Quotes by American Authors - Page 281

I want to speak to the dream in your heart. That dream that has taken a backseat as you have strived to live up to something different.
Suzette R. Hinton
Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.
Henry Ford
Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, where love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.
Cynthia Voigt
...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.
Paul Edward Gottfried
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.
Ken Wheaton
As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance... The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.
Alys Arden
I lied!' I spat my whisper at him. 'I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!' I took a breath. 'He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!
Robin Hobb
I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue.
Mat Johnson
She stood up. Something inside her had changed. "It was finally time," she thought. It was finally time to leave the past in the past. And move on. She took her first step. It felt like walking for the first time. It was strange to not be chained anymore. It felt like life. Like hope. Like happiness.
Yasmin Mogahed
Oh deep winter snow, pale executioner, thou who delights in a slow, torturous death.
T.R. Neff
Worship gatherings are not always spectacular, but they are always supernatural. And if a church looks for or works for the spectacular, she may miss the supernatural. If a person enters a gathering to be wowed with something impressive, with a style that fits him just right, with an order of service and song selection designed just the right way, that person may miss the supernatural presence of God. Worship is supernatural whenever people come hungry to respond, react, and receive from God for who He is and what He has done. A church worshipping as a Creature of the Word doesn't show up to perform or be entertained; she comes desperate and needy, thirsty for grace, receiving from the Lord and the body of Christ, and then gratefully receiving what she needs as she offers her praise-the only proper response to the God who saves us.
Matt Chandler
If you can master the opening, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
Darynda Jones
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.
Helen Keller
When you make a commitment to live a life of bliss, everyday is an opportunity to live the dream awake.
Tia Walker
People ate everyday, and often times they didn't pause when standing in the fresh produce section of the grocery store to realize the magnitude of God's earth that feeds them.
Cindy Woodsmall
When we change our thoughts, we will change our experiences.
Michael Thomas Sunnarborg
We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.
Lauren F. Winner
If you love something, let it go. If it does not come back it was not yours to began with.
Anna Napper
It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.
Erma Bombeck
I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.
Anne Sexton
You're Superman, thinking Kryptonite makes you invincible." 
J.M. Darhower
If you encounter defeat, you must persist to be a winner.
Debasish Mridha
I am beyond good and evil at this point. I am beyond the lines drawn in the sand by society at this juncture. I am beyond fear, beyond religion, beyond the morals and mores. I am Lord of the Fucking Flies. Do you understand?
Jason S. Hornsby
Now isn´t the time to change yourself to fit into the world... you should be changing the world to accept you. To let you exist as you are, without being cut open and damaged.
Alexandra Bracken
In the circle of successful living, prayer is the hub that holds the wheel together. Without our contact with God we are nothing. With it, we are 'a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.
Conrad Hilton
I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad.
Peter Davis
she drew me. But not who I see in the mirror. Nia saw the Oscar i keep hidden. And she put him on paper. Nobody sees the real me.
Pam Bachorz
I couldn’t love you for who you are because you showed me who you truly wanted to be, and I loved her more.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
Sebastian Junger
The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.
Thomas C. Oden
I am a war president.
George W. Bush
The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.
Elbert Hubbard
The better the school library, the higher the reading scores.
Stephen D. Krashen
A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx
And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all.
Anita Shreve
The Serpent, to my interpretation, was pain.
William Goldman
He did have his beliefs, chiefly in his own genius.
T.J. Stiles
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
Mark Doty
I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite.
Elle Lothlorien
Adjusting to life’s changes may be difficult and something you may not be looking forward to experiencing. Be gentle with yourself and you will find clarity on all levels of encouragement in places and by people you least expect. Remember as it has been said before: This too shall pass!
Steven Cuoco
You can’t make someone your everything because when they are gone you have nothing left.
Kate McGahan
And she had pushed, or she hadn't. The result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she'd been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this? How could she not have been forgiven?
Lauren Groff
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.
Bill Bryson
What grace I have is enough.
Theodore Roethke
Your arousal is like the sweetest perfume I’ve ever smelled... I can sense it all around me — tingling against my skin, thickening your blood and shoving me off the edge of insanity.
Kenya Wright
I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard—I must keep armed.
Billy Graham
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?
Jodi Picoult
For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.
David Bayles
Manhattan is basically this island in New York, where all the cool stuff is located.
Jason Medina
The missions were always changing- sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.
Michelle Cuevas
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't run I never liked fast food
Rachel Caine
In the vast spectrum of space-time’s coeternal continuum, I am but a glint of bundled energy held together by the translucent fiber of creative consciousness. The misty dew of private thoughts that inhabit my streaky underworld briefly forms a splintery part of the glittering arena of the cosmos. In the ether-like dawn of my awakening, my minuscule arch appears intravenously injected amid the dark matter of the nightscape. Reminiscent of the morning’s dew, my comet’s tailed reflection disintegrates and dissipates without a lasting trace in the dawn of a new age. I shall never wholly cease to exist, since my filtrate potentiality – a trace of my essence – remains suspended forevermore in celestial wonderment.
Kilroy J. Oldster
...crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white and gilt dressing table-cum-sculpture, done up in the new, hyper-Baroque style named Rococo. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes asquint, as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler’s rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well.
Neal Stephenson
Stress kills when you fuel the initial reaction with negative thoughts, aggressive behavior, belief and trust in the uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms it causes. Don’t fuel it, and watch how fast stress disappears.
Charles F. Glassman
What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?
David F. Wells
Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.
James Davison Hunter
The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.
Bryant McGill