Quotes by American Authors - Page 2837

Let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.
Walter Mondale
Universal dilemma of the real dog person: You leave the dog home, you worry what will happen to him when you’re out. You take the dog with you, you worry that something will happen to him when he’s alone in the car….The solution, of course, is to keep the dog at your side twenty-four hours a day, every day, but then you worry that your constant presence is making the dog neurotically dependent, and besides, you can’t go anyplace that doesn’t allow dogs, so you can’t go to work or get your hair cut or go to the dentist. And then, of course, you feel guilty because, after all, doesn’t your wonderful dog deserve a better owner than this poverty-stricken, shaggy-headed slob with decayed teeth? Meanwhile, the dog doesn’t worry about anything. Why should he? That’s what he has you for, and for obvious reasons, he trusts you completely.
Susan Conant
If I could turn my thoughts into spoken words and share them with someone, they’d become real and mean something. Now, they were only lines that could be erased when I didn’t feel them anymore or hopeful thoughts that, like shadows, would disappear when the sun went away. - Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines
Holly Michael
No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.
Annie Proulx
I am not questioning God's power! It is God who gave us reason and circumspection! It is God we serve by exercising prudence!
Dan Brown
I used to ask myself, ‘Sergei, would you rather spend your money on drink or women?’ and thanks to the club, I spend it on both and am called a patron of the arts.
Melika Dannese Lux
...even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.
Julianna Baggott
My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were *right* and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions
Alexei Panshin
You'll never really be great unless you aim high.
Stella Adler
Actually, I was prone to random acts of stupidity. I considered it to be one of my talents.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
James Madison
How—I didn't know anyword for it—how "unlikely". . .How had I come to be here,like them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?
Elizabeth Bishop
you are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Kahlil Gibran
Given our abundance, the burden of proof should always be on keeping, not giving. Why would you not give? We err by beginning with the assumption that we should keep or spend the money God entrusts to us. Giving should be the default choice. Unless there is a compelling reason to spend it or keep it, we should give it.
Randy Alcorn
Don't try to fit into another person's mold, be bold and beautiful in your own shape and form.
Eveth Colley
No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption of knowledge, claiming to understand everything.
John Bloomfield Jervis
So much for being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.
Emma Straub
The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.
M.T. Dismuke
The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.
Alexander Graham Bell
She rides as a man, goes unveiled as a man, fights as a man. Let her prove herself worthy as a man, worthy of her weapons and of our friendship.
Tamora Pierce
You get used to... what you want to get used to.
Steven Lyle Jordan
The Artificial’s speech pattern was an idiosyncratic mix of awkward and colloquial. It was unexpectedly endearing. “I just have good instincts. Mostly I love being in space.” But you are not ‘in’ space. You are in your starship and your starship is in space. It is not so different than being on a planet. “Oh, Valkyrie, you have no idea.” Tell me then.
G.S. Jennsen
This couldn’t be just a lake. No real water was ever blue like that. A light breeze stirred the pin-cherry tree beside the window, ruffled the feathers of a fat sea gull promenading on the pink rocks below. The breeze was full of evergreen spice.
Dorothy Maywood Bird
Communities that can't read and translate what the powers are putting out will always be tricked.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Only the unprotected self can feel joy.
Siri Hustvedt
Again, all of life presents us with two basic ways to treat events. We can either label them "god for us" or "bad for us." The event is only an event. It's how we treat the event that determines what it becomes in our lives. The event doesn't make that determination- we do.
Chris Prentiss
One faces the future with one's past.
Pearl S. Buck
I've never had a humble opinion in my life. If you're going to have one why bother to be humble about it?
Joan Baez
In other words, I tasted a different drug. A drug called progress.
Cameron Conaway
Want to have a short phone call with someone? Call them at 11:55 a.m., right before lunch. They'll talk fast. You may think you are interesting, but you are not more interesting than lunch.
Randy Pausch
When the world asks "what was it like?" Only the photographer can say "See!
