Quotes by American Authors - Page 2707

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor
There are three ways to take down a wild tusklan.The average hunter takes a large-bore weapon with which to shoot the animal. When it works, the method is quick and efficient. But if the first shot fails to hit a vital organ, the tusklan may be upon its attackerbfore a second shot can be aimed and fired.The wise hunter takes a smaller-bore weapon. The method is less likely to produce a first-shot kill, but the second, third, or fourth shot may succeed. However if the bore is to small, none of the shots will penetrate to vital points, and the tusklan will again triumph over its attacker.The subtle hunter takes no visible weapon at all. He instead induces a thousand sting flies to attack the tusklan from all sides. The method is slow, and destructive of the pelt. But in the end, the tusklan is dead. And dies never knowing where the attack came from.
Timothy Zahn
Bones didn’t share any of my qualms about suddenly holding an arm that wasn’t attached to a body anymore. He just grabbed the ghoul by his other arm and began thumping him over the head with the loose limb. I’d heard Bones threaten to beat someone with their own limb before, but I’d always assumed that was a figure of speech. Apparently not.
Jeaniene Frost
...the greatest barrier to intimacy is fear -- fear of being known, fear of being rejected, fear of facing the truth about ourselves......We are afraid to be known because at some deep level we fear that the truth about us, when out in the open and reflected back to us through someone else's eyes, will be shocking to ourselves.
Sheila Walsh
While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.
Lee Ann Hoff
Grace is not just enough, it is more than enough.
John Paul Warren
Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.
Thomm Quackenbush
Innovation is too important to leave solely in the hands of the management team without any oversight or guidance by the boardroom.
Pearl Zhu
Observing the wizard’s high magic was his biggest privilege as Kadmeion’s assistant.
Lita Burke
Either the key to a man's wallet is in his heart, or the key to a man's heart is in his wallet. So, unless you express your charity, you are locked inside your greed.
Noah Benshea
War made the state, and the state made war
Charles Tilly
The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that's too heavy to carry.
Mark Lawrence
The hidden keys of true happiness are individual responsibility and an incessant quest for joy.
Amy Leigh Mercree
A blank canvas...has unlimited possibilities.
Stephanie Perkins
No matter how hard I try to forget you, you always come back to my thoughts When you hear me singing I am really crying for you.
Jane Bierhorst
When it comes to getting a job or client, congruent value is aligning the employer's need with your value add.
Richie Norton
Cultivating self-love is an odyssey with moments of difficulty and joy. It's an excursion into knowing ourselves, learning to accept and deal with what we discover... and struggling with our fear of allowing in a little madness to set us free.
Bud Harris
If you have never been saved,you need to stop right where you are and admit to God that you are a sinner in need of salvation. Then ask Him for the gift of eternal life that was made available to you when Christ took your punishment and died for your sins on the
Jerry L. Ross
Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone
Sana Krasikov
Fear is the greatest enemy; the father of all suffering, and love is the only cure for humanity's great afflictions
Bryant McGill
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.[misquote of a letter about wine, see quotes/831031]
Benjamin Franklin
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.
Katie Kennedy
Those small moments of pleasure men get from sin, from defying God, are perhaps grace - His final gift still to those who hard-heartedly choose to deny Him. Godless men may blatantly enjoy offending God not because they are free-spirited, but on the whole because He moves them to enjoy it. Sin is, in a sense, still touching God: for a strike involves a touch. Perhaps this is His divine kindness. Faithful men find everlasting fulfillment in His good company; but godless men who strike at the Author of Joy, who are completely ignorant of the greater, for them - and by God's love for His enemies - there is yet this small recoil known as 'pleasure' before the fall.
Criss Jami
I don’t want this,” Sirus uttered, his voice stripped bare.“Me either.” Grey sounded as if he were in agony.Swearing, they flew at each other in a furious kiss.
Cameron Dane
One is as one is and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love.
Marya Mannes
Each evening she held his head in her hands and ran her aching fingers thru the thick ruff of fur around his neck. He burrowed against her, sighing devotion.
Meg Rosoff
Maybe it was me," Grandma said."Sometimes they sneak out.Did I fart?
Janet Evanovich
Whether what you learned was objectively true or false, the conclusions that you made about yourself, your environment, and other people will be replayed in your life because they become a part of who you are.
Cortney S. Warren
The very best thing about dogs is how they just know when you need them most, and they’ll drop everything that they’re doing to sit with you awhile.
Steven Rowley
I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn't check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now.
Amy Garvey
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
Orson Scott Card
but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?
Jodi Picoult
Today-be the sunshine in someone's life.
Debasish Mridha
HOW CONCISE THAT YOU CAN CRY FROMAWFUL WOUNDS, DESERTION, HAPPINESS,MEMORIES, HUMILIATION,DISAPPOINTMENT OR GRANDEUR.
Jenny Holzer
She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.
Cassandra Rose Clarke
The cat Horus shot out from under the table and headed for the door, his ears flattened and his tail straight out. There he encountered Abdullah, who had been waiting for us on the verandah and who had, I supposed, been alarmed by Emerson's shouts and hurried to discover what disaster had prompted them. The cat got entangled in Abdullah's skirts and a brief interval of staggering (by Abdullah), scratching (by Horus) and swearing (by both parties) ensued before Horus freed himself and departed.
Elizabeth Peters
There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.
Erica Jong
Gin and tonics won't say "I love you" and neither will he.
Sarabeth Purcell
In the past few months, life had lost its sweetness and he’d lost his way. But no longer. Death was once again the enemy, his indifference and apathy drowned in a Cheshire pond.
Sharon Kay Penman
[H]er spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire.
James Blish
Sometimes you are in the middle of your destiny before you even know it has begun.
Sarah Holman
If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
Albert Einstein
When we build on our strengths and daily successes — instead of focusing on failures — we simply learn more.
Tom Rath
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
Alan Lightman
If I only had a little humility I'd be perfect.
Ted Turner
In a world filled with flaky people, those that honor commitments and do what they say STAND-OUT. Integrity is currency.
Dr. Matthew Loop
Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.
Janet Malcolm
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics....Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.
Leonard Peikoff
The ill-informed masses included her own family among their ranks, a family that specialized in being both inconvenient and asinine.
Gail Carriger
. . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think — 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please . . .
CrimethInc.
Motivation gets you going Inspiration keeps you going.
Todd Stocker
When I was a kid--10, 11, 12, 13--the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: "There's never gonna be a room someplace where there's a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, 'You know what would be great? We should call Fiona. Yeah, that would be good.' That'll never happen. There's nothing interesting about me." I just felt like I was a sad little boring thing.
Fiona Apple
Be aware of the voices in your head. Identify them. Just became you hear it doesn’t mean it’s your voice saying it. And just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s true.
Toni Sorenson
To be a housewife is ... a difficult a wrenching sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only a job. Regarded as a profession it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world will be lost indeed.
Phyllis McGinley
Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.
IRVIN D.YALOM
What one has to do usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Be truly romantic even when you are alone.
Debasish Mridha
We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.
Roger Kimball