Quotes by American Authors - Page 304

Our favourite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the water's edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine!
Helen Keller
Shine like the sun in darkness.
Debasish Mridha
The Government goes after the little guys, not their own.
Kenneth Eade
Enough tiny sharp jabs can cut as deeply as any knife.
Roshani Chokshi
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.
Paul Bowles
Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.
Joyce Carol Oates
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Jane Addams
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl S. Buck
Being inspired by a great personality is not enough. You have to take actions to succeed.
Debasish Mridha
The best decisions are always made quickly and changed slowly, not made slowly and changed quickly.
John Patrick Hickey
The deeper irony is that the evidence of sin that are always found in and around the body of Christ may become indirect intimations of its holiness. It could not be a holy church if it had clean hands, as if severed from its task of saving sinners and healing human hurt.
Thomas C. Oden
Clarity is a perception; it’s an emotional alignment of thoughts, intuitions, inclinations, expression and expectations.
Pearl Zhu
Say something worthwhile and people will listen.
Germany Kent
My dad believes that bad disguises itself - that danger hides. I think it's the opposite. The truly horrible things about the world are always reaching out for you.
Brian James
For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.
Kirby Wright
All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when we ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
We weren't a couple, but friends didn't spoon every night. Fate and I were officially in relationship-no-man's-land.
Donna Augustine
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
Tony Kushner
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
Donald Miller
Many hands make light work.
William Patten
They didn't even had the authority to choose an alcoholic beverage. They couldn't be deciding who deserved to live or die.
Maggie Stiefvater
Just because as human beings, what we can't have is what we reply in our head over and over again before we go to sleep.
Taylor Swift
I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.
Maggie Stiefvater
Tell me something good about your life," I whispered, needing to hear that he wasn't as broken as I thought him to be.Peter breathed into the handset for about two minutes. I began wondering if he was about to hang up, or had fallen asleep, when he answered. "You." It was so quiet I almost didn't hear it. And then he hung up before I could ask him to repeat himself.I fell asleep, grinning, with the phone still clutched in my hand and my milk souring on the coffee table.
Dani Alexander
I love objectivity when mine.
Brian Spellman
God's Grace is greater than all our sins. Repentance is one of the Christian's highest privileges. A repentant Christian focuses on God's mercy and God's grace. Any moment in our lives when we bask in God's mercy and grace is our highest moment. Higher than when we feel smug in our decent performance and cannot think of anything we need to confess... That is potentially a glorious moment. For we could at that moment accept God's abundant Mercy and Grace and go forth with nothing to boast of except Christ Himself, or else we struggle with our shame, focusing on that as well as our track record. We fail because we have shifted our attention from Grace and Mercy. One who draws on God's Mercy and Grace is quick to repent, but also slow to sin.
Jerry Bridges
But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you.
Francesca Lia Block
All those years of lurid magazine covers showing extremely nubile females being menaced in three distinct colors by assorted monstrosities; those horror movies, those invasion-from-outer-space novels, those Sunday supplement fright splashes—all those sturdy psychological ruts I had to re-track. Not to mention the shudders elicited by mention of 'worms,' the regulation distrust of even human "furriners,” the superstitious dread of creatures who had no visible place to park a soul.("Betelgeuse Bridge)
William Tenn
Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!
Naomi Wolf
Can't you just like a girl who likes you back?''None of them likes me back. I may as well like the one I really want.
Rainbow Rowell
Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.
Vera Nazarian
God