Quotes by American Authors - Page 2714

Remind me again-why do you hate me so much?"I don't hate you."Could've fooled me."She folded her cap of invisibility. "Look...we're just not supposed to get along, okay? Our parents are rivals."Why?"She sighed. "How many reasons do you want? One time my mom caught Poseidon with his girlfriend in Athena's temple, which is hugely disrespectful. Another time, Athena and Poseidon competed to be the patron god for the city of Athens. Your dad created some stupid saltwater spring for his gift. My mom created the olive tree. The people saw that her gift was better, so they named the city after her."They must really like olives."Oh, forge
Rick Riordan
Poem by Howard A. Walter (Character)I would be true, for there are those who trust me;I would be pure, for there are those who care;I would be strong, for there are those who suffer;I would be brave, for there is much to dare.I would be friend of all--- the foe, the friendless;I would be giving, and forget the gift;I would be humble, for I know my weakness;I would look up, and laugh, and love, and lift.
JOHN C MAXWELL
The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it her suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father's actions. I feel an obligation to right my father's wrong. But why? Shouldn't my father's welfare come first? His welfare is my welfare. How does one weigh love for a parent against the urge to help someone in need? I feel like what is right should be done no matter what. This lack of doubt makes me feel inhuman. But it is not a question of my head for once. I hear the right note. I recognize the wrong note. Maybe the right action is a lake like this one, green and quiet and deep.
Francisco X. Stork
Fear owns me because I let it. Because I obsess over it, name it, raise it, and nurture it to become perfect. It is one of the few things in my life that I can control.
Pete Wentz
Tomorrow always comes with a new hope for a new beginning. After all, it is a new day!
Debasish Mridha
She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water. Her pertness enchanted them. Young men went away from her with a feeling of bravado. Old men were enslaved by her silver curls. Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something different from either // Your shadow at morning striding behind you // Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you // I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S Eliot
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
Noam Chomsky
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.
Harry Crews
Not being liked was so much worse than being invisible.
Rebecca Donovan
I believe that God—if he exists at all—is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress him up in costumes that make him visible to us. Then we come up with a lot of very silly rules that we attribute to him and tell everyone if they don't follow those rules, they can't be part of the gang.
Michael Thomas Ford
We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.
Betty Friedan
The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.
Peter Kreeft
Be careful, fathers, when you inordinately desire things to be better for your children than they were for you. Do not, however unintentionally, make things worse by removing the requirement for reasonable work as part of their experience, thereby insulating your children from the very things that helped make you what you are.
Neal A Maxwell
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
Anna Quindlen
A chubby vole sat as guardian between the two sections, making sure the hoi polloi didn't get any ideas above their station. His name was Harold, and the most important thing he had learned in his life, as far as he was concerned, was that it was entirely possible to sleep with one's eyes open, or at least open enough to deceive passersby, if one was willing to put in a bit of practice. True, it wasn't as good as a full-on nap, but any degree of slumber was better than waking. As far as Harold was concerned, the biter part of existence lay in those little moments of oblivion that preceded the last.
Daniel Polansky
Happiness is the only sanction in life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.
Louis Zamperini
One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?" ... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same." "How?" I asked. "Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves.
Dawn Casey-Rowe
Teaching our children to live a quiet, sane, and balanced life is one of the most important parental tasks of our day.
Brent L. Top
We're all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day--his insanity--had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer.
Philip K Dick
There's an exact moment for leaping into the lives of wild animals. You have to feel their lives first, how they fit the world around them. It's like the beat of music. Their eyes, the sounds they make, their head, movements, their feet and their whole body, the closeness of things around them - all this and more make up the way they perceive and adjust to their world.
