Quotes by American Authors - Page 2845

There may have been a time when pride was the very center of your life. You had ambitious thoughts of yourself, your powers, desires, and aims; but now that will begin to change . . . you have been born again.
Billy Graham
Which do I care more about - demanding my rights or displaying right choices?
Lysa TerKeurst
I'm me," she whispered. "Me"Nel didn't know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant."I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me."Every time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark leaves of the horse chestnut."Me," she murmured. And then, sinking deeper into the quilts, "I want... I want to be... wonderful. Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful.
Toni Morrison
Personal loss is the greatest motivator to a call for action!
Laurence Stuart
Oh, I'm not worried about him,' returned Bill. 'He's gone. It's not any more complicated than that. Honestly, if I admit it, it's me that I feel bad for.' He walked away from me and looked out toward the south. 'There's nothing like having a parent die to make you realize how alone you are in the world,' he added.
Hope Jahren
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.
Octavia E. Butler
Nothing stood between Sheryl's heart and skin. She was whole in her sorrow, perfectly connected inside and out, soul and body united, swaying with complete abandon to a dirge that only she could hear.
Athol Dickson
If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.
Calvin Coolidge
Comfort, joy, and love are key ingredients to a rich, pleasurable life. Prize them.
Amy Leigh Mercree
My fish dream is a sex dream.
Joseph Heller
Sometimes when I'm aloneI Cry, Cause I am on my own.The tears I cry are bitter and warm.They flow with life but take no formI Cry because my heart is torn.I find it difficult to carry on. If I had an ear to confide in, I would cry among my treasured friend, but who do you know that stops that long, to help another carry on.The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.Then to stop and see what makes one cry, so painful and sad. And sometimes...I Cry and no one cares about why.
Tupac Shakur
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.
Rebecca Solnit
For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong. – Bill W.
Bill W.
Feel free to scream, whisper, and everything in between. I want to hear it all.
Kristen Hope Mazzola
The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe.
Alisa Harris
The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.
Miranda July
The more light in your composition, the more generous you are. That is the first sign of a true light warrior. They give without waiting for you to ask. They give without expecting to be repaid. They give to strangers and even offer help to enemies. And sadly, because their light is so bright, they also attract tons of bugs and flies their way.
Suzy Kassem
You are quite possibly the least smooth guy I know,” she mumbled. “You can’t even put your arm around me without tripping up.
Lish McBride
[she] believes our experiences and our worlds make us. I believe our choices make our experiences and our worlds.
Josephine Angelini
She wished she liked him more.She wished she loved him less.
Scott Stabile
The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.
Tyler Cowen
The door that nobody else will go in at seems always to swing open widely for me.
Clara Barton
Like Hitler, the President used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.
Timothy Snyder
Every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.
Katja Millay
A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
Henry Hazlitt
In my heart, poetry screams, “I exist!
Delano Johnson
When I die, I want them to bury me facedown and ass up so that the whole world can kiss my ass!
Julie Halpern
Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future - you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.
John Green
Balance your body for better results. A balanced body improves electrical communication to muscles and gets you stronger, faster.
Josh Bezoni
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Kahlil Gibran
In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)
Vladimir Nabokov
A boy and a girl, fated to rule all. Two will rise, and One will fall.
James Patterson
Self-confident people are mindful about spending their time, energy, and interests on things that truly matter.
Susan C.Young
The most common emotional defense is avoidance (an ineffective coping skill for any stressor) as expressed through denial (e.g., "That wasn't really bad, I barely remember it").
Brian Luke Seaward
Learning to change the world is rarely easy or convenient--it can be complex, costly, and messy.
Ken Wytsma
And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.
Frank Herbert
He has the body of a professional athlete, chiseled to perfection in all the right places.
Collette West
The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
James Gleick
Climb upon the hates, and build upon the loves.
Anthony Liccione
Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors.
Geoff Manaugh
Does the king know you're back?""Nope! I'm trying to think of a properly dramatic way to inform him. Perhaps a hundred chasmfiends marching in unison, singing an ode to my magnificence.""That sounds… hard.""Yeah, the storming things have real trouble tuning their tonic chords and maintaining just intonation.""I have no idea what you just said.""Yeah, the storming things have real trouble tuning their tonic chords and maintaining just intonation.
Brandon Sanderson
What is it doing to me? Will the darkness consume me?
Melissa Marr
I wonder where love really is. Good feelings. Happiness. They're someplace, I know. I feel that. But without Father and Mother, how do I get there?
Susan Shaw
Before I can stop myself I throw my half-eaten banana at him and it hits him on the back of his neck.He spins around, wipes his neck and looks down at the banana on the floor."Did you really just fruitally assault me?
Ella Dominguez
Maybe I shouldn’t have told you––about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.“No," Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather––“ He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.
Philip K Dick
It took strength to be quiet. It took strength to be kind. It took strength to let other people's cruelty bounce right off of you.
April Genevieve Tucholke
It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
George Dennison Prentice
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
Norman Cousins
Love has a way of making the sane insane and the insane normal.
Shannon L. Alder
Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world.
Henry Clay
After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.
Mitch Albom
You don't have to love yourself unconditionally before you can give or receive real love.
Sharon Salzberg
Well I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
J.P. Morgan
Maybe," she said. "Maybe. But now you're making promises you might not be able to keep, and that's how people in love get very badly hurt.
Ransom Riggs
Everyone needs a place to be honest.
David W. Earle
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
Diane Ackerman
If there is no scent of Christ’s love on someone, then they bear no evidence of true devotion to Christ.
Eric Ludy
Each of us has more intelligence than we are trained to use and the part that we get graded on in school doesn’t amount to much.
Laurie Nadel
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.
Orson Scott Card
No one is so accursed by fate No one so utterly desolate But some heart though unknown Responds unto his own.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow