Quotes by American Authors - Page 3008

But the secrets of such a book are not perpetual. Once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all the secrets of the universe. Eventually the seeker of a recondite knowledge may conclude—either through insight or sheer exhaustion—that this ruthless process is never-ending, that the mortification of one mystery after another has no terminus beyond that of the seeker's own extinction. And how many still remain susceptible to the search? How many pursue it to the end of their days with undying hope of some ultimate revelation? Better not to think in precise terms just how few the faithful are.
Thomas Ligotti
I’m not letting you go, Fallon.”Her throat seized at his words. “Brad—““You don’t have to say anything. “I’m just laying it out there.
Katie Reus
If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Haven't you ever wanted something you couldn't have?
Tracy Guzeman
The world is a giant eye, staring back at the stars. When it tires, it closes its lids--just as I am doing now--and gives way to dreams, which is why the night is so much more mysterious than the day.
Sean Stewart
My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
Universal opinions are often mistaken for universal principles
Seth Czerepak
You can't understand where someone's going unless you understand where they've been.
Jerry B. Jenkins
We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It’s based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.
Marcia Conner
And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge.
Hanya Yanagihara
Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).
Gary F. Marcus
Doubt, fear and regret are the three villains of success. However, if you close the door on the first two, you will never have to worry about meeting the third.
Suzy Kassem
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Walt Kelly
Fall in love for as long as you can with the one who sees you when you are invisible.
Darnell Lamont Walker
What an incomparable creature is the sea! ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
If you’re not proud of what you do, you’re not done.
Frank Sonnenberg
When you meet The One you'll know it. She'll latch onto your soul like a god with a bone and won't let go. No matter what either of you say or do, it won't change the fact that you're destined to be together.
Paige Tyler
I used to fear things like not having enough alcohol and drugs, or the money to get them. Now I fear someone holding me down and physically forcing me to take drugs and drink alcohol. I fear that for some reason I wouldn't be allowed or wouldn't be able to read anymore.
Phil Volatile
Years were wasted trying to make him feel better. I never stopped to see if I felt appreciated.
Darian Wilk
Robots get to see the worst of the human condition on a daily basis. Good thing they don’t have feelings.
Martin McConnell
A superior brain without the saving essence of godliness may turn against the human race and drench the world in blood, or worse, it may loose ideas into the earth which will continue to curse mankind for centuries after it has turned to dust again.
A.W. Tozer
I still get angry when older people assume that everyone in my generation, screws around. They're probably the same ones who think all kids use dope. It's true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn't mean we are all jumping into bed together.
Judy Blume
Alice, you might be the product of the biggest ball of ignorance, confidence, and good fortune the universe has ever manufactured. But if you’re thinking that you can take your results at the virtual tables and your grand tactic of Ignorance Is Bliss, and make that work for the Main Event, forget it—it WON'T.
Elle Lothlorien
Most families around town only had a bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinets. If you had the flu, you took an aspirin. If you had a toothache, you took an aspirin. If you were bitten by a snake, you took an aspirin. If you developed kidney problems from taking too much aspirin, you took an aspirin. You wouldn't even think of going to the emergency room unless your leg was hanging by a thread. And even then you might wait a while.
Marlin Bressi
A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
Howard Mittelmark
All the time and effort put into networking can be all for naught if there is no follow-through. The same goes for sales. And leadership. And … well, everything.
Beth Ramsay
All the carriages filed out in single file but in a fashion that seemed to mean that they were competing against each other. The only sound that could be heard for a while was the pounding of the horses’ hooves and the squeal and groan of the wheels against the road. Their hooves kicked up dirt, creating a storm of dust.tOnce the miniature storm and the sound of galloping horses subsided, I could only see one last person. He glared up at me and mouthed, “Next time.” Christopher dug his boots into Dawn’s muscled flank. She reared up and broke into a gallop through the sparse forest, heading for escape. The last trace of them was the particles of floating dust, bright like floating fire.
Erica Sehyun Song
Ask questions. Seek answers, knowing you’ll never have all of them. And that’s okay. Sometimes curiosity is its own reward.
Michael Holbrook
LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Colin Nissan
Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.
Jacob M. Appel
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.
Ray Bradbury
The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
Dallas Willard
Ladies, don't lower yourself to fight over a man or compete with other women for one. It's not classy, immature, and a waste of time. Instead, use that energy and time wisely by achieving goals and being a better you. This way, you attract someone better than a man that doesn't see the jewel that you are. Have standards always.
