Quotes by American Authors - Page 2796

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all.
Asa Don Brown
If you scared, say you scared, and if not then push yourself off of that wall and step into the darkness. That's where success is, get up out of that comfort zone, you'll be surprised what you can achieve!
Noel DeJesus
Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.
Michael Pollan
Discontent is want of self-reliance it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.
Stacy Schiff
The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.
Edward Abbey
A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.
Donald Miller
Contention in our families drives the Spirit of the Lord away. It also drives many of our family members away. Contention ranges from a hostile spoken word to worldwide conflicts.
Ezra Taft Benson
To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana
He looks like a ghost, haunted by a life suddenly torn away, and I don’t know how to comfort him.
Victoria Aveyard
Fathers...Rise at dawn.Stand up strong.Fix and build.Plow the field.Carry the weight.Work 'til late.Encourage our dreams.Provide the means.Fight with might.Defend what's right.Protect the home.Refuse to roam.Forge the way.Take time to play.Spoil our moms.Keep homelife calm.And all becauseof selfless love.
Richelle E. Goodrich
What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave…
Jack Kerouac
We must resolve to live our lives and to build our lives in such a way, that if every ounce of fame were to dissipate tomorrow, and the only people who still remember our names are the few people around us who have true love for us in their hearts-- we would still be able to go on living life with an equal or even greater amount of happiness than before. You see, we must resolve to live our lives in such a way, that the worth and the value of it all comes from those things that are a part of our souls. You fill your soul with what is a part of it, with people who have made you a part of their hearts, and things that bring you awe. Then if all the world were to disappear before your eyes, just not any part of your soul, then you are okay! You are still happy. You can wake up to a new morning in a world that doesn't know you, retaining every ounce of worth that you had before! And maybe even more.
C. JoyBell C.
On desperate seas long wont to roam Thy hyacinth hair they classic face Thy naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.
Edgar Allan Poe
I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.
Karen Joy Fowler
You think this is a walk in the park, that it’s all beauty pageants and tea parties? Come on girl, wake up! This is survival at its most intense.
RoChe Montoya
Life's managed, not cured.
Phillip C. McGraw
Would it be so terrible, sweet Cyn?” he whispered. “To spend eternity at my side?” But she was too far gone in sleep, and Raphael didn't know if he wanted to hear her answer anyway.
D.B. Reynolds
Burn God's words into your heart, His thoughts into your mind and His ways into your actions; and you'll have a Spirit-filled life.
Alisa Hope Wagner
If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays with you.
Tim Burton
God has put enough into the world to make faith in Him a most reasonable thing. But He has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone.
Ravi Zacharias
It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.
Criss Jami
Nothing in the world is so strong as a kind heart
Frances Hodgson Burnett
I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching--they are your family.
Jim Butcher
Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream.
Richelle Mead
Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.
Terry Tempest Williams
Simplistic ideas are the weapons with which the thoughtful are clubbed.
James Rozoff
One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Headstrong is just a word, Katie - a word others call you when you don't do what they want.
Jennifer Donnelly
Longevity conquers scandal every time.
Shelby Foote
Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...
Christy Hall
As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
Garth Risk Hallberg
She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved.
Leslye Walton
The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.
Robin Hobb
Your limitations are largely programming instilled by others that you choose to believe.
Gary Hopkins
She sat back, eyeing the flames now leaping upward to lick at the wooden beams of the ceiling. "If this fire gets out of hand, or if the guards take too long to come, you and I may be in a lot of trouble.""We are already in a lot of trouble.""That was my reasoning, too. Of course, if that happens and the fire gets too big before the mighty citizens of Ringhmon stop it, it'll also gut this little palace and destroy everything inside it. Including the enormously expensive Model Six that I just fixed, which they'll be responsible for paying fo, and probably the other Model Six that they openly own." She shrugged, trying to appear unworried. "That'll teach them to kidnap me. But that won't happen. We'll be fine.""You say that and yet you are frightened.""Yes, I'm frightened! I admit it! Happy? No, wait, Mages are never happy. Just try not to die, all right? I don't want that to be my fault."Alain thought through her words. "I will attempt not to die. Your plan appears to be sound, as well as potentially very destructive. I see that it is a mistake to offend you.
Jack Campbell
The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way.
Wilfred M. McClay
In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert Hughes
Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.
Oliver North
I know we sort of said goodbye, but I don’t have anyone else to tell this to and I’m going to burst with it. You know EBB’s verse:tGod answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,tAnd thrusts the thing we have prayed tFor in our face, tA gauntlet with a gift in it. –
Mary Jane Hathaway
Change Management = The human side of change.
Pearl Zhu
Well, in the meantime, Carter and I have been discussing the matter of Ryan." This time it wasn't the clang of a pan I heard, but instead a messy smack--the contact of Carter's backhand with Dean's head, I presumed. "Just hear me out. You have options. I have an Italian uncle. He'll make sure Ryan is sleeping with the fishes by next week.""Dean!" Unable to repress my amusement, my eyes flew wide and my grin grew."Either that, or we can go all Sweeney Todd on him and--""Oh, will you stop?" My laughter was crippling. "There will be no calls to your uncle and no trip to the barber shop--please, leave Sweeney Todd out of it.
Rachael Wade
Roses are for our eyes to adore, but they mean nothing unless you give them to someone you love.
Chris Paynter
Saint Melor’s father was Saint Meliau.”“Was everyone in Bertaèyn a saint, back in the day?”“Everyone who didn’t murder anyone, maybe,” Perrotte said.
Merrie Haskell
So let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless unreasoning unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Nature endowed human beings with two teleological components that define our essential humanity: consciousness and memory. Consciousness enables people to make decisions, and memory allows us to learn and share our accumulated knowledge. Cognitive endowments of consciousness and knowledge allow people to ascribe a meaning to existence, by establishing a direction and purpose to their life.
Kilroy J. Oldster
She's terse. I can be terse. Once, in flight school, I was laconic.
Joss Whedon
Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us - to haunt our thoughts long after we face them. He would be delighted to know you're still fretting over whatever nonsense he said...Don't give him the satisfaction of knowing that he's still troubling you; put those thoughts from your mind
Sarah J Maas
But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.
Carson McCullers
So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don’t think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he encounters them he tells them to piss off.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Today, I look forward and I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.
Jane McGonigal
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
Aldo Leopold
Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on ‘our new reality.’ He called us ‘targets.’ He said ‘get used to it.’ He told our Webmaster ‘get off your ass’ and remove bus routes/stops from the school’s website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus.
Tucker Elliot
Eleven pages— this is a letter! Have courage. I'm going to stop.
Jean Webster
Was Jane now. All Jane. Come calamity or come calm, was myself and none else.
J.D. Jordan
I think, to be happy is to be interested and engaged.
Aimee Mann
The essence of true love is mutual recognition-two individuals seeing each other as they really are. We all know that the usual approach is to meet someone we like and put our best self forward, or even at times a false self, one we believe will be more appealing to the person we want to attract. When our real self appears in its entirety, when the good behavior becomes too much to maintain or the masks are taken away, disappointment comes. All too often individuals feel, after the fact-when feelings are hurt and hearts are broken-that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the loved one is a stranger. They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was really there.
Bell Hooks
[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--'[Opal] 'Was?'[J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.
Maria V. Snyder