Quotes by American Authors - Page 2753

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky
We may have lots of differences,We may not be the perfect couple.But in-spite of those differences,In-spite of those imperfection,We are always at our best for each other...
NerD_Seyer
It is often said that a wrong decision taken at the right time is better than a right decision taken at the wrong time.
Pearl Zhu
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway
Be a Flea, not a Bull or a Bear. Don't delay, retire anyway. Trading is NOT a four letter word. Buy carefully, sell aggressively. Don't mark duds while drinking. When your plan fails, change it. Don't be slow, don't be greedy. Don't be obtuse with a machine gun pointed at you. There's still time to build wealth and retire well.The Stock Market Flea: Lessons from the Front
James J. Houts
He'll come back," Simon said again. "For you.
Cassandra Clare
Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
Patricia A. McKillip
She wasn't a cowardIf she were she would have retreated back into her shell years before and pulled back entirely from life. She was a fighter. Life knocked her down, and she coped by getting up and moving on.
Dee Henderson
I think if a writer is being honest they’d admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They’re like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut.
Dan Alatorre
When your thoughts, choices and actions are in alignment with love as a priority in your life, the streams of love flow naturally in ways that continue to replenish you.
Tracie Sage
You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.
Wendell Berry
DAISIESIt is possible, I suppose that sometimewe will learn everythingthere is to learn: what the world is, for example,and what it means. I think this as I am crossingfrom one field to another, in summer, and themockingbird is mocking me, as one who eitherknows enough already or knows enough to beperfectly content not knowing. Song being bornof quest he knows this: he must turn silentwere he suddenly assaulted with answers. Insteadoh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselesslyunanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies displaythe small suns of their center piece, their -- if you don'tmind my saying so -- their hearts. Of courseI could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale andnarrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;for example -- I think thisas I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch --the suitability of the field for the daisies, and thedaisies for the field.
Mary Oliver
[Prayer] is the link between God's inexhaustible resources and people’s needs...God is the source of power, but we are the instrument He uses to link the two together.
Charles F. Stanley
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,women at least should know the differencebetween love and death. No poison cup,no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recordershould have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recordernot merely played but should have listened to us,and could instruct those after us:this we were, this is how we tried to love,and these are the forces they had ranged against us,and these are the forces we had ranged within us,within us and against us, against us and within us.
Adrienne Rich
Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can't be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.
Anne Lamott
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Allan Bloom
Having moved from Florida to Wisconsin, it has been an interesting exercise for me to attend networking events where I did not know a soul. I would silently scan the room to see who was approachable and who was not. It was those individuals who put out the approachable vibes whom I would be magnetized toward to engage in conversation.
Susan C.Young
A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.
Andrew Klavan
Remember the many compartments of the heart, the seed of what is possible. So much of who we are is defined by the places we hold for each other. For it is not our ingenuity that sets us apart, but our capacity for love, the possibility our way will be lit by grace. Our hearts prisms, chiseling out the colors of pure light.
Kare Anderson
Deciding denial was the better part of valor, CK pretended nothing was out of the ordinary.
Judy Teel
In recent months, the emotional aspect has become as necessary to me as the physical. It amuses me, this strange quirk of mine. I want my little captive to love me, to care about me. I want to be more than just the monster of her nightmares.
Anna Zaires
You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.
Dan Chaon
Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction?This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.
Lynne McTaggart
War is a terrible, bloody thing.
Katlyn Charlesworth
you will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leafknow you could tumble at any second.Then decide what to do with your time.--The Art of Disappearing
Naomi Shihab Nye
I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don't know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.
Sharon Creech
There are times...when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth....When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.
Mary Doria Russell
It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.
Jeannette Walls
An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a great difference between a gift given freely, and one that's meant to tie you to a man.
Patrick Rothfuss
...You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.
Sarah Dessen
In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not...
Bill Gates
It was the first time she had ever felt the kind of loneliness that couldn't be cured with just any available company.
Lisa Kleypas
We were going to save the world, because no one ever saved us.
Mav Skye
Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
I.F. Stone
As for the prayers, I suppose they can’t hurt. I’ve never found much good in them, I’ll confess that here, though I keep such thoughts private when in public company. Who would confide in a physician who claimed no affiliation with God? I still must feed myself, and keep my house. I still need my patients. But too many people believe with too much conviction in what amounts to, at best, a superstition.I’ve seen science change a patient’s diagnosis, but I’ve never heard a prayer that changed God’s mind about a damn thing..
Cherie Priest
Passion gives you direction. It serves as an inner compass that links you to action.
Susan C.Young
The deceitfulness of the heart of man appears in no one thing so much as this of spiritual pride and self-righteousness. The subtlety of Satan appears in its height, in his managing persons with respect to this sin. And perhaps one reason may be that here he has most experience; he knows the way of its coming in; he is acquainted with the secret springs of it: it was his own sin. Experience gives vast advantage in leading souls, either in good or evil.
Jonathan Edwards
A decision is only as strong as the belief standing behind it
Isaiah Hankel
Sure, life as we know it is enough. But life as we don’t know it? That’s where the magic awaits. That’s where second chances abound.
Holly Elissa Bruno
Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.
Candace Bushnell
Some people think destiny is something you cannot escape, such as death or a curdled cheesecake, both of which always turn up sooner or later.
Lemony Snicket
Jean Laffite was a sexy bad boy with a gentleman's manners and an air of barely suppressed danger. Every girl's secret dreamboat in other words. We always say we want a nice, hardworking, decent guy but we're lying to ourselves. - DJ Jaco
Suzanne Johnson
They love him most for the enemies that he has made.
General E. S. Bragg
Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness.
Catherine Lacey
Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
David Brooks
Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.
William S Burroughs
One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.
Anita Shreve
The yoga asana practice was developed to get the body in the best physical condition possible, so that the yoga practitioner would be able to sit for many hours comfortably in meditation. In order to reach the higher spiritual vibrations we must be as strong, flexible and open as possible.
Dashama Konah Gordon
I’ve always had a lifelong interest in spirit. I was an 8-year-old boy – an 8-year-old adorable little boy. I just understood my grandfather had a ‘knowingness.’ I didn’t know the word psychic then.” (during interview with Sam Liebowitz on the Conscious Consultant Hour)
John B. Muciaccia
Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.
Ruta Sepetys
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
Why do you think that you are weak when you are blessed with the power of love?
Debasish Mridha
If a tattoo is supposed to make a statement, that kid’s body is just plain babbling.
Vincent H. O'Neil
Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances 100 things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've concluded that I learned far more from my failures than from my successes.
June Hunt
Many of life's failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas A. Edison
The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.
Corey Ford
We’re too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don’t have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine.
Steven Rowley
Why Do Some People NOT Take Initiative?•tThey have a FEAR of . . . rejection, looking stupid, failing, criticism, getting out of their comfort zone, or imposing on other people.•tThey are unmotivated or uninspired.•tThey get stuck in negativity, confusion, stress, or doubt.•tThey don’t want to upset the apple cart or the status quo.•tThey are lazy, disengaged, or indifferent.•tThey have LACK of . . . energy, desire, confidence, self-esteem, skills, creativity, imagination, connections, resources, education.
Susan C.Young