Richard O'Barry
I love analogies! Let’s have one.Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind of food. There are some places in town that do this particular cuisine just amazingly. Lots of people who are into this kind of food hold these restaurants in high regard. But let’s say, at every single one of these places, every now and then throughout the meal, at random moments, the waiter comes over and punches any women at the table right in the face. And people of color and/or LGBT folks as well! Now, most of the white straight cis guys who eat there, they have no problem–after all, the waiter isn’t punching them in the face, and the non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys who love this cuisine keep coming back so it can’t be that bad, can it? Hell, half the time the white straight cis guys don’t even see it, because it’s always been like that and it just seems like part of the dining experience. Granted, some white straight cis guys have noticed and will talk about how they don’t like it and they wish it would stop.Every now and then, you go through a meal without the waiter punching you in the face–they just give you a small slap, or come over and sort of make a feint and then tell you they could have messed you up bad. Which, you know, that’s better, right? Kind of?Now. Somebody gets the idea to open a restaurant where everything is exactly as delicious as the other places–but the waiters won’t punch you in the face. Not even once, not even a little bit. Women and POC and LGBT and various combinations thereof flock to this place, and praise it to the skies.And then some white, straight, cis dude–one of the ones who’s on record as publicly disapproving of punching diners in the face, who has expressed the wish that it would stop (maybe even been very indignant on this topic in a blog post or two) says, “Sure, but it’s not anything really important or significant. It’s getting all blown out of proportion. The food is exactly the same! In fact, some of it is awfully retro. You’re just all relieved cause you’re not getting punched in the face, but it’s not really a significant development in this city’s culinary scene. Why couldn’t they have actually advanced the state of food preparation? Huh? Now that would have been worth getting excited about.”Think about that. Seriously, think. Let me tell you, being able to enjoy my delicious supper without being punched in the face is a pretty serious advancement. And only the folks who don’t get routinely assaulted when they try to eat could think otherwise.
Ann Leckie
If I had a dollar for everytime my mother told me god had a plan I'd probably buy a new prada bag.
Naya Rivera
He learned to trust the Father when circumstances seemed hopeless. Christ used the tool of adversity to forge radiant joy in his spirit.
Nicholas Cappas
All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
Shirley Jackson
William tell, William tell,Take your arrow, grip it well,There’s the apple– – aim for the middle– –Oh well … you just missed by a little.
Shel Silverstein
If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.
Orson Scott Card
But the second she opened her eyes and looked at me, I knew. She was either going to be the death of me . . . or she was going to be the one who finally brought me back to life.
Colleen Hoover
Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.
Steve Pavlina
We must keep our heart open in the very moment our instinct tells us to shut it down. When we transcend this critical point, we are finally and truly able to deepen our love and strengthen our bond.
Kate McGahan
So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.
John Mason Brown
As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean.
H.P. Lovecraft
I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.
Clair Huffaker
Temporary setbacks are overshadowed by persistence.
Quentin L. Cook
Tessa: Are all vampires like that? Cold like that?Charlotte: Many of them have been alive a long time. They don't see things the way we do.
Cassandra Clare
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Arian paced the cavern in his mountain in agitation and a wee bit of anxiety. He was shaking off the dragon sleep from the past six hundred years. Not only had it been six centuries since he had been in human form, but there was a war the Dragon Kings were involved in.Con and the others were waiting for him to join in the war. Every King had been woken to take part. After all the wars they had been involved in, Arian wasn’t happy to be woken to join another.Because of Ulrik. The banished and disgraced Dragon King hadn’t just made a nuisance of himself, but he somehow managed to get his magic returned.Which meant the Kings needed to put extra magic into keeping the four silver dragons sleeping undisturbed deep within the mountain. They were Ulrik’s dragons, and he would want to wake them soon.But it wasn’t just Ulrik that was causing mischief. The Dark Fae were as well. It infuriated Arian that they were once more fighting the Dark. Hadn’t the Fae Wars killed enough Fae and dragons?Then again, as a Dragon King as old as time itself, they were targets for others who wanted to defeat them.For Ulrik, he just wanted revenge. Arian hated him for it, but he could understand. Mostly because Arian had briefly joined Ulrik in his quest to rid the realm of humans.Thoughts of Ulrik were pushed aside as Arian found himself thinking about why he had taken to his mountain. When he came here six hundred years earlier, it was to remain there for many thousands of years.The Dragon Kings sought their mountains for many reasons. Some were just tired of dealing with mortals, but others had something they wished to forget for a while. Arian was one of the latter.There were many things he did in his past when the King of Kings, Constantine, asked. Not all of them Arian was proud of. The one that sent him to his mountain still preyed upon him.He didn’t remember her name, but he remembered her tears. Because of the spell to prevent any of the Dragon Kings from falling in love with mortals, Arian had easily walked away from the female.Six centuries later, he could still hear her begging him to stay with her, still see the tears coursing down her face. Though he hadn’t felt anything, it bothered him that he had so easily walked away. Because Con had demanded it.Loyalty—above all else.The Dragon Kings were his family, and Dreagan his home. There was never any question if he were needed that Arian would do whatever it took to help his brethren in any capacity asked of him.
