Quotes by American Authors - Page 2886

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities.
John Foster Dulles
It’s always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I’m wrong, or I’m right, either you bring us back, or you don’t, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they’re not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.
Lee Child
God’s church is a Bible-centered church, and it grows strong under persecution.
Billy Graham
The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.
Saul Bellow
Love is a deep well from which you may drink often but into which you may fall but once.
Ellye Howell Glover
A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.
Edward Gorey
The humble woman is surprised by all the good that she sees around her rather than scandalized by what she cannot judge anyway. The humble woman is grateful for her successes but not disheartened by her failures. She enjoys her gifts and readily admits her mistakes. She maintains a sense of humor, whether the news from Wall Street is giddy or glum. She faces her character defects without getting discouraged. Her humble confidence in God’s love and her enchantment with the kabod Yahweh shape a hedge of thorns against self-absorption and frees her for an unselfconscious presence to others.
Brennan Manning
Home was more about people than a place.
Caragh M. O'Brien
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone.
H.P. Lovecraft
This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives. She did love Leo. She’d loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Men and women may devise plans to satisfy their inner longings, but in the midst of all the “religions” of the world, God’s way is available in the Bible for all who will come to Him on His terms.
Billy Graham
To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown.
Jane Avrich
Unconditional love and forgiveness are the sources of eternal happiness.
Debasish Mridha
Because I always feel like runningNot away, because there is no such placeBecause if there was, I would have found it by nowBecause it's easier to run,Easier than staying and finding out you're the only one who didn't runBecause running will be the way your life and mine will be described,As in "the long run"Or as in having "given someone a run for his money"Or as in "running out of time"Because running makes me look like everyone else, though I hope there will never be cause for thatBecause I will be running in the other direction, not running for coverBecause if I knew where cover was, I would stay there and never have to run for itNot running for my life, because I have to be running for something of more value to be running and not in fearBecause the thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from,Not without showing the fear as I see it nowBecause closer, clearer, no sir, nearerBecause of you and because of that niceThat you quietly, quickly be causingAnd because you're going to see me run soon and because you're going to know why I'm running thenYou'll know thenBecause I'm not going to tell you now
Gil Scott-Heron
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
Mitch Albom
We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better. -Bishop Milton Wright to Orville Wright, 20 Sept. 1908
David McCullough
Some things we must learn through experience. That is how one truly lives.
Tony DiTerlizzi
Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Booth Tarkington
The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.January 1830
Daniel Webster
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.
Henry James
That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]
John Green
-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
Joseph Heller
One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
Helen Vendler
Look, Laszlo. I'll have the dentist with me, and I don't want to alarm her any more than necessary. So take Vanna out of the backseat and stick her in the trunk."Shanna halted. Her mouth dropped open. Her throat seized up, making it hard to breathe.I don't care how much crap you have in the trunk. We're not driving around with a naked body in the car."Oh no! She gasped for air. He was a hit man.
Kerrelyn Sparks
If there's one area of me that the devil's got a hold of, it's my tongue.
Stefne Miller
If there had once been a chance and there had once been love, then it will still be there in spite of time and obstacles. If you can get past that, you can get past a lot.
Donna Lynn Hope
...because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.
Meg Wolitzer
Let us find the dam snack bar," Zoe said. "We should eat while we can."Grover cracked a smile. "The dam snack bar?"Zoe blinked. "Yes. What is funny?""Nothing," Grover said, trying to keep a straight face. "I could use some dam frenchfries."Even Thalia smiled at that. "And I need to use the dam restroom."Maybe it was the fact that we were so tired and strung out emotionally, but I startedcracking up, and Thalia and Grover joined in, while Zoe just looked at us. "I do notunderstand.""I want to use the dam water fountain," Grover said."And…" Thalia tried to catch her breath. "I want to buy a dam T-shirt."I busted up, and I probably would've kept laughing all day, but then I heard a noise:"Moooo."The smile melted off my face. I wondered if the noise was just in my head, but Groverhad stopped laughing too. He was looking around, confused. "Did I just hear a cow?""A dam cow?" Thalia laughed.
Rick Riordan
Creating anything that never existed before is not sanity.
Kamal Ravikant
Then a ploughman said , speak to us of work : in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life ,And to love life throught labour is to be intimate with inmost secrets .And what is it to work with love ?it is to weave the colth with threads from your heart , even as if your beloved were to wear that colth .It is to build a house with affection , even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house .It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy , even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit .It is to change all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit .He who works in marble , and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone , is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
Kahlil Gibran
She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious.The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community.Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.
Susan Wiggs
Can we just stop pretending that skinny jeans are a good look on anyone? Can we just band together and go for a boot cut, please? Ladies?
Jennifer Garner
Pretty doll," rasped the dark haired vampire as he went about behind her, and she could feel his ravenous hunger practically radiating off him.
J.E. Keep
Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.
Robert A. Caro
Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
Amy Tan
A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find
Rex Stout
Your happiness is in direct proportion to the amount you serve others.
Chris Matakas
This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.
Anne Lamott
She clutched the train ticket tighter and waited for the sense of escape to come over her as it had a dozen times before, that heady sensation of having just scooted through the clanging gate, of eluding the thrown net. It didn't come. She was running again, but she wasn't escaping. She'd been chased to ground a long, long time ago.
Connie Brockway
Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?
Christopher Hitchens
The road home is tinged with regret and the road forward is full of the unknown.
Joaquin Lowe
Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.
Robin Hobb
This is what reading is like to me. It's finding a spring in the midst of a barren land. Just when I think I might up and die of thirst, I stumble onto this fresh, cold water, and I'm suddenly given this new life because I can-and do-drink to my heart's content.
Beverly Lewis
I'd spent a night with Ranger a while ago, and I knew what happened when he was encouraged. Ranger knew how to make a woman want him. Ranger was magic.
Janet Evanovich
she should have told me that times slides away on a hillside of lose shale and takes everything in its path-dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.
Kristin Hannah
The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.
John Adams
Don't wait until people are dead to give them flowers.
Sean Covey
Visualize "prayerize " "actionize " and your wishes will come true.
Charles L. Allen
Tonight was a perfect illustration of why Cinderella and the Prince get married twenty-four hours after they meet. Because when you're living with your stepmother, there is no happily ever after.
Melissa Kantor
Oh, God. Not again.”Not again? “Do you make a habit of driving into people’s houses?
Christina Dodd
A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature...
Rebecca Solnit
Ask a writer what he thinks about critics and the answer you get is similar to what you get when you ask a lamppost how he feels about dogs.
Bert Sugar
The things that your eyes see plainly and cant forget are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination.
Kendare Blake
When you unlock your pleasure, you unlock your power. And that can change anything..." -Sheerah, Donny and Ursula Save the World.
Sharon Weil
Warning: Okay, okay…stop asking. They get their story. Happy now?
Alexa Riley
I barely brushed towards her cheek as I moved towards her mouth, her nails tickled my chest, driving me insane. Kissing her became my single reason for breathing.
Katie McGarry
She'd even violated the only sensible rule of dieting she'd ever run across, the sage advice of the Muppets' Miss Piggy, who recommended never eating anything bigger than your head.
Susan Donovan
Fuck you!” “Right here?” He crossed his arms. “That definitely wouldn’t help your getting over me.
Stacey Marie Brown
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.
Edgar D. Mitchell
We sucked in atheism with our canned milk.
Joy Davidman