Quotes by American Authors - Page 3004

Kindness carries no price tag neither does it require making a purchase. A random act of kindness can change someone's life...choose to be kind always.
Kemi Sogunle
There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.
Brian Evenson
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
Niall Ferguson
A rich and mature life involves opening up to a wider world. If we base our understanding of life only on what we personally experience, we are impoverished indeed.
Robert Strayer
Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?
Chris Kraus
Say 'provoking' again. Your mouth looks provocative when you do.
Becca Fitzpatrick
We tend to get a little information before we off people. It’s not a play by ear sort of deal.
Holly Hood
We must believe that there are places where tranquility exists and nature is given back her power to speak...
Nanette L. Avery
Spring is the time to bloom like a flower with all our beauty. It is the time to spread the fragrance of our love and fill the air with joy.
Debasish Mridha
I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.
Stephen King
They all memorized a simple phrase, “Be helpful, be useful, be scarce.
Damian Wampler
Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up
Flora Rheta Schreiber
Aspire to be who you most admire
Deborah A. Carr
A poor original is better than a good imitation.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.
Ken Liu
When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth......But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself."But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
Kahlil Gibran
I think what a family is shouldn't be so hard to see. It should be the one thing people know just by looking at you.
Heidi W. Durrow
So here’s my question: when you lose the most important person to you in the entire world, where is all the love – love you never even knew you were capable of – supposed to go?
Ted Michael
Real relationships - the kind that were supposed to last but never did - were more trouble than they were worth.
Lauren Conrad
It's great to be self confident, but some people are very egotistical. Once you realize the world doesn't revolve around you and change your attitude, you'll truly walk in your purpose.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Your thoughts and actions becomes your world.
Debasish Mridha
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
Mae West
Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.
E.L. Konigsburg
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
Orson Welles
What is first?Love or life?Life or love?Intention or emotions?Emotions or intentions?
Debasish Mridha
You are not responsible for the murderous rampage of an alien psycho, okay?
Pittacus Lore
Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
The Cream Does NOT Always Rise To The Top! There is a serious misconception, misconnection and mistake in this idea of thinking.
Loren Weisman
She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
Holly Black
He was raw and sharp and rich and throbbing with life. He was sweet blood after a long hunt. How could she have mistaken Aiden's kisses for this? They had been delicious and smooth like the brief comfort of chocolate, but they had never been enough.
Annette Curtis Klause
To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Vibration can be shifted through the mastery of thought
Alaric Hutchinson
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
Rick Warren
Luck is everything. ... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward to have a low threshold of fear because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.
Alfred Hitchcock
Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.
Stephen King
I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK beacuse he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that- he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The principle that first you try to solve your problems on your own and only turn to others as a last resort applies to friends. We have an obligation to show our friends that we are turning to them for a favor not because it happens to be convenient for us to do so but because of a compelling reason.
P.M. Forni
I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We don't speak of it, or react to it. Paralyzed in a reality of uncertainty and madness,this is where we are.
Danielle Rohr
If one day I was taken away...would you wait for me to come back?"Concerned moved across his face. "Where are you going?""Just tell me, please. I need to know, without telling you anything else.""No."I swallowed and blinked back tears."I'd go after you," he said.
Kelly Parra
I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.
Anasazi Foundation
What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway."Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes."Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.
Darnell Lamont Walker
As long as you look only at the situation in the world today, it will be very hard . . . to overcome your worries because it is true that there are many problems and the future is unknown to us. Lift your eyes beyond your circumstances and learn instead to trust God. Worrying . . . won’t change anything.
Billy Graham
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
Stephen King
A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.
George Saunders
Ironic, isn't it, what religion does to people?""I guess it's more ironic what people do to religion.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable…Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Speaking of cupcakes, Will wants two dozen off your special menu to take on the road after the wedding.”tt“The, erm, peach kind?”t“The peach kind,” Lindsey said.t“I like the peach kind,” Josh said.tMikey had named them Sex on a Peach. And they were Kimmie’s second biggest seller, after the Hairy Dicks, which were coconut cake balls strategically placed with Dahlia’s chocolate-covered, ice cream-filled bananas.tAnd Josh’s frown had disappeared, and now he was grinning as if he knew it.tAll of it.
Jamie Farrell
...the oppressor is truly repressed. Their poverty is existential, often surrounded by an abundance of material goods. (Leonardo Boff, p. 179)
Mev Puleo
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.
Anaïs Nin
The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.
Rainbow Rowell
Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.
Kelli Russell Agodon
The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.
Miles Davis
But God has set no traps for us. Quite the contrary. He has summoned us to the only true and full freedom.
Elisabeth Elliot
I don't care what your daddy told you. I don't care what your grandaddy told you. The South lost. Get over it man! -January, 2003; Opening lecture to Intro to Civil War Era Studies, Gettysburg College
Mark A. Weitz
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Ray Bradbury
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
Don DeLillo
Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.
Lois Greiman
The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
Marge Piercy
How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.
Charles Bukowski