Quotes by American Authors - Page 2842

nothing can block your light. what's for you will be yours even when shade is thrown
Alexandra Elle
My job was to fight evil, and my soul was my weapon.
Rebecca Chastain
A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again, with the old ambivalence of love and hate and with all the old guilts, the blood brothers of our childhood. In a civil war – especially in one such as this when the nation shares deep and significant convictions and is not a mere handbasket of factions huddled arbitrarily together by historical happen-so – all the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-division of the country a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.
Robert Penn Warren
People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.
David Brooks
War makes animals of men, and we can't let that happen to us. If we do, we won't have any chance of survival.
Shannon A. Thompson
Sarita's been so busy exercising her brain that she hasn't had time for her heart, the poor thing.
Manil Suri
and we laugh and laugh andall I know isat this moment I feel likeI can do anything I wantand be anyone I wantand go anywhere on the globeand still call it home
Kirsten Smith
memories were tricky things…they weren’t stable. they changed with perception over time. …they shifted, and [she] understood how the passage of time affected them. the hard working striver might recall his childhood as one filled with misery and hardship marred by the cat calls and mae calling of playground bullies, but later, have a much more forgiving understanding of past injustices. the handmade clothes he had been forced to wear, became a testament to his mother’s love. each patch and stitch a sign of her diligence, instead of a brand of poverty. he would remember father staying up late to help him with his homework – the old old man’s patience and dedication, instead of the sharpness of his temper when he returned home – late- from the factory. it went the other way as well.[she] had scanned thousands of memories of spurned women, whose handsome lovers turned ugly and rude. roman noses, perhaps too pointed. eyes growing small and mean. while the oridnary looking boys who had become their husbands, grew in attractiveness as the years passed, so that when asked if it was love at first site, the women cheerfully answered yes. memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. they were stories people told themselves.
Melissa de la Cruz
I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
Dorothy Parker
To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?
David Sedaris
True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.
Edgar Allan Poe
Hold onto the wings of angels that pass your way. They fly higher than any army that has none.
Shannon L. Alder
Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred?
Jeffrey McDaniel
Like the waves in the ocean, life changes every moment.
Debasish Mridha
And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
Jack Kerouac
Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.
Maud Hart Lovelace
As many of you know, I am not very fond of the human race. However, I will not let them die by the hands of our species nor any other. For thousands of years, we've walked this earth in peace with them, and a war is not in the best interest of either party. It'll only create suffering and tragedy on both sides. We can't allow this to happen. Our only option is to find him and kill him.
Christine Gabriel
...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
For a peaceful life, always think of peace and forget to judge others.
Debasish Mridha
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
Sam Harris
It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K.
Dave Eggers
We have all suffered losses and pain, but no loss is greater than a life lost holding-on to a painful past.
Bryant McGill
It's not about Indians, it's about people... the overall philosophy is to reconnect all people to nature and inevitably themselves. - Larry Stillday
Michael Meuers
(...) 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
Ruth Ozeki
I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation.
Lemony Snicket
Each man follows his own path - his own destiny, if you will. And only he is responsible for the choice.
Heather Graham
We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
Randolph Bourne
I realized Michael was right. I mean, I am always writing in this journal. And I do compose a lot of poetry, and write a lot of notes and emails and stuff. I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as a talent. It's just something I do all the time, like breathing.
Meg Cabot
God gave you a gift of 86 400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you"?
William Arthur Ward
Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.
Laurie Notaro
As I age in the world it will rise and spread,and be for this place horizonand orison, the voice of its winds.I have made myself a dream to dreamof its rising, that has gentled my nights.Let me desire and wish well the lifethese trees may live when Ino longer rise in the morningsto be pleased with the green of themshining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.
Wendell Berry
We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.
william gass
If Hitch were a person, he'd be Mother Theresa or Gandhi or someone who treated all living creatures with the respect they deserve. It's depressing how my dog is a better human being than I am.