Donna Grant
Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.
Gregory Benford
Once Addie let someone in, she was impossible to forget. There was something about her that crawled inside a person and built a nice comfy home there, her goodness expanding until it filled every limb.
Kasie West
And the bummer thing is, ghosts never leave. They might leave you alone sometimes, but they're always there deep down, whispering lies in your ear. They echo the lies others told you: That you're not smart enough; that you're not pretty; that you'll never amount to anything.
Josh Shipp
Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such great responsibilities.
Ransom Riggs
Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’tThis is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)
Frans de Waal
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -and if so, why?
Bennett Cerf
until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.
Will Tuttle
What one heart finds in Him is so different than what another discovers, yet none less true.
Dana Candler
Living is suffering, Billy. Now give your mom a nice big hug.
Dash Shaw
No one ever wants to hear about how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn't a conversation. It'll never lead anywhere.
Mindy Kaling
Why, you'll be 'changed, m'dear. We'll just swap you for a human child who'll make a good servant to the Band. Half Humans never work out 'mongst the Folk. No, never do.""But--I'm half Folk too... What if I never work out 'mongst the humans?""Aye, you're neither one thing nor yet quite t'other. Pity, but there 'tis.
Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of other men —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received and am still receiving.
Albert Einstein
Zara.” He sighs. The wind bellows outside. “How can I make you understand this? I need your mom. If I don’t get her, more boys will die.”“That’s ridiculous.”“No, it’s just how it is.”I think for a second. “If that’s true, then why did Ian try to turn me?”He loses his composure. His face shifts into something worried, something almost human. “Did he kiss you?”“Almost. Betty killed him first.”He almost smiles. He pulls his hand through his hair. “Betty is fierce.”“Is that why you stay away when she’s here?”“Not even a pixie wants to tangle with a tiger.”He blows on the ember in his hand. It turns to dust.“You seem like you could handle almost anything,” I say.“This?” He smirks. “Parlor tricks.
Carrie Jones
I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.
Carol Rifka Brunt
But the goal of the arts, culinary or otherwise, is not to increase our comfort. That is the goal of an easy chair.
Jeffrey Steingarten
Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (genes that produce fitness). Genes that produce fitness become gradually over-represented in populations through the selection phenotypes, thereby allowing organisms to become more and more adapted to their environments. There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution.
Siddharta Mukherjee
I think the highest forgiveness is to accept that creation is thoroughly tangled, with every possible quality given outlet for expression. People need to accept once and for all that there is only one life and each of us is free to shape it through the choices we make. Seeking can’t get anyone out of the tangle because everything is tangled up…it’s much easier to keep up the fight between good and evil, holy and profane, us and them. But as awareness grows, these opposites begin to calm down in their clashes, and something else emerges- a world you feel at home in.
Deepak Chopra
Inconceivable!""You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
William Goldman
In populations experiencing trauma across a wide variety of settings, the portion of those experiencing ongoing PTSD is remarkably similar – one third. Ecclesiastes says woe to him who falls alone, but that the cord of THREE strands is not easily broken. Apparently deep in our human wiring is the resilience to be a buttress for those feeling overcome.
Andrew Zolli
He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.
Helen Simonson