Quotes by American Authors - Page 2681

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Ultimately, my love saved me, for my love gave me strength. At night, when sleep was sunwilling to rescue me, I gritted my teeth and devoured my fondest memories.
John Shors
You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.
Christy Hall
She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.
Sylvia Plath
The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us. Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky. Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggle cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink. flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffly clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless.
Maria Semple
Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know.
Tao Lin
Mathematics is the art of explanation.
Paul Lockhart
Your journey into the future can only begin when you are able to let go of the past.
Debasish Mridha
It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.
Tom Lehrer
History n: an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
She could not think what it would be to teach school twelve miles away from home, along among strangers. The less she thought of it the better, for she must go, and she must meet whatever happened as it came. "Now Mary can have everting she needs, and she can come home this next summer," she said. "Oh, Pa, do you think I - I can teach school?" "I do, Laura," said Pa. "I am sure of it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Anxiously attached Codependents demonstrate the ability to maximize the attention they get from their partner, regardless of whether it is positive or negative (i.e., "I'd rather be screamed at than ignored"). Manipulation is used to keep the inattentive or inconsistent partner involved by alternating dramatic angry demands with needy dependence. When the partner is preoccupied and not paying attention, the anxious Codependent explodes in angry demands and behaviors that cannot be ignored.
Mary Crocker Cook
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
Gregory Maguire
The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
Larry Levis
I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.
David Sheff
A king who trusts no man is weak.
Patricia Briggs
Being alone is not the same as being on your own.
Katy Lee
I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.
Vanessa Veselka
It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.
Alexandra Fuller
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
Know your enemy, but don't give him all your energy.
Jeanette Coron
Too many of us view liberty as something that ‘just is,’ and too few see it as something that ‘is’ only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.
Julie Lythcott-Haims
To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
Norman Cousins
[... Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.
Sondra Horton Fraleigh
One should never underestimate the role of stupidity in history
Ervand Abrahamian
People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they’re not willing to start something separate, world-changing, and risky, they have no business starting anything. Somehow, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, and a stock ticker symbol to matter.
Seth Godin
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'm Irish yet I don't drink as I refuse to be a stereotype and live down to the expectations of others.
Stewart Stafford
That's interesting," Bitterblue said. "You think a conscience requires fear?
Kristin Cashore
All books are either dreams or swords.
Amy Lowell
There are a lot of things I want," I say quietly and deliberately. "But I think I will keep what I have.
Rosamund Hodge
If you are lucky enough to have a childhoodfriend, try your hardest to grow old with them.These friends are a unique, irreplaceable breed.These friends lived through curfews andPolaroid pictures with you. These friends knowyour parents and siblings because they had to callyour house first to speak with you. Your memoriesare not frozen in time on social media, but live onnonetheless.Most importantly, they remember the personyou were before the world got ahold of you, sothey have this crazy ability to love you no matterwhat.They are the living, breathing reflection ofwhere you have been. And so, just when you thinkyou’ve lost yourself for good, they are there tobring you face-to-face with your true self, simplyby sharing a cup of coffee with them.As your world grows and becomes larger andmore complicated than your backyard, even if youestablish a life elsewhere, I hope your childhoodfriends remain lifelong allies, because mine havesaved my life on more than one occasion.
Alicia Cook
The way a culture treats women in birth is a good indicator of how well women and their contributions to society are valued and honored.
Ina May Gaskin
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.
Joan Didion
The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.
Glen Cook
How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?
Jandy Nelson
What you do doesn’t define you. You can’t let your failures, or your success for that matter, dictate how you view yourself. You are loved.
Taylor York
The chief means of resisting manipulation is humility – knowing who we really are and facing it. You can only serve by love. You can only love by choice. True love cannot be the result of decree, force or manipulation. Jesus always kept his strength to make loving choices. He calls us to make loving choices necessary to be the servant of all." "Humility permits me to own my feelings – and to admit them. Now I'm free to say, ‘I'm angry’. I'm free to admit what I am reacting to. I am free to ask if anger is what the person wanted to produce in me, and to ask for help in changing if my reaction is inappropriate.
Gayle D. Erwin
The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.
Chila Woychik
I may not know you, but I don’t see any difference between you and me. I see myself in you; we are one.
Debasish Mridha
Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.
Richelle Mead
To enjoy the nectar of life, I like to kiss you like a beautiful bee kisses the flower.
Debasish Mridha
You can quarrel with a person's ideas, but not with their experience.
Marty Rubin
Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.
Phyllis Therous
We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)
Sarah Vowell
Fair mindedness doesn't require a lot of thought, it requires a lot of bravery.
Toni Sorenson
You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
Sarah Vowell
You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.
Bill Watterson
Don't get me wrong. It's a lovely idea. It's very romantic. 'Just believe' and you can experience magic. It's why grandmothers the world over knit the word Believe into blankets for their grandchildren." His elbows resting on the arms of his chair, Mister Fox waved his hands in a vague, circular gesture. "There's just one little problem. It's completely wrong. It's backward. When you believe in something, you stop questioning it. You stop looking for answers and ignore other possibilities. Only minds that are truly open to possibility can see magic. It's people who aren't sure - of themselves, of the world, of their place in the world - who can see and experience magic.
Adam Shaughnessy
The measure of a society is its compassion.
Kristin Hannah
I have found that most young people really want us to spell out a moral code. They may not accept it or believe it, but they want to hear it, clearly and without compromise.
Billy Graham
Just when you think you have it all figured out, an epiphany arrives at the higher level of one's consciousness.
Terry a O'Neal
It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.
Maeve Brennan
It's kind of freaky to send your picture over the Internet to someone you don't really know and then have to sit waiting for their judgement on how you look. Maybe that's why my aunt Penny, who got divorced two years ago, hates online dating so much. Mom's always nagging her to go back on Match.com but Aunt Penny says she'd rather have root canal work - without anesthetic.
Sarah Darer Littman
There are many forms of love as there is moments in time, and you are capable of feeling them all at different stages of your life.
Shannon L. Alder
Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.
Thomas Paine
In the hours waking,when we're still all still,and you can hear the floorboards creaking,and you can feel the shades blow in,the night we slept with,we'll never kiss like that again.Our lips, will sever, our memories, will dissipate,and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky.
Dave Matthes
I strive for perfection - I settle for satisfaction
Carroll Bryant