message you were getting. Access the hero inside your own story....
Laurie Perez
When you turn on the news, it's the same old rich white people that have systematically ruined this country regurgitating the same tired, stale ideas. And they keep getting invited back.
Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein
She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.
Stephen L. Carter
Leadership is the day to day communications about the real issues.
Chris Argyris
I remember Chap saying Jesus was a lifeline. And I needed one. Had needed one for a long time, I guess. So I prayed for the first time in my life and let Jesus rescue my soul from the depths.
Jessica R. Patch
Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.
Chuck Klosterman
When I think of whisper, I think of tenderness, gentleness, beauty. And that was God's voice. The hard part with whispers, though, is we have to be listening for them. They are just loud enough that only the people listening will hear and those who are distracted won't.
Jefferson Bethke
He remembered hearing Karl tell James once that it was hard for people to ever know what they really looked like. Reflections in mirrors weren’t accurate, Karl said, because when you stared at yourself in a mirror, you subconsciously composed your face in a way that wasn’t your natural expression.Marvin wondered it that was true when you were with strangers too. Maybe you only looked like your true self with the people you loved. And maybe that was a face you yourself hardly ever got to see…
Elise Broach
Easter is the miracle of transformation as seen in the change of seasons, in the maturation of mortal persons, and in the resurrection of souls.
Richelle E. Goodrich
When you suffer, you are being conformed to the image of Jesus. When you pray, you are being made holy in the image of Jesus. When you quietly serve a person in need, you are being shaped into the image of Jesus. When you generously give, your heart is being remade into the image of Jesus, our Lord and Savior.
Allen R. Hunt
To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
Sherry Turkle
So what’s your name?” the stranger asked.Tarrah pulled his shirt away from her head and held out her hand. “Tarrah. Tarrah Reid.”He slipped his hand into hers, his cheeks stiffening as he held back a smile.Tarrah sighed, knowing exactly what he was thinking. She was completely aware of the fact that she held the name of a famous Hollywood actress. The association actually helped with her “Christmas floozy” persona during the holidays, so she’d never really minded.
Victoria H. Smith
Standing at the window, reading the menu of Obediah's services, the Minotaur wishes he could believe in what she has to offer: a promise woven into deep lines of his palm, some turn of fate told by a card. But faith is a nebulous thing and charlatans a dime a dozen; it's always been that way. The Minotaur both envies and pities the devout.
Steven Sherrill
In her career, she'd closed multi-million dollar deals without a hint of nerves. Now she needed a jumbo-sized bottle of antacids just to get out of her car. Or a double shot of whiskey. God, she was losing it.
Avery Flynn
People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller
And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep.
Jack Kerouac
And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.
Erica Lorraine Scheidt
There were a hundred shades between a truth and lie, and she knew them all.
V.E. Schwab
The most wicked criminals have God on their lips at all times, for God is the only one who can stomach them.
Margaret George
When Scripture says, "As a man thinks, so is he," it is raw truth. How we approach life and react to its vagaries determines the bulk of our character. How we love is locked into how we think about it. What angers us is triggered by how we think. It is between our ears that we decide how easily offended we will be. When it comes to harsh words from others, whether my skin absorbs like cotton or deflects like Teflon is a decision I make. All of that happens in a three-pound organ five-and-a-half inches across called my brain. In a very real sense, my world begins and ends between my ears. I don't have to be brain-dead to be brain-defeated.
Richard Foth
For Abby, "friend" is a word whose sharp corners have been worn smooth by overuse. "I'm friends with the guys in IT," she might say, or "I'm meeting some friends after work."But she remembers when the word "friend" could draw blood. She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other's names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive.
Grady Hendrix
...shame spreads through his body like a drop of red dye in water.
Zak Ebrahim
Sometimes when you had nothing at all and it was raining and you were alone in the flat, it was wonderful to know that you could have something even though it was only a cup of black and bitter coffee.
Betty Smith
Elias and Laia are each other’s countermelodies. I am just a dissonant note.
Sabaa Tahir
But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?
Robert M. Price
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
Henri J.M. Nouwen
If you haven't guessed it already," I said, something fervent and resonating slipping into my tone, "I need you, too.""Is that a yes?" he asked, pushing his fingers through my hair, fanning it out around my sholders and searching my face intently. "Please let it be yes," he said with a gravelly edge. "Stay with me tonight. Let me hold you, even if that's all it is. Let me keep you safe.
Becca Fitzpatrick
Are you here about the infestation?"MacMillian stiffened. "I don't... We aren't-"Lena cleared her throat. "I'm afraid bugs aren't really our specialty.""Not bugs." The woman shook her head vigorously. "Ghosts. Whole place is crawling with 'em.
Laura Oliva
I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years.
Molly Ivins
Five truly effective prescriptions to remedy a bad day. (You can't overdose.)—Pray; discuss your troubles with God.—List your blessings. (The blue sky, soft cookies, warm socks, etc.)—Call your mom.—Visit an animal shelter and hug a lonely cat.—Visit a nursing home and hug a lonely grandparent.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Moxie gave me a small smile. "Why do you always say that- which here means?""I'll probably outgrow it," I said.
Lemony Snicket
The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.
Cormac McCarthy
Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.
Criss Jami
Sociologically speaking, as Americans we often lack social, cultural, and mindful awareness. We hear the stories of how our arrogance has been known to offend, confuse, and alienate people from other cultures. Arrogance is the thief of mindfulness and it happens from both directions.
Susan C.Young
Prejudice comes from insecurity and its spiritually infantile need of belonging.
Bryant McGill
Can one come 2 conclusions,Before the question is conceived?
Tupac Shakur
Wisdom is the understanding that God exist, and that he is the creator of all life and things in the universe and upon Earth. This is truth. When we realize mistakes we have made, we should make serious efforts to correct them. This also, is truth.
Ellen J. Barrier
If at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing it wrong. Learn from the experience. Try again, but with a different approach.
Steve Maraboli
With some people there is easy conversation and not enough time in one meal to get out everything you want to tell her--all the things you didn't know you'd been holding in until you're suddenly confessing to Facebook-stalking ex-boyfriends and how nerdy you are for coveting the iPad--and with others there is that subtle but heavy weight of constantly trying to think of what you might say next to avoid an uncomfortable silence.
Rachel Bertsche