Quotes by American Authors - Page 2718

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself.
David Foster Wallace
The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.
Thornton Wilder
I tilt my face up and inhale, willing my surroundings to enter me somehow and to remind me how small I am.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.
Jennifer Egan
One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.
Jack Kerouac
I often think of life as a great darkened room with a mammoth-sized tapestry fastened to a stone wall. I believe true peace can be achieved not in viewing the whole tapestry, but in accepting without bitterness those portions we have been afforded the luxury to see.
Chip St. Clair
She and Kennedy both dove for the power connector; Kennedy reached it first and yanked out the connection as Alex landed on her stomach beside it.The air settled down until the fine hairs on her arm no longer stood on end. Alex dropped her forehead to the platform and started laughing. “Just like university, isn’t it?”“Almost—nothing’s actually blown up yet.
G.S. Jennsen
Do not mislead Perez Anna or malign the people who have sheltered you for over twenty years. We are not - what is the word for eaters of one another?""Capitalists," said Anna.
Eleanor Arnason
Just pick a goal and stick to it―no big complicated secret.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
Henry James
Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The path of your life can change in an instant.
Ann Brashares
Despite the forecast, live like it's spring.
Lilly Pulitzer
Watch out for your daughters.The man is coming.He’ll promise you the world.But if you accept, there’s no turning back.Watch out for your daughters.Because here comes Jack.
Nancy Glynn
It's not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.
Nathan W. Morris
Wars are won from a wink, a gesture, an event that transpired a millennium before the battle. Humanity has always been saved by small acts; the ones where someone gained a piece of their own puzzle, not the ones where a hero stood prodigious on a battlefield.
Sarah Noffke
Well, I admit it. I’m a people addict, and I don’t want to quit!
Amber Hurdle
What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
Pascal Boyer
Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!
Mark Lawrence
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tyson pounding the Earthborn into the ground like a game of whack-a-mole. Ella was fluttering above him, dodging missiles and calling out advice: "The groin. The Earthborn's groin is sensitive."SMASH!"Good. Yes. Tyson found its groin.
Rick Riordan
One thing I want to make clear: I don’t think our old maps are bad. They deserve to be honored for their intent to help guide us safely through life. This is one of the reasons why, when we try to "push through" resistance, it seems to get even harder to move forward. After all, if you were trying to save someone by keeping them from running out into a dangerous situation, and they were pulling against you, you'd try to hold tighter, wouldn't you?
Rachel S. Heslin
So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.
Sol Luckman
The mystery of God’s love would not be a mystery if we knew all the answers.
Billy Graham
God made me an Atheist
Christopher Zzenn Loren
In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.
Pat Conroy
Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
John Green
Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?
Rick Bass
Strength is taking charge of your own destiny and not waiting on others to do so. You don’t have to swear and drink and beat people up and slay monsters. You’re allowed to cry and take care of children and cook and get your heart broken and dress up and date and get pregnant. But when decisions have to be made, a strong character makes them and doesn’t wait for someone else.
Mur Lafferty
Prayer wasn't a familiar practice in my life. --Titus Ray, Chapter 2
Luana Ehrlich
The parent is protector and trainer, but never the ultimate teacher. Every parent is responsible for teaching their kid basic moral conduct, manners, the difference between love and hate, and right from wrong. However, after maturity, the child must set off to seek knowledge on their own. Religion is never to be forced. And you cannot threaten your child with hell and tell them your religion is the only right way. There is no one right way. The many ways to the Creator are as varied as the colors of a rainbow.
Suzy Kassem
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Maya Angelou
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
Albert Einstein
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the - he said in the first 100 days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules - unchain Wall Street. They're gonna put y'all back in chains.
Joe Biden
Murdered by a kind of fear that seeks to obliterate any evidence that the world is different from the way they want to see it, from the way they want to believe it to be.
Lana Wachowski
Just one act of kindness can change someone's whole world.
Heather Wolf
I believe in romance... in playfulness... in passion... in expressing feelings... in friendship... in all the ways love heals, nourishes, and transforms "you" and "me" into an "us".
Steve Maraboli
Faith is above all openness an act of trust in the unknown.
Alan Watts
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
Walker Percy
The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.
James Wood
I prefer to solve the world's problems. They never seem as complicated as my own.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
Kahlil Gibran
She should not remember what it was like to be free.
Sarah J Maas
The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. ... [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and for new and better therapeutic weapons should appreciate that one of the central problems of the world is the more equitable distribution and use of the medical and nutritional advances which have already been established. The observations which I have recently made in parts of Africa and South America have brought this fact very forcible to my attention.
Charles Herbert Best
We weren't ashamed to enjoy food and alcohol in moderation - why were we so afraid of sex?
Sierra Simone
The Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say "please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.
Elizabeth Bear
I like video games, but they're really violent. I'd like to play a video game where you help the people who were shot in all the other games. It'd be called 'Really Busy Hospital.
Demetri Martin
You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there's no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it's the only one left in the world!
C. JoyBell C.
It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...
John Green
Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear?Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feetdeep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the longnight, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little childrenare born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt andhungry, and the white walkers move through the woods
George R.R. Martin
Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.
George Lakoff
Always" is a good word to believe in.
Susan Abulhawa
Whether it is in a sales situation, love at first sight, a husband and wife having an important conversation, a parent disciplining a child, or a teacher instructing her students, eye contact is a powerful body language for enriching engagement, focus, and communication.
Susan C.Young
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.
Tim O'Brien
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
Rob Sheffield
Why does anyone stay in an unhappy relationship? Because people do. They do it all the time. And the truth is, when you’re in it, when you’re up to your neck in the everyday part of life with another human being, sometimes you don’t exactly notice how bad things really are. It’s not always as apparent as it would seem. Unhappiness, when it involves another person, can be like that line from The Sun Also Rises about going bankrupt, how it happens two ways: gradually, and then suddenly.
Sarah Dunn
Oh, poor baby,” she said, mimicking his drawl.“Whew. You’re back. There was this other Susie here a minute ago, and she was really nice to me. She scared the shit out of me.”She laughed. “They locked her back up in the loony bin.”“Good, because there’s only one Susie for me—the one who calls me on my crap and doesn’t let me get away with jack shit. That’s the Susie I need. That’s the Susie I’ve missed coming home to over the last year.” He kissed her. “And that’s the Susie who’s going to leave a gaping hole in my heart and my life if she doesn’t give me another chance.
Marie Force
I copied the address into my address book, erasing an earlier one that had not been good for very long. No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.
Lydia Davis