Quotes by American Authors - Page 2771

Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot."[Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]
Jon Stewart
All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property
Gary L. Francione
Step out on faith and walk into your purpose.
Germany Kent
In the depression, was I ever suicidal; or in other words, did I ever think about taking my life? I’m not sure if I ever pondered this act but, honestly, I did not care whether I lived or died; for to me, death had already taken place—and it seemed to be worse as disbelief gave way to shock…and then reality.
H. Kirk Rainer
It matters little which party has gotten lazy about delivering what their partner craves. It doesn’t take too many days or weeks for an unsatisfied partner to start to feel love-starved and sadly unfulfilled. If you want great sex in the bedroom, show love to each other outside the bedroom.
Cathy Burnham Martin
Be you wise and never sad,You will get your lovely lad.Never serious be, nor true,And your wish will come to you--And if that makes you happy, kid,You'll be the first it ever did.
Dorothy Parker
The world is too quiet without you nearby.
Lemony Snicket
Once people knew about the cancer, I wouldn't be able to stop them from talking about Val every time they saw me. And then I would stop being me, because my time was something I could only buy at home.
Melanie Conklin
They say dragons never truly die. No matter how many times you kill them.
Suzanne G. Rogers
That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.
Michael Ventura
I was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain words, chance words I hear or read,Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.
Vladimir Nabokov
The INFJ is able to tune into underlying meanings and gain deeper awareness of your situation. They can feel unexpressed emotions and pick up on small inflections which others may require you to spell out. INFJs do not only listen, they hear, comprehend and engage in your words.
Jennifer Soldner
He loves me, he loves me not. How many flowers must I kill before he loves me?” ~He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
Kimberly Kinrade
He took deep breaths. He wanted to sleep. At least in sleeping, he could find a kind of peace. At least in sleeping, he could dream about his dead friends and maybe, until the sun came up, feel like he wasn't all alone.
Alex London
Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.
Isaac Marion
I promise, Matthias. I'll take you home.""Nina," he said, pressing her hand to his heart. "I am already home.
Leigh Bardugo
The wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers got hungry scolded God were egotistical or impatient in their turns made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
Phyllis McGinley
There is no such thing as unconditional love," my mother told me. "I could stop loving you at any time.
Elana K. Arnold
But I'm not ready to let Winn-Dixie go.
Kate DiCamillo
Te amo, Querida," he whispered suddenly, stroking her hair. "Tu eres mi luz en la oscuridad."t"This is the second time you've said that," Cassandra murmured. "What does it mean?"t"I love you." His voice was as rough as his hand on her cheek was gentle. "You are my light in the darkness.
Brooklyn Ann
Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing.
Thomm Quackenbush
You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by.
Rachel Reiland
Who says we don’t want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it’s some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don’t we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?
Dave Eggers
My favorite thing you do is stop me in the middle of whatever I'm doing to tell me you love me.
Crystal Woods
Poetry, I tell my students,is idiosyncratic. Poetryis where we are ourselves,(though Sterling Brown said"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")digging in the clam flatsfor the shell that snaps,emptying the proverbial pocketbook.Poetry is what you findin the dirt in the corner,overhear on the bus, Godin the details, the only wayto get from here to there.Poetry (and now my voice is rising)is not all love, love, loveand I'm sorry the dog died.Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)is the human voice,and are we not of interest to each other?
Elizabeth Alexander
Drugs may know how to numb a brain, but the past never forgets to resurface.
Kris Kidd
Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.
Tony Schwartz
One who walks in love sees the world through the envelope of their mission.
Bryant McGill
Don’t participate or allow yourself to be dragged into other people’s dramas, complaints, or gossip.
Susan C.Young
I've come to seduce you."tHis pupils dilated as his gaze heated.tShe smiled. He hadn't been surprised at her presence, but he'd been very surprised at the reason.tHe held up a palm. "By all means.
Erica Ridley
There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I'm not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it's MY delusion and I'm sticking with it. It's sort of like: I have problems but problems don't have me.
Carrie Fisher
An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.
Ron Brackin
A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this IS grace.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Jesus tells us not to be misled by the voices of strangers. There are so many strange voices being heard in the religious world of our day. We must compare what they say with the Word of God.
Billy Graham
We love that which we corrupt.
Kiana Davenport
I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.
Walter Cronkite
In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
Gary Snyder
I’ll tell you what time it is. It is time to be a hero.
Mark Andrew Poe
Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. "There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.
Michael Finkel
How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.
Walker Percy
The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.
Anthony Marra
Books pull you to other worlds ... let them, and enjoy the adventure.
H.B. Bolton
Wishes have voices sometimes.
Alyssa Day
I am absolutely convinced without any uncertainty that the old adage, History Repeats Itself is a valid assertion.
Chris Mentillo
When you make a promise, you’re not giving your word in erasable pencil, you’re inscribing your commitment in indelible ink.
Frank Sonnenberg
It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.
Rollo May
Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.
Stefan Petrucha
One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)
Don DeLillo
We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.
Susan Sontag
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
Ursula K Le Guin
To gain wisdom, you must not only acquire knowledge, but you must assimilate it within your being.
Debasish Mridha
Look upon the world with loving eyes and the reflection everyone sees will contain love.
Bryant McGill
I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.(from Who's Who in Hell)
Jack London
Think about what you are thinking about. Be aware of your own thoughts!
Toni Sorenson
All spiritual techniques seek to awaken fallen man from the dream in which he lives : he dreams continuously of individual state of being, and of the many forms through which the external world presents itself to him; he builds for himself a paradise of illusions, so as to forget the absence of God. To recover the vision of the spiritual world, the soul of man must "die" to this dream, this ceaseless flow of images which fallen man regards as normal, everyday state of his consciousness.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
I've got the Mark of Cain," said Simon. "That means nothing can kill me, right?""You can kill yourself," Magnus said, somewhat unhelpfully. "As far as I know, inanimate objects can accidentally kill you. So if you were planning on teaching yourself the lambada on a greased platform over a pit full of knives, I wouldn't.""There goes my Saturday.
Cassandra Clare
There are only a few planets with life. It is an oddity. It is really difficult to have the necessary conditions not only to support life but also to maintain the life inside a planet.-Loto
Carolina Cody Aldaz
...it's exemplification of our moment in American culture and American cultural journalism. It is an accurate document of the discourse of "takes." This movie, that book, this poem, that painting, this record, that show: Make a smart remark and move on. A take is an opinion that has no aspiration to a belief, an impression taht never hardens into a position. Its lightness is its appeal. It is provisional, evanescent, a move in a game, an accredited shallowness, a bulwark against a pause in the conversation. A take is expected not to be true but to be interesting, and even when it is interesting it makes no troublesome claim upon anybody's attention. Another take will quickly follow, and the silence that is a mark of perplexity, of research and reflection, will be mercifully kept at bay. A take asks for no affiliation. It requires no commitment.
Leon Wieseltier
The wheel of life: one generation rises like summer wheat, then withers and falls to seed. The wheel turns - birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood, senescence, death - driven by genetic machinery set in motion so many eons ago. For all its subtleties and infinite beauty, life has but one purpose: to keep the wheel turning.
Frank Vertosick Jr.