Quotes by American Authors - Page 2751

What if today you gave yourself permission to be outrageously kind? What if you extended as much good will and kindness as you can possibly muster to every person you meet? And what if you did it with no thought of reward? I'm sure of one thing: it will be a day you will never regret.
Steve Goodier
I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.
Marilynne Robinson
When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will best consult its interests by not mingling in the game.
Henry James
Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.
Kristin Hannah
I don’t know,” she said quietly. “A guy in a pair of ripped jeans who takes off his shirt because he’s all sweaty is kind of hot.
Samantha Chase
We all know what we have to do what the inkling provokes us. We have to do the right thing. We have to make that extra push out of bed, or off the sofa. We must just do it.
Mark Andrew Poe
I had a dream that I had brown hair…I woke up and ran to the mirror…Phew! I’m still a blonde.
Starley Ard
There is something divine, mystical, magical and unexplainable in the universe that is listening and responding to each of us.
Bryant McGill
Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn’t have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?
John Green
You gain power by pretending to be weak.
Chuck Palahniuk
Accepting our greatness means no longer playing small. It often starts with baby steps. But eventually it means making major changes - in our lives, jobs, relationships, and dreams. If I had believed in my own self-worth, I would never have been willing to make the financial moves I made in the past. If I'd known my value, I couldn't have spent so many years ignoring the whispering - and sometimes screaming - voice that told me to leave my marriage. For a long time, that truth was just too scary and painful for me to face. Talk about keeping my head in the sand! But how many years did I waste, postponing what has proven to be a much better life - simply because I went into hiding and didn't see that I was worthy of something better?
Nancy Levin
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.
E B White
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
James P. Carse
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.
Jared Diamond
Sometimes painful endings bring the best new beginnings.
Shae Ross
struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature.
Garth Stein
I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, Be more active, Show up more often.
Brian Tracy
If this constant bitter disappointment was love, then I was perfectly fine not to have anything to do with it.
Vann Chow
I clearly saw the skeleton underneathall this show of personalitywhat is left of a manand all his pride but bones?
Jack Kerouac
There are things I need to say first. Things you need to hear before we go any further."tShe tensed. "Oh, God, are you married?"tHe chuckled. "No, nothing like that."t"Good," she replied, letting out a relieved breath.t"I want you to know you've made this very difficult for me. I had a speech prepared. Then I see you like this." His finger continued to trail down her stomach, tracing the rim of her panties. "And I can't even remember my damn name.
Stacey O'Neale
Alarm clocks are the bane of humanity. Sleep inertia, the decline in motor dexterity, subjective feeling of grogginess, and impaired state of awareness and mental performance is normal after awakening from even a light sleep. Scientific studies reveal that abruptly awakening from a deep sleep amplifies the severity and duration of sleep inertia.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.
Scott Westerfeld
Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.tA secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.tFear spawns in the body, phonologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body into a state of phobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.
Steven Pressfield
Only the Holy Spirit can open our eyes. Only He can convict us of the depth of our sin, and only He can convince us of the truth of the Gospel.
Billy Graham
You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.
Kim Stanley Robinson
It will have to be Jem. He's impossible to hate. Even that devil cat likes him.
Cassandra Clare
Republicans don't like people to talk about depressions. You can hardly blame them for that. You remember the old saying: Don't talk about rope in the house where somebody has been hanged.
Harry Truman
Of course I’m shielding her, you broken feather!
Kim Harrison
Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
Robert McKee
Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.
Thor Benson
And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.
Donna George Storey
When you go to sleep, where do you really go?
Brian Lovestar
Of all the hardships and deprivations a people can suffer, I am not sure if the deprivations of art and culture are not the most devastating. As meat and rice are food for the body, art and culture are food for the soul. Starve the body and the person dies; starve the soul and the spirit dies.
Gerard de Marigny
She was a tragic beauty. Sadness had left its fingerprints all over her face.
John Mark Green
Loving someone doesn't just include that person, Ben. Loving someone means accepting all the things and people that person loves, too. And I will. I do. I promise.
Colleen Hoover
She was thankful that in her job, she didn’t have to choose sides—she fought against currency counterfeiters, stock and bond forgers, money launderers, diamond smugglers—in short, lowlifes like Spyro Leandrou who engaged in activities that were universally perceived as wrong.
Mike Wells
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.
Mignon McLaughlin
Wrath held her even closer, right to his beating chest. “. . . a son?” “Yes. A son.” All of a sudden, he felt the biggest, widest, happiest grin hit his face, the g*dd*mn thing stretching his cheeks until they hurt, making his eyes water from the strain, pulling at his temples until they burned. And the joy wasn’t just on his puss. A flush so great it burned him alive flooded through his body, cleansing him in places he didn’t know were dirty, washing out cobwebs that had crept into his corners, making him feel alive in a way he hadn’t been in a very, very long time. Before he knew what he was doing, he burst to his feet with Beth in his arms, leaned back, and hollered at the top of his lungs, with more pride than his six-foot-nine frame could hold. “A soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon! I’m having a soooooooooooooooooooooooon!”-Wrath & Beth
J.R. Ward
Everyone wears masks.They come in all different shapes and sizes.The only problem with trying one on is that it fits. How easily we fall into the trap that we don’t have to be who we really are.How easily we convince ourselves that we need to cover up what we were born to be.It’s a tragedy that fear keeps us from our destiny.It’s hell when the person you were created to be is covered up by some cheap imposter
Rachel Van Dyken
If you’re looking for the full deal, the till-death deal, then look at me. No one’s ever going to love you, stick by you, understand how you work the way I do.(Malcolm Kavanaugh)
Nora Roberts
The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.
David McReynolds
Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.
Penn Jillette
If you are not learning, you are not living.
Kevin James Breaux
Don’t kiss me,” she said warningly.“I don’t intend to,” he replied, smiling a little. “I don’t have my whip and chair with me.
Linda Howard
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler
Sheana Ochoa
One great pleasure of being a writer is possessing the power to determine the fate of my characters and how the story will end.
Terry a O'Neal
Love means not ever having to say you're sorry".
Erich Wolf Segal
Winning" is taking the talent or potential you were born with, and have since developed, and using it fully toward a goal or purpose that makes you happy.
Denis Waitley
You don't blast a heart open," she said. "You coax and nurture it open, like the sun does to a rose.
Melody Beattie
Within the beautiful struggle of a cocoon all butterflies are made.
Jason Versey
There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.
Julie Lythcott-Haims
I was tired. Tired of men, tired of moving, tired of being scared, tired of being confused. But who was I kissing? I'm not one to sit quietly, anywhere.
Deborah Rodriguez
The window shades have all been removed. Nighttime is now free to encroach.
Tracy Letts
I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
Jamaica Kincaid
Freedom is the most sophisticated form of control. The best lies use the truth.
Bryant McGill
His name is Tyson? I hate to break it to you, but you dated a brand of chicken.
Gena Showalter
The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.(from The structure of desire and recognition)
Robert B. Brandom
Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are."...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.
Natalie Goldberg
I don't like the new president who hunts muslim extremists, I like the old president who is a muslim extremist.
Stephen Colbert
They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.
Marlena de Blasi