April Mae Monterrosa
If your enemy has the power to see into the future, make sure you are the author of that future.
Lionel Suggs
Be happy. Be free. You have a universe inside you.
Sophia Elaine Hanson
On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.
Eudora Welty
Hate is strewn like confetti by the fear-fueled, specious, tiny- dicked (or un-tender) vacuous dictators, of any gender, whom never knew true love, only sadism. They ALL need some good pharma.
Elizabeth Lucye Robillard
If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.
Edmund White
Billy tries to imagine the vast systems that support these athletes. They are among the best-cared for creatures in the history of the planet, beneficiaries of the best nutrition, the latest technologies, the finest medical care, they live at the very pinnacle of American innovation and abundance, which inspires an extraordinary thought - send them to fight the war! Send them just as they are this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat, send the entire NFL! Attack with all our bears and raiders, our ferocious redskins, our jets, eagles, falcons, chiefs, patriots, cowboys - how could a bunch of skinny hajjis in man-skits and sandals stand a chance against these all-Americans? Resistance is futile, oh Arab foes. Surrender now and save yourself a world of hurt, for our mighty football players cannot be stopped, they are so huge, so strong, so fearsomely ripped that mere bombs and bullets bounce off their bones of steel. Submit, lest our awesome NFL show you straight to the flaming gates of hell!
Ben Fountain
I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.
Bill Watterson
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's a lot of nice things about Denver. I just don't for the life of me know what they are.
Judy Hampton
And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.
William Faulkner
Digital age of business and world shall move up from apathy, to sympathy, to empathy.
Pearl Zhu
You look within and upon and around me, savoring every inch. You pull my ear for no reason, and I can tell you really don’t want to cry. As a tear falls between by breasts, I look away and pretend the grass is a jungle, and the ants, little kings of forgotten tribes.
Virginia Petrucci
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
Ralph Ellison
I know that "what´s up" is just something people say, but it´s a very hard thing to say anything back to.
Ava Dellaira
But in that moment when my brother took the field, all that washed away, and everyone was proud... I looked up at my dad, and he was smiling. I looked at my mom, and she was smiling even though she was nervous about my brother getting hurt, which was strange because it was a VCR tape of an old game, and she knew he didn't get hurt.
Stephen Chbosky
Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity
Bill Bryson
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
Adlai Stevenson
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
Anne Rice
The sadness was I'd lost a father I had never fully found. It's like a tune that ends before you've heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you've lost in strangers' faces.
Frederick Buechner
She sighed. "You're not without fault, but you're not rotten. Although you're very disorderly. You're pigheaded, cocky beyond bearing, arrogant." She stopped when she realized she'd just said the same thing three times over. "You have a troubling obsession with vigilante justice." She cleared her throat. "Well, I'm sure there are things you don't like about me."t"You're not naked, and you're not under me." His voice was thick with passion.
Dana Marton
Was that me? Yes it was. Was that him? No it wasn't..t Just a trick of the woods!t Just a moment,t One peculiar passing moment.t Must it all be either less or more,t Either plain or grand?t Is it always 'or'?t Is it never 'and'?t That's what woods are for:t For those moments in the woods...t Oh, if life were made of moments,t Even now and then a bad one--!t But if life were only moments,t Then you'd never know you had one.t First a witch, then a child, then a Prince, then a moment--t Who can live in the woods?t And to get what you wish, only just for a moment--t These are dangerous woods..t Let the moment go..t Don't forget it for a moment, though.t Just remembering you had an 'and,' when you're back to 'or,'t Makes the 'or' mean more than is did before.t Now I understand--And it's time to leave the woods.
Stephen Sondheim
He loved her. And she loved him. And in such bliss does devastation grow.
Roshani Chokshi
Believe me, I'm no romantic, and while I've heard all about love at first sight, I've never believed in it, and I still don't. But even so, there was something there, something recognizably real, and I couldn't look away.
Nicholas Sparks
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.
Glen Cook
Focusing your energy on the things you don’t like about yourself is self-sabotage and defeating. When you re-direct all that energy into a more positive direction, you will feel the shift instantly to improve your self-esteem and attitude.
Susan C.Young
Must you know that yours will be the “better” picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty?Must a rose be “better” than an iris in order to justify it’s existence?I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods.
Neale Donald Walsch
I missed you." I didn't mean to tell him so, even if it was true. Admitting need felt like weakness; it demonstrated dependence and vulnerability.
Ann Aguirre