McCall Hoyle
I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a novel at the same time, for example. But I’ve seen that writers who are starting out sometimes throw their energy in so many different directions that they can never finish any of the projects, much less all of them.To me a good test is this: what do you like to read? What kind of book moves and affects you the most? Is it the memoir, the novel, the long poem-collection? Personally, I find myself most immersed in the novel, and that’s why I write them – they have the most magic for me. The joy of self-expression is exhilarating, but ultimately choosing one venue for it can make your work much better – and same for your chances of actually finishing something.
Charles Finch
Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive.
Robert Jordan
Dios mio, I think my brother lost his balls somewhere between here and Mexico. Or maybe Brittany has them zipped inside that fancy purse (of hers).
Simone Elkeles
This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne--the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.
Maryrose Wood
He’d spent so much time in the penalty box for fighting last season, he’d been tempted to hang a picture and maybe set up a lava lamp, it had felt so much like home
Rachel Gibson
Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths...
Rollo May
Among industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks 29th in infant survival.
Jennifer Block
The power of getting to know one another is so immense, eclipsed only by first getting to know ourselves.
Bryant McGill
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
Carl Sagan
Erotic attraction often serves as the catalyst for an intimate connection between two people, but it is not a sign of love. Exciting, pleasurable sex can take place between two people who do not even know each other. Yet the vast majority of males in our society are convinced that their erotic longing indicates who they should, and can, love. Led by their penis, seduced by erotic desire, they often end up in relationships with partners with whom they share no common interests of values.
Bell Hooks
Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.
Henry A. Giroux
Oh my gosh, he smells good, like some exotic but comforting spice, nutmeg or cardamom. Slowly Damian lowers his head to mine and I think my chest might explode, my heart is tap-dancing so qui
Lisa Ann Sandell
The Mayor spoke proudly. 'Yes, they will light it. I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir, but—I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brae man will have made them a little braver.' He smiled apologetically. 'You see, it is an easy thing to do, since the end for me is the same.'Lanser said, "If you say yes, we can tell them you said no. We can tell them you begged for your life.'And Winter broke in angrily, 'They would know. You do not keep secrets. One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it. The flies have conquered the flypaper. You do not keep secrets, Colonel.
John Steinbeck
Death is a part of life. It is inevitable. It is not to be feared
Kirsten Beyer
Once upon a time Karen saw somebody nobody else could see. She thought to ask an old man: who were you? Once upon a time I thought to dream of medicine. Now I dream of medicine by the sea.
Nicholaus Patnaude
She didn't know how to love, to give herself to someone, to out herself in someone else's keeping and take him into hers. She didn't trust anyone with her heart - or the darker places of her soul.
Christine Feehan
The greater the volume of thoughts you have to work with, the better the context you can create for developing options and trusting your choices.
David Allen
Finally! You're here!"Uh....Do I know you?"Well, no....But you're here, all the same...
Lynn Weingarten
Without dignity, identity is erased.
Laura Hillenbrand
Tell me you love me. Tell me you love me and will fight with me.
Cassandra Clare
Compassion is not a virtue -- it is a commitment. It's not something we have or don't have -- it's something we choose to practice.
Brené Brown
There are a million things one might do with a block of wood. But what do you think might happen if someone, just once, believed in it?
Suzanne Weyn
If we fail to realize our full potential as human beings, we live more on an animalistic level. This is fine for dogs, cats, and chimpanzees but doesn’t work quite so well for women and men. Without the capacity to freely shape our own lives, much as a sculptor might carve stone, we inevitably slip into negativity and depression.
H.E. Davey
Early in my sales career, various sales trainers taught our teams how to use matching and mirroring to build rapport and earn trust with our clients. When done well, it would inevitably help us improve customer service and closing ratios. It was not encouraged as a deceptive sales practice to manipulate, but rather a subtle way to make a great first impression and connect on a meaningful level.
Susan C.Young
In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.
Atul Gawande