Quotes by American Authors - Page 2821

We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.
Patti Smith
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
David looked at me, then, the regret plain on his face. No matter what I said, we both knew the hard truth. We do our best. We try. And usually, it makes no difference at all
Leigh Bardugo
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
Bill Bryson
The problem with a “free” translation, on the other hand, especially for study purposes, is that the translator updates the original author too much…On the one hand, these renditions often have especially fresh and vivid ways of expressing some old truths and have thus each served to stimulate contemporary Christians to take a fresh look at their Bibles. On the other hand, such a “translation” often comes very close to being a commentary, but without other options made available to the reader. Therefore, as stimulating as these can sometimes be, they are never intended to be a person’s only Bible; and the reader needs constantly to check particularly eye-catching moments against a true translation or a commentary to make sure that not too much freedom has been taken.
Gordon D. Fee
Do you know much about the Vittra?""Some." He held out an orange slice to me. "Want some?""No, thanks." I shook my head. "How much is 'some'?""I meant like a slice or two, but you can have the rest if you really want.
Amanda Hocking
I've seen enough cowboys in my life to know I don't want one for a husband."...Victoria"Every good man I know is a cowboy."...ColtPromises Kept
Scarlett Dunn
An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
Jennifer Egan
I wonder if any night on earth will be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad tonight.
Kate Chopin
‎Determination, effort, and practice are rewarded with success.
Mary Lydon Simonsen
History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”--from Past Present and Future are One
Aberjhani
Deep down inside, my heart knew the score.And I know that Haven was wrong.It's not always a case of one loving more than the other.When two people are truly meant to be, they love equally.Differently - but still equal.
Alyson Noel
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
Will Durant
In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.
Tim O'Brien
New Rule: Stop putting psychedelic screensavers on computers. I sit down to check my e-mail, and the next thing I know it's three days later, I'm in the desert, I'm banging on a drum, I'm naked, and somebody's pierced my dick.
Bill Maher
Truly powerful people have great humility. They do not try to impress, they do not try to be influential. They simply are. People are magnetically drawn to them. They are most often very silent and focused, aware of their core selves. ... They never persuade, nor do they use manipulation or aggressiveness to get their way. They listen. If there is anything they can offer to assist you, they offer it; if not, they are silent.
Sanaya Roman
Stupid bitch," he spits, and that's when I mentally punch him in the face.Except it isn't just mentally—it's for real, my closed fist is actually moving. It hits him square in the nose with a sickening crunch."Oh my God," Laney breathes from behind me."Oh my God," Jake says from the floor.My eyes widen. "Oh my God.
Hannah Harrington
When Eleanor was a little girl, she'd thought her mom looked like a queen, like the star of some fairy tale.Not a princess - princesses are just pretty. Eleanor's mother was beautiful. She was tall and stately, with broad shoulders and an elegant waist. All of her bones seemed more purposeful than other people's. Like they weren't just there to hold her up, they were there to make a point.
Rainbow Rowell
Self-pity is a death that has no resurrection a sinkhole from which no rescuing hand can drag you because you have chosen to sink.
Elizabeth Elliot
Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.
Ruth Gordon
We all go through times of self-doubt, times when we may question our abilities and hope we can live up to the expectations of others.
Susan C.Young
For me it's the challenge-the challenge to try to beat myself or do better than I did in the past. I try to keep in mind not what I have accomplished but what I have to try to accomplish in the future.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I’ve been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword…the analogy is a bit muddled, but it’s in there somewhere.
Willow Madison
[H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes you a liar.
Jenny O'Connell
When I was in my single digits, I was subjected to the worst torture you can possibly inflict on a child: Catholic mass.
Tyler Oakley
The vastness of your imagination depends on the level of your consciousness, the power of your awareness, and the deepness of your perception.
Debasish Mridha
There's never going to be someone else," he says, shaking his head. "You've wrecked me. I wouldn't be any good to anybody now—except for you.
Emm Cole
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adapation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.
Michael Chabon
His height forced her to stand on her toes. For a woman who’d been taller than most of the boys in her class in high school, that particular physical trait provoked a flurry of sensual images to flash through her mind. Sex against a wall. It was a possibility. And given the breadth of his shoulders, she imagined he’d hold her up just fine. Oh, glorious day.