Mark Denman
I have yet to figure out a better way to combat hate than to love harder.
Scott Stabile
Our culture is getting better and better at encouraging women to speak, but it’s not doing enough to listen to what they say when they do.
Lilit Marcus
Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film - another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is *never* satiated. And when someone is fully consumed - vampirized - they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers. ("Red Light")
David J. Schow
Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.
Augusten Burroughs
More wine," Lightsong said, raising his cup."You can't get drunk, Your Grace," Llarimar noted. "Your body is immune to all toxins.""I know," Lightsong said as a lesser servant filled his cup. "But trust me—I'm quite good at pretending.
Brandon Sanderson
Emma hung up and hugged her pillow tight to her chest. He shouldn't be making her feel this special and desired. He was just a friend. Right, just a friend. She wasn't even fooling herself anymore.
Claire Matthews
Nico clenched his sword. Sharing his secret crush hadn’t been the worst of it. Eventually he might have done that, in his own time, in his own way. But being forced to talk about Percy, being bullied and harassed and strong-armed simply for Cupid’s amusement … Tendrils of darkness were now spreading out from his feet, killing all the weeds between the cobblestones. Nico tried to rein in his anger.
Rick Riordan
How do I learn to speakwhen silence is all I know?
Susie Clevenger
It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.
Ron Paul
If you can't be the poet, be the poem.
David Carradine
I am living on hope and faith ... a pretty good diet when the mind will receive them.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
If we are to feel the positive feelings of love, happiness, trust, and gratitude, we periodically also have to feel anger, sadness, fear, and sorrow.
John Gray
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them
Stacia Kane
So, does that make me your girlfriend?”“Do you want to be?”“I’ve never liked that word, actually. It sounds so juvenile. ”He shot her a worried look. “Is there another term you’d prefer?”“I’ve always liked ‘companion of my heart’. Or ‘my better half’. Or maybe even ‘the sun in my universe’.
Mary Jane Hathaway
The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, governments and governors will go, the things made by men's hands will go, buildings will always crumble - only the earth will remain the same, there will always be men on the earth in the morning, there will always be the things made by God's hands - and all this history of cities and congress now will go, all modern history is only a littering Babylon smoking under the sun, delaying the day when men again will have to return to earth, to the earth of life and God -
Jack Kerouac
That's the thing about parents. They ask what you think, but they don't really care, or at least they don't care enough to let it affect the outcome.
Peter Monn
How did it die?" he asked."Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires."He looked at me like I was senile."Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough.
Jonathan Messinger
I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.
Toni Morrison
Hope gives us reasons to live and pursue our dreams, expecting greater possibilities.
Ellen J. Barrier
I can see he thinks he's the ultimate creation, and he seems to believe every woman here is his Eve, created from his ribcage for him to enjoy. I'm both aroused and infuriated, and this is the most confusing feeling I've ever felt in my life." Brooke Dumas, REAL
Katy Evans
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
Mark Twain
Dress confidently in clothes that make you feel great about yourself. When you look better you feel better.
Susan C.Young
But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.
Will Durant
I know life well enough to know you can't count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to. You can't stop people from dying. You can't stop people from going away. You can't stop yourself from going away either.
Jennifer Niven
Silence—true silence is universal. It is the profound stillness at the center of everything, at the center of every relationship—at the center of yourself. While it is always there, it can only be experienced beyond the veil of judgment, expectation, and attachment. From time to time, a person can spontaneously enter into a perfect moment of silence when dancing, watching a sunset, holding an infant, or making love; but for most,true silence remains elusive at best. Yet through various forms of meditation and prayer this veil can be lifted, allowing that inner silence to wash through you, leaving in its wake a cleansed mind and a compassionate heart.
Darren Main
When you make a deliberate effort to keep your thoughts positive, and authentically feel that way, more positive outcomes are inevitable.
Susan C.Young
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Arthur Miller
A technicality I'm prepared to hide wildly behind.
Jim Butcher
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separa
Adrienne Rich