Quotes by American Authors - Page 2827

I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks. "It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded. "Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.
John Green
Are you always so mistrusting?” he said, lifting a brow.“When my escort is a demon, yes.
Lia Davis
Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.
Roman Payne
If you can't see a benefit of the challenges in the present, know that you're giving a present to your future." —Bright Side Up: 100 Ways to Be Happier Right Now
Amy Spencer
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Surrender your expectations. Surrender your doubts. Surrender your fears. Surrender your strengths. Surrender your anger. Surrender your control.
Yasmine Galenorn
Beliefs create reality
Melody Beattie
Every act intends some good.
Brent Weeks
An excess of law inescapably weakens the rule of law.
Laurence H. Tribe
I was so anxious about what kind of kiss it would be-because my friends back home described so many types-and it turned out to be the beautiful kind. You didn't shove your tongue down my throat. You didn't grab my butt. We just held our lips together...and kissed.
Jay Asher
Tragedies can contain some of life’s greatest rewards and valuable lessons. Struggle makes you stronger. Pain makes you alert. Clouds bring forth the rain. As a wise man once said, ‘You seek problems because you need their gifts.’ Why would you rob someone of these benefits?
Brownell Landrum
Goals are important but what you become to achieve goals is much more important.
Debasish Mridha
The truth is, time travel is hard, and people are lazy.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
You love me,” he said. “That’s all I need to know.” “You always say the right thing,” Savannah told him, her eyes so filled with love that he almost wept. “Sometimes it takes you awhile to get to it, but you always get there, and what you say is always worth waiting for.
Suzanne Brockmann
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
When you're and only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool. But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edged of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life. "Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.
Margaret McMullan
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Stephen King
I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories.
Ishmael Beah
The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
Robin Hobb
We are only human, and the Gods have fashioned us for love. This is our greatest glory and our greatest tragedy.
George R.R. Martin
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Two things that matter to me. Emotional resonance and rocket launchers.
Joss Whedon
Ah, but is any history really all that ancient?' Second asked. 'Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?' This man was more annoying than any history teacher Jordan had ever had.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.
Tom Clancy
Good thoughts without actions are like a ship stuck in a port.
Debasish Mridha
Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.
Edith Hamilton
There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered on night in darkness and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (identity unknown) called "Where Is The Voice Coming From?" But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. I'm not sure this story was brought off; and I don't believe that my anger showed me anything about human character that my sympathy and rapport never had.
Eudora Welty
He thought again of the watch in the window. It had twelve black numbers on its moon face and there was magic to that. For these were numbers that were not really numbers at all but letters like in words. He shivered at the possibilities of such untold magic.
Davis Grubb
Employee engagement takes mind, heart and hands unification.
Pearl Zhu
What are you doing?" "Ya!" said Jane, whirling around, her hands held up menacingly. It was Mr. Nobley with coat, hat, and cane, watching her with wide eyes. Jane took several quick (but oh so casual) steps away from Martin's window. "Um, did I just say, 'Ya'?" "You just said 'Ya,'" he confirmed. "If I am not mistaken, it was a battle cry, warning that you were about to attack me.I, uh..." She stopped to laugh. "I wasn't aware until this precise and awkward moment that when startled in a startled in a strange place, my instincts would have me pretend to be a ninja.
Shannon Hale
Some of the hardest battles we fight are those against the demons of our past, over which we have no control.
Charles F. Glassman
There is no security no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago we will do it again. Actually every time we begin we wonder how we ever did it before.
Natalie Goldberg
...you influenced me, in a way in which no one else did.
Michael Kelahan
Often, evicted families also lose the opportunity to benefit from public housing because Housing Authorities count evictions and unpaid debt as strikes when reviewing applications. And so people who have the greatest need for housing assistance—the rent-burdened and evicted—are systematically denied it.
Matthew Desmond
We are living a shallow, hollow Christianity and hardly realize it. Our Christianity looks nothing like the Book of Acts, and we somehow have no problem with that. It is anemic and weak compared to the apostolic glory days. We have started to rewrite ourtheology based on our lack of experience, rather than based upon the scriptures.
John Willis Zumwalt
I've come back for you, my love, my life. Let me look at you, keep you, never let go of you.
Sandra Byrd
Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.
Lois McMaster Bujold
I know something about a lot of things," she countered evenly. "That's why you're grooming me to be your lieutenant, remember?" - Mara Jade
Timothy Zahn
Some people feel the coolness of winter and complain. Some people endure, enjoy, and wait for spring.
Debasish Mridha
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
Herbert Hoover
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
David F. Wells
And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
Anaïs Nin
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
Stephen King
Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.
Cintra Wilson
Seriously, men.” Gina scowls when she turns back to us. “We’re royalty when they want to fuck. Thrilled to have as much sex as their anatomy allows, and then we’re nothing.Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place.
Katy Evans
I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!
Bill Maher
Once you've caught a glimpse of the cosmos through the back doors of your church, it doesn't seem like such a big deal to suggest to a sweet young couple that they quit sleeping with other people.
Richard Lischer
Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.
Sharon Salzberg
You are never to drive like that,” I told them. “Even if you are ever wealthy enough to own a Jaguar.
Kathy Bryson
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.
Patrick Rothfuss
In WASP families, if you don't get along with someone, you have as little to do with them as possible. In Jewish families, you move next door, to make them as miserable as possible.
Doreen Orion
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
Adam Gopnik
Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.
Newton Lee
The solution to nearly every problem in the world comes down to greater awareness, compassion, and empathy.
Bryant McGill
If it comes, let it come. If it goes, it's ok, let it go. Let things come and go. Don't let anything disturb your peace. Stay calm and carry on.
Germany Kent
Lyonesse stared wide-eyed at Lynet’s hand and swallowed hard. Lynet realized that she was still holding the carving knife and had been pointing it at Lyonesse’s breast. She laid the knife down slowly and gathered a few plates of food. “I’ll take the rest of my dinner in my room, I think,” she said.
Gerald Morris
Come closer to me,” he commanded. She began to get to her feet, giving him the opportunity to force her down again. “No. I want you to crawl over here on your hands and knees.” Jace watched the power of his words place invisible constraints on Camille’s body. She fell down to her knees and crawled on the floor like an animal. In that moment, he was her master; in that moment, everything seemed natural and right in the world. He was the yin to her yang, pulling both of them into perfect equilibrium.
Edith Warner
Good men are remembered for their friends. Great men are remembered for their enemies. The greatest men are those who turn their enemies into friends.
M. Todd Gallowglas
Perhaps the Creator of this strange place knows us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps humanity was meant to eternally ponder the purpose and importance of our own existence. If we were assured of either, we’d be intolerable creatures.
Tiffany Madison