Mia Sosa
In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
Gary Snyder
It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.
Donna Tartt
Kaldar almost never stops and thinks about the consequences of his actions. Something is fun or not fun, and my brother’s fun often lands him in interesting places such as jails or castles belonging to California robber barons. Where other people see certain death, my brother sees an opportunity for a hilarious, thrilling adventure. But when I got the tattoo, Kaldar warned me that marrying her was a bad idea.
Ilona Andrews
What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
«In my opinion, it is you considerate, humane men, that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches; because, if it were not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foothold for an hour. If there were no planters except such as that one,» said he, pointing with his finger to Legree, who stood with his back to them, «the whole thing would go down like a millstone. It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects his brutality.»
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.
Robin Hobb
Math. It’s your favorite subject. Which surprises you. Last year your teacher tried to convince you that you had a real “aptitude” for math, but all you got in the end was a B minus. The truth is you weren’t even trying. But then you got low Cs and Ds in all your other classes and you weren’t trying there, either, so maybe you are good at math after all. tYou like it because either you’re right or you’re wrong. Not like social studies and definitely not like English, where you always have to explain your answers and support your opinions. With math it’s right or it’s wrong and you’re done with it. But even that’s changing, my teacher said now you have to explain how you solved the problem and support your answer, saying that having the right answer isn’t as important as explaining how you got it and bam, just like that, you hate math.
Charles Benoit
Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.
Lauren Oliver
If you count all your assets you always show a profit.
Robert Quillen
Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.
Criss Jami
Banality is a terribly likely consequence of the underuse of a good mind.
Cynthia Propper Seton
The character of Jesus can only be ultimately known experientially through the indwelling of His Spirit in union with us."~"The character of Jesus can only be ultimately known experientially through the indwelling of His Spirit in union with us."~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
The dream thatwe are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,41without knowing why, and looked intomy reflection in the water. I couldn’t lookaway. What was the image that pulled mein after it? What was it that I loved? Andthen I recognized it. So simple. In thewater I saw my father’s face, and that facesaw the face of its father, and so on, and soon, reflecting backward to the beginningof time, to the face of God, in whoseimage we were created. We burned withlove for ourselves, all of us, starters ofthe fire we suffered—our love was the afflictionfor which only our love was thecure . . .
Jonathan Safran Foer
The single most important ingredient to success is Discipline.
Brad Lomenick
I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
Oprah Winfrey
Hatred does not stir the stone men half so much as hunger.
George R.R. Martin
To tell you the truth, I've just been avoiding everything. I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mea way. In a curious way. it's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that da, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report on top of that. or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why. Especially since I know that if they went to another school, the person who had their heart broken would have had their heart broken by somebody else, so why does it have to be so personal? And if I went to another school, I would never have known Sam or Patrick or Mary Elizabeth or anyone except my family. (Pg 142)
Stephen Chbosky
The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.
Alan Jacobs
For the New Age community, 'ancient' knowledge is always considered unimpeachable and unimprovable, just as a diverse range of beliefs from Eastern mysticism to UFOs, energy dowsing to cryptozoology, are - though mutually contradictory - unquestionably accepted in the name of open-mindedness.
Mark Crutchfield
We'd spent maybe ten minutes together, during which time I'd accidentally swung a sword at her, she'd saved my life, and I'd run away chased by a band of supernatural killing machines. You know, your typical chance meeting.
Rick Riordan
The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume.
Dee-Williams
But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears', for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house". The moral of 'Snow White' is "Never eat apples". The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.
Lemony Snicket
Usually when someone is angry we hear their angry words. Instead, try hearing the unspoken, “I am scared, I am frustrated, I am insecure, I am vulnerable, I am threatened.
Charles F. Glassman
You're looking for a reason," she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.
Sue Monk Kidd
Zeb was kindergarten teacher--a good one. I always thought it was because he was the same emotional age as his students.
Molly Harper
But make no mistake about it, Jordan. When the time is right and you're ready" - he trailed his forefinger along the edge of her palm and stilled when she shivered in response - "I have every intention of getting you into bed. And sleeping will have little to do with it.
Sara Humphreys
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
John F Kennedy
Every prayer victory makes it easier to believe the next time.
Lori Hatcher
I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?
Sharon Waxman