Quotes by American Authors - Page 2787

...that whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.
Gayle Forman
Clary- "How to Come Out to Your Parents," she read out loud. "LUKE. Don't be ridiculous. Simon's not gay, he's a vampire.
Cassandra Clare
In politics, looking at the big picture is the most convenient way to avoid getting bogged down in annoying little details, like the facts. That's why politicians always talk in generalities, such as "balancing the budget" or "obtaining justice under law" or "maintaining meaningful employment," when they really mean "massive spending cuts in programs advocated by my opens," or "creating a religious loophole for my largest contributor," or "keeping open a redundant and wasteful government facility in my district.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Yeah, I'm a drug addict. And a prostitute. The whole world knows. Not because I robbed my own family. Not because I ended up behind bars. Not because I've been hassled by the cops when soliciting customers from a local street corner. Not because I'm shooting up in the public bathrooms at your city park. Everyone knows because I told them all. I never tried to hide any of it. I never felt the need to.
Ashly Lorenzana
...if you plan everything out completely from beginning to end, you destroy your chance for adventure.
Carine McCandless
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.
Mark Z. Danielewski
Some people need a super hero to save them, but I am my own super hero. All I need is myself, my strengths and the fiery passions in my heart to overcome the obstacles in my life.
Imania Margria
Perhaps I really was disillusioned; unable to see myself for who, and what, I really was. Maybe I really was an ungrateful wretch who just refused to take responsibility for my own actions. Maybe I was lying to myself because I didn’t want to admit to being a bad person. Maybe…
J.M. Northup
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.
Bruce Lee
It was funny the way memory obliged the heart. His happy recollections were always afloat in his soupy subconscious where so many of his darker memories had sunk to the underbelly of his past and been as good as lost forever. But without conscious instruction, memory had edited and enlarged the finest moments of his life and stored them like masterpieces in the private gallery of his personal history.
Nanci Kincaid
You discover something so awful, so life-changing, the only way you can cope is to jump straight into denial.
Jane Green
It is like the panting of a thousand puppies.
Jerry Spinelli
I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regrettedmost of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.
Nora Ephron
If God gave you contentment then you would never pursue your life purpose. It is your restlessness that pushes you to take action, change your life and seek more of what you could possibly be.
Shannon L. Alder
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Edith Wharton
The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.
Ben Marcus
Don't get pissy with me leech." With a glare, Carrow pressed her print to his torque. "Even tapped out, I can still do a love spell to make you fall in love--with the sun.
Kresley Cole
This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.
Lauren DeStefano
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod. Grappa is made from the spent skins and stems and seeds of wine grapes; marmalade from the peels of oranges. The wine behind grappa is great, but there are moments when only grappa will do; the fruit of the orange is delicious, but it cannot be satisfactorily spread.“The skins of onions, green tops from leeks, stems from herbs must all be swept directly into a pot instead of the garbage. Along with the bones from a chicken, raw or cooked, they are what it takes to make chicken stock, which you need never buy, once you decide to keep its ingredients instead of throwing them away. If you have bones from fish, it's fish stock. If there are bones from pork or lamb, you will have pork or lamb stock.
Tamar Adler
Are you okay?”She looked up, her eyes glistening. “I just . . . I . . .”“Hey.” He stood up and rounded the picnic table, sitting next to her on the bench. He wrapped hisarm around her, the feeling of her, so warm and female and way too tempting, sending a shock ofpleasure through him. “Hey, don’t . . . don’t do that.”“I’m pregnant. It’s a pregnant thing,” she said.“I’ve never seen you do it.”“I don’t often.”“I can tell.
Maisey Yates
A certain amount of native skill and training can allow many individuals to be fairly successful magicians, achieving a surprisingly high ratio of positive results through sorcery.(...) These outer changes, no matter how dramatic, will not necessarily have a deep impact on the deepest levels of your psyche, which is where the process of initiation most meaningfully manifests.'--Zeena Schreck for “Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its backgroundand role within new Western religiosity,” University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004
Zeena Schreck
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.
