Quotes by American Authors - Page 289

I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray.
Neal Shusterman
All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.
Thomm Quackenbush
What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
James Baldwin
It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.
Mary MacLane
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
Christopher Morley
Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul.
E.M.Bounds
Travel does not exist without home....If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.
Josh Gates
Voldemort the corn snake with the shoe fetish. Wonderful.
Huntley Fitzpatrick
I'm not going to drown in what I can't change.
Jessica Park
The idea of the book that matters most," Kiki said. "Because i think it's like impossible to pick such a book. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not. Like if you're unhappy and you read, I don't know, On the Road or The Three Musketeers, and that book changes how you fell or how you think, then it matters the most. At that time.
Ann Hood
I have a sack of hate mail that I want to respond to. One day, when I’m tired or tipsy, I will respond and tell them what I think.
Chris Colfer
I had a professor one time... He said, 'Class, you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here, so please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and He has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself. And, if on meeting someone, right away you recognize what they are, listen to them anyway'.
Rich Mullins
I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff.
Jeff Lindsay
Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.
Frank Herbert
To cultivate bravery and courage, take a deep breath & relax:When you feel fear, your body tenses up and your thoughts lead you down an anxiety-ridden path. Stop, breathe, relax.
Susan C.Young
the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I shall yield a rifle of fury, loaded with the justice of time and the raging storm of my soul!
Quoleena Sbrocca
Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.
Frank Harris
My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.
David Sedaris
The dreamer's untamed eye sees beyond the illusions to the heart of what is real.
Bryant McGill
It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else.
Naomi Janowitz
It’s very possible to live life without disliking anyone. It’s all vibration. We can get to the point where ‘dislike’ does not even register as an option in the default settings of our minds.Some may wonder, ‘What does it matter if I like or dislike people?’In my perception, it matters greatly since dislike influences our entire energetic body. It becomes part of our vibrational aura, what we’re emitting and receiving in return from the world. How we respond to the world is how the world will treat us.
Alaric Hutchinson
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for.
Cintra Wilson
When he was kidnapped by the Iron King and taken into the Nevernever, she didn’t hesitate to go after him. And she didn’t stop there. When her magic was sealed by Mab, leaving her defenseless in the Winter Court, she somehow managed to survive, even when she thought you had turned on her. When the Scepter of the Seasons was stolen by the Iron fey, she went after it, despite having no magic and no weapon with which to defend herself. And when the courts asked her to destroy the false king, she accepted, even though the Summer and Iron glamours within her were making her sick, and she couldn’t use either of them effectively. She still went into the Iron Kingdom toface a tyrant she didn’t know if she could overcome.“Now,” Ariella finished, turning toward me, “do you still believe humans are weak?
Julie Kagawa
Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one.
Ambrose Bierce
You are an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind, amazing being. There will never be another you and this fact alone makes you infinitely and absolutely valuable. Having absolute value means you cannot be diminished by anything or anyone. You are bulletproof and nothing can change your value.
Kimberly Giles
The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers.
John Gardner
...there is still a need for those of us nestled deep within the Christian bubble to look beyond the status quo and critically assess the degree to which we are really living biblically.
Francis Chan
A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity.
Mollie Marti
She disliked me. But she worshipped my brother. He didn't see her, not really. Not like I did.
Penny Reid
To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.
Judith "Jack" Halberstam
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
When the soul-penetrating pathos she was beaming at me failed to prevent me from continuing to put things in boxes, the helper dog became increasingly alarmed. Over the ensuing few days, she slowly descended into psychological chaos. The simple dog remained unfazed.
Allie Brosh
A fine line exists between quitting on ourselves and letting go of a restrictive position in life and moving forward to reach our ultimate destination based upon our natal predisposition honed by a lifetime of experimentation. Who has not been forced to stop and ask ourselves, ‘who are we,’ ‘what are we doing,’ and ‘where are we going?’ Who has not been forced to pause by life’s dynamic forces and ask ourselves, ‘what mystical chords bind us as a species; what is the meaning of life; and how do we give birth to our genetic blueprint while shaping a sense of purposefulness out of our own existence and striving to bring joy to other people’s hearth?’ To answer these life affirming questions that gnaw most voraciously at our consciousness at the time when tension and unsettling trauma besieges us, we must appreciate our heritage, be mindful our epoch, accept responsibility for our adult decisions, and strive to accumulate wisdom that segues our entrance into the future. Each of us must arrive at a unifying philosophy that guides our living quest, and the sooner we come to terms with our eccentric self the quicker we will perceive and appreciate the ineffable beauty of nature.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.
Elizabeth Berg
Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer.
B.F. Skinner
For a Christian to return to a Jewish territoriality is to deny fundamentally what has transpired in the incarnation. It is to deflect appropriate devotion to the new place where God has appeared in residence, namely, in his Son. This explains why the New Testament applies to the person of Christ religious language formerly devoted to the Holy Land or the Temple. He is the new spatiality, the new locale where God may be met.
Gary M. Burge
Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
Wendell Phillips
I'm not a romantic.
Jack Kevorkian
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A true prophet would rather be believed false by many but actually true than believed true by many but actually false.
Criss Jami
Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.
L.R. Knost
On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.
Michael Lewis
I don't like to overdose. Call me old-fashioned.
Chelsea Handler
It had been a month before then that I'd sat on the bathroom floor and now it was back, the feeling that I was watching life through a thick pane of glass and that, whatever was out there, I wasn't designed for it.
T.R. Richmond
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
Donald Miller
Should is my all time least favorite word! It’s this sort of guilt inducing, finger wagging word that we use to beat up others and ourselves.
Frank Beddor
Soil, blood, seed- Let me draw strength from you. let it be enough.
Emily Whitman
Emotions buzz through our beings like busy bees, giving us the gift of living vividly.
Amy Leigh Mercree
The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words ofsome loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.
Helen Keller
Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
Amy Tan
He wasn’t looking for a soulmate. That would require having a soul to share, and he’d sold his off long ago
Miranda Liasson
The Bible is intensely practical, and one of the reasons God gave it to us is so we’ll be better prepared to deal with life’s problems and temptations. All too often we respond to these in ways that don’t reflect Christ . . .when we do that, Satan is the winner and the cause of Christ suffers.
Billy Graham
Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.
David Brooks
If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.
Peter Debye
Gender is but a doorway to a vast inner universe of ultimate relationships between oneness and duality, manifest and divine, being and nonbeing, temporal and eternal.
William Keepin
now it’s computers and more computersand soon everybody will have one,3-year-olds will have computersand everybody will know everythingabout everybody elselong before they meet them.nobody will want to meet anybodyelse ever againand everybody will bea recluselike I am now.
Charles Bukowski
She wasn't the perfect mom. However, she was the perfect Mother for me.
Raymond D. Longoria Jr.