Quotes by American Authors - Page 2908

You die in the middle of your life.
John Green
The world has always teemed with a wide variety of spiritual thought and many differing journeys of the heart. But too often the world has used these differences as a weapon. How much agony has been wrought by what should be a thing of beauty - religious passion?
Steve Goodier
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Howard Zinn
When you've been lost as I have," he once said, "you get good at finding your way home.
Emily Henry
For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.
Edith Grossman
Love was more than just a fleeting desire, or a brief glimpse into a fairy tale, or a flash of playful flirtation in her beautiful hazel eyes. It was more than infatuation with a person’s best qualities, or reluctant acceptance of their less appealing traits. Real love meant loving the whole person, in every form, in every state, in every way. It was what transformed the ordinary monotony of everyday life into extraordinary moments of warmth and compassion and joy.
Jacqueline E. Smith
The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help. The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help. Offering help is courageous and compassionate, but so is asking for help.
Brené Brown
I don’t think I have as many friends as I thought I did, not close ones, not many who I connect with on that deep level of language that doesn’t just allow us to be ourselves with each other but allows us to be understood, even when we’re not saying anything.Silence—awkward or comfortable—is a language too. Awkward silence screams, “We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.
Erin McCahan
I'd keep your beauty timeless. like a flower pressed in a book, yesI wouldn't let it fade Folded in the chapters of my mind
Richard L. Ratliff
...if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there.
Roland Merullo
It could be said that going to church will not make one a Christian. But . . . refusing to fellowship with believers will not make you one either.
Billy Graham
Sacredness and profanity and prayers and wishes: they're all held together by the broken limbs of this dead tree, raking the night sky with its blackened branches. We are so small, the two of us. The tree and sky are so large and grand. We could fail so easily, fall before we've begun to rise.
Elora Bishop
An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to uptime causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the Universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and you be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
Carl Sagan
All things are possible to those who believe in themselves. Live a life without limits. Believe in yourself. Break through the ceiling of limitation. Develop high confidence and connect yourself to total success.
Mark F. LaMoure
But each time you use spirit, you're more likely to go crazy.”“Already crazy about you, Sage.
Richelle Mead
For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.
Jodi Picoult
There is a lot of willful incompetence in solar industry that is in the process of coming to light.
Steven Magee
I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
Thomas Nagel
Spiritual warfare is the unseen battle God wages on your behalf.
Jim George
…have you always been a jackass or is that something you’ve just recently acquired at the ‘I Want to be a Junior Jackass’ store? -Weasel to Army Lieutenant
Ray Palla
In most people's minds, fossils and Evolution go hand in hand. In reality, fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation. If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fossils that show how one kind of life slowly and gradually changed to another kind of life. But missing links are the trade secret, in a sense, of paleontology. The point is, the links are still missing. What we really find are gaps that sharpen up the boundaries between kinds. It's those gaps which provide us with the evidence of Creation of separate kinds. As a matter of fact, there are gaps between each of the major kinds of plants and animals. Transition forms are missing by the millions. What we do find are separate and complex kinds, pointing to Creation.
Gary Parker
HIt is surely certain - as certain as one can be about any historical events - that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements. We can thus end on a positive note of willed achievement, a century’s moral achievement that may have no parallel. It is an achievement, despite its many limitations, that should help inspire some confidence in other movements for social change, for not being condemned to fully accept the world into which we are born.
David Brion Davis
His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.
Elizabeth Spencer
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Charles Bukowski
The only sharks I’m afraid of are the ones that wear three-piece suits and write memos.
Laurie Nadel
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Joseph Campbell
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it's one of the easiest sons to commit while convincing oneself that he is being faithful.
Russell D. Moore
Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
Robert McKee
And If our God is for us, then who could ever stop us, and if our God is with us, then what can stand against?
Chris Tomlin
Then, in spite of everything, he began to smile. So much of his existence in Everlost had been full of despair. Despair, and a fear of losing what he had. But Allie was not lost, she was just there across the river, waiting for him to find her. Nick was not lost either--not entirely.It was then that Mikey McGill realized something. It must have been his sister who first called this place Everlost, because by naming it so, it stripped away all hope except for a faith in her, and the "safety" she could provide. Well, Mary was wrong on all counts, because nothing in Everlost was lost forever, if one had the courage to search for it.Mikey held tightly on to this shining truth as he and the golem sunk into the earth. Then with all the force of his heart, his mind, and his soul, Mikey McGill began to dig.
Neal Shusterman
I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.
Martha Washington
If I keep pushing myself, I’ll finally be somebody. I’ll finally matter. I’ll finally arrive.” Nonsense. You won’t be satisfied. The only thing worse than failing to realize any of your dreams, is seeing them all come true. You were meant for something more. Even if you could be known the world over, what does it matter if you have no time to be known by God?
Kevin DeYoung
Scratch a “libertarian” these days, and you will find...a leftist.
Murray Rothbard
Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.
Nathanael West
All that guides me is fear,And all that finds me is lossDeath defines which paths I crossIt is within the shadows that I stumbleAnd I am desperate without a voiceHere I am threatened by the resolve that you are my soulBut if my lies are the path that I have to wander because there is no choiceWill you love me still?In the darkness of the night when I wish to do nothing more than take flight?Will you hold me to this plane and ease the suffering and pain?When all you know is the truthAnd all they see is the liesWill I be the one you find, or the one you leave behind?Alone may be the only home I shall find
Cassandra Giovanni
The story of how I left Huckleberry begins -- as do all worthy stories -- with a goat
John Scalzi
Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.
Matthew Quick
The day you start trusting the people who think you are right, then the people who are actually right, you are on your way down.
EverSkeptic
Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. in Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii's rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
Tom Robbins
I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.
Charles Manson
Recovery is the affirmative outcome you’ll enjoy once you have moved through a setback and arrived on the other side. The sooner you find ways to achieve solutions for recovery, the faster you will regain vitality, hope and well-being.
Susan C.Young
Every house was different. Some had prayer rooms, some did not. Some of the women covered, most did not. Some fasted for Ramadan, some did not. Every one of them shopped. Most had been to that same ball because America was the great place where you could worship many things at once, until now.
Laleh Khadivi
The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.
Sherry Turkle
When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them tostop fighting?
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Most men can make moves, decisions, mistakes, plans, money, babies, love, war, progress, or even history. Not all men have what it takes to make a worthwhile difference in this world. Substance, drive, dedication, intelligence, faith and values; that comes from within. Its not what a MAN can make but what a MAN is made of that's impressive.
Carlos Wallace
At 20 years of age the will reigns at 30 the wit at 40 the judgment.
Benjamin Franklin
He felt her heartbeat against his shoulder, through his jacket, light as raindrops.
Lauren Gilley
The successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
Don Marquis
As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.
Eugene B. Sledge
Most people don’t understand performers are really sheltered and protected so much sometimes that they don’t get a chance to live their lives.
Diana Ross
When it was daylight, we'd been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn't help but love that light traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.
Marisha Pessl
God's justice is always perfect.
Shannon L. Alder
With endless pharmacological supplies at our fingertips, we do not need to penetrate the motives behind our actions, feelings, transgressions, dreams, and phobias. High on chemical substances we can remain stagnated in an infantile mental state. Without introspection, we foreclose ourselves from gaining the insight that allows us to navigate adulthood’s ceaseless demands.
Kilroy J. Oldster
What are the key elements for a fabulous, well-delivered compliment? You . . .•tare sincere and genuine.•tgive it freely without expecting anything in return. Your compliment is a selfless gift, not a boomerang.•tare specific and detailed.•telaborate on why you like something.•tdescribe how their positive virtue has positively impacted you.•tcan use adjectives for more colorful descriptions.•tkeep it positive.•tsay it like you mean it with intentional impact.•tuse discretion and good judgment.•tleave no room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding.•tsay the right thing at the right moment and let it flow organically.Finding sincere ways to compliment others is a powerful way to make a great first and last impression.
Susan C.Young
I am done looking for love where it doesn’t exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry wells.
Maggie Georgiana Young
When God justifies a sinner, everything in God is on the sinner's side. All the attributes of God are on the sinner's side. It isn't that mercy is pleading for the sinner and justice is trying to beat him to death. All of God does all that God does.
A.W. Tozer
Hutch called into the semidarkness of The Shed. 'Somebody's coming, Heck!'Then he, with the rest, faded from sight with that uncanny quickness known only to creatures of the wild and young children who are, after all, also creatures of the wild.("The Shed")
E. Everett Evans