Jerry Mander
Anxiously, he touched the lump on his head again, then felt his injured leg, groaning. "The whole affair is a mystery to me," he said. "Who would want to steal anything from me?" "Perhaps a thief...?" ventured Julius.
Henry Winterfeld
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens
When I finally applied logic to Religion that was when I quit paying after life insurance and quit going
Stanley Victor Paskavich
For some people, their fear to lose is greater than their desire to succeed, so they end up doing nothing and their dreams become impossible.
Rodolfo Costa
I believe that a worthwhile life is defined by a kind of spiritual journey and a sense of obligation.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Your ability to shape your destiny is directly proportional to your belief that it is a matter of will and determination--however much or little that belief may be.
James A. Owen
The more doors you open to the mysteries, or sacred knowledge, the smaller you feel. And because you begin to feel smaller and smaller until your ego disappears, the more humble you become. Therefore, any man who behaves arrogantly with what little he knows, or claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing. Real greatness does not reside inside those who feel large. The truly wise are meek. Yet being small and meek do not make one weak. Arming oneself with true knowledge generates strong confidence and a bold spirit that makes you a lion of God. The Creator does not want you to suffer, yet we are being conditioned by society to accept suffering, weak and passive dispositions under the belief that such conditions are favorable by God. Weakness is not a virtue praised by God. How could he desire for you to be weak if he tells us to stand by our conscience? Doing so requires strength. However, there is a difference between arrogance when inflating your ego, and confidence when one truly gets closer to God. One feels large, while the other feels small. Why? Because a man of wisdom understands that he is just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms, and that in the end — we are all connected. And did you not know that the smaller a creature is, the bolder its spirit?
Suzy Kassem
-she loved Lily Cate like her own, and for this night, this moment, she would be her mother, even though there was no guarantee of tomorrow.
Laura Frantz
The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.
Doug Wilhelm
Possibilities...in the closet...itching...to break out...but afraid of...the fallout
Ellen Hopkins
The machines are too dull when weare lion-poems that move & breathe.
Michael McClure
Choose your friends carefully but don’t worry about your enemies, they will choose you
Carl Henegan
All romantic novels end the same way, but it's the process of getting there that provides all the enjoyment.
Candice Hern
I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)
Donald Miller
The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized . . .
Carew Papritz
Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.
Martina Boone
The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn't added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it's peace of a kind he hadn't imagined himself worthy of receiving.
Anthony Marra
An artist sees not only the thing, but he also hears its inner voice.
Debasish Mridha
All suffering is caused by one belief....the belief in separation
Vivian Amis
From human problems come human solutions, which in turn spawn inspiration, creativity, insight and enlightenment. Without life's problems, life would become stagnant, dull and boring.
Beth Johnson
In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.
Elizabeth Kostova
«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»
Bruce Sterling
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge. Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.
Napoleon Hill
The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.
Alasdair MacIntyre
He sent Zuckerberg a letter proposing Viacom would pay $1.5 billion to buy the two-year-old company.
David Kirkpatrick
When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.
Chris Kraus
if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.
Jerry Spinelli
Best way to achieve greatness is to serve others with great love.
Debasish Mridha
I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand."I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand."Go," he says.
Lauren Oliver
A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.
Alice Walker
Everybody knows there is no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only a messy, inconsistent, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our lives.
Tori Spelling
No. She will never be queen.” She swayed toward him, and he felt like he was being encircled by a python, smothered and choked.
Marissa Meyer
If we don't fear God, it's because we don't know God.
Craig Groeschel
All forms of art are parallel expressions. Writing is not unlike painting or other artistic endeavors. Each artistic endeavor is an expression of the mystery of the world. The job of the artist is to deepen that mystery, express reverence for the mystery of life, and explore the enigmatic aspects of human nature.
Kilroy J. Oldster