Quotes by American Authors - Page 2977

It's Ms. Armano.”“Oh, Ms, huh. One of those women's libbers?” He chuckled, glancing up at her. “I prefer independent woman who can make it on her own. Lucky for you I'd say if I decide to accept your offer.
Mary J. McCoy-Dressel
Someone said that once a family producers a writer, that's the end of the family.
Zoe Kazan
And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.
Catherynne M. Valente
Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he'd lost.
Alice Sebold
Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained inall respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold aRealistic Vision of human nature.
Michael Shermer
Last will never be more important than commitment. Commitment stacks the odds of a successful relationship in my favor.
Gena Showalter
Climbing is as close as we can come to flying.
Margaret Young
I'm not good at games, Robert. Don't kiss me unless it's for read. Don't come around unless you mean to stay.""Do you mean marriage?" he asked coolly, his expressive eyebrows lifting...."if you're looking for a summer affair, I'm not your woman."His mouth twisted as an unreadable expression crossed his face. "Oh, but you are. You just haven't admitted it to yourself yet.
Linda Howard
I can’t”… “It’s not possible”… “I’m not good enough”... ~ These are lies the demons of your past use to scare away the possibilities of the present.
Steve Maraboli
I try to take one day at a time but sometimes several days attack me at once.
Ashleigh Brilliant
The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small.
James Gould Cozzens
Never let your fear of the unknown and things being too difficult make your choices for you in life. One of the saddest lessons in life is finding out that your fear made the situation worse than what it was and a braver person stole the dream you gave up on.
Shannon L. Alder
Your number one mission in life is to be who you were intended to be.
Bryant McGill
Courage has a ripple effect. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. And our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver.
Brené Brown
Cadillacs are down at the end of the bat.
Ralph Kiner
Let thy discontents be thy secrets
Benjamin Franklin
I'm the terrorist, do what I say or I'll terrorize you.
D.J. MacHale
Happiness is never found in materialistic things; it exists in things that cannot be physically possessed. Therefore, happiness is priceless. It can never be purchased. Love is happiness.
Ellen J. Barrier
I think I know what will help you chill.”The way his eyes devoured me hinted I shouldn’t take the bait, but I did anyhow. “And what would that be?”Noah pressed his body into mine, pushing me against the lockers. “Kissing.”I held my books close to my chest and fought the urge to drop them and pull him close. But that would only encourage his behavior, and good God, bring on his fantastic kissing. Fantastic or not, kissing in public would definitely mean detention and a tardy slip.I ducked underneath his arm and breathed in fresh air, welcoming any scent that didn’t remind me of him. Noah caught up to me, slowing his pace to mine.“You know, you may have never noticed, but we have calculus together,” he said. “You could have waited for me.”“And give you the chance to drag me into the janitor’s closet?
Katie McGarry
A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.
Charlie Jane Anders
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.
Aldo Leopold
Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.
Loren Eiseley
It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.
T.S Eliot
Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.
Paul Beatty
A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.
Mickey Mantle
Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.
Ruth Ozeki
The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.
Erich Fromm
What I'm trying to say is that I spent the last four months learning to be alone, avoiding the world, hating pretty much anyone who so much as blinked at me." But when I am with you, I don't want to be that person anymore.
Andrea Cremer
Don't you understand? I want to spend my life with you. I want you to be there when I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning.
Heather Anastasiu
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….
Jeff Bezos
...and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her...
Kellie Elmore
Never turn down a job because you think it's too small you never know where it may lead.
Julia Morgan
There is no hospitality like understanding.
Vanna Bonta
Endings are hard, but important. You have to have an end, so you can have another beginning.
Heidi Cullinan
As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.
Thomas Pynchon
Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.
Lemony Snicket
Never settle. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was to never settle in relationships, friendships, your career, or your dreams. Never accept less than what you think you deserve, and aim for bigger and better (because you will probably get it!). You never want to look back and think, ‘I could have done more.’ You can do more…right now. Stop saying ‘someday.’ Start saying ‘today.
Lauren Conrad
The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without the author there is nothing.
Michael E. Bierman
New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.
David Levithan
Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)
Alice Sebold
An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
Bonnie Friedman
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin
There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.
Chuck Klosterman
The strong lines of the woman's face bespoke hard-won wisdom and courage, and somehow that made watching her more difficult. If such a woman could be defeated by Elantris, what hope was there for Raoden?
Brandon Sanderson
Human beings not only can't bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn't force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.
Dean Koontz
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
Joseph Heller
Hooking up with a tall, dark stranger in a bar wasn't anywhere on her to do-do list, but as she eyed those broad shoulders, the thick neck, strong-looking hands, and gorgeous mouth...What the hell, maybe he should be on the top of her "to-do" list.
Ophelia London
I put it all to rest; my mind, my body, and all those nasty, gnawing fears. With each sip of tea, I become whole, one again, with me.
Dharlene Marie Fahl
The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proporttion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents.
Thomas Nagel
It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?
Robin Epstein
No parent/home/child/teacher/school has an all-round 100 percent wholeness. We all have limitations and problems. But I must never think it is all or nothing. Perhaps I'd like to live in the country, but I don't. Well, maybe I can get the family to a park two times a week, and out to the country once every two weeks. Maybe I have to send my child to a not-so-good school. Well, maybe we can read one or two good books together aloud. If you can't give them everything, give them something.
Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
[Y]ou can't control everything. Anything, really. Like the food we've been making. We can follow the recipe exactly as your grandmother wrote it, do everything exactly--or almost exactly--as she had, and the dish can come out so-so instead of amazing. Or it can come out amazing when you were expecting very little.
Melissa Senate
When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. Someone who flies in a spaceship to the moon,” he explained, in case she didn’t know the word.tShe thought about that for a moment. “But you didn’t go.”t“Turns out I have dyslexia. It’s something in your brain that makes it hard to learn. Mine is not bad, just enough so I couldn’t pass the test.”t“I’m glad you didn’t go to the moon,” she said. “I think it’s better that you came here.
Dana Marton
How can I know for sure if it's my son speaking and not you?""You never can, my lord. Just as no man can ever be sure that he alone is a thinking and feeling creature and everyone else a machine that only pretends to feel and think.
Paul Hoffman
Somehow I get puzzled when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing 'Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee,' and remember how my wife died in a tenement in New York City, gasping for air and asking God to take the little girl too. Of course Idon't expect you people can prevent every one from dying of starvation, lack of proper nourishmentand tenement air, but what does following Jesus mean?
Charles M. Sheldon
I nod in the darkness. He embraces me and before long he's fast asleep, a man with clear consiense and an open heart. I stay awake, listening to his breath and thinking of the webs we weave.
Lizbeth Gabriel
The sooner we accept the situation, the sooner we can work on course-correction.
Kim Ha Campbell
Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.
Molly Caldwell Crosby
Err on the side of awesome.
Brandon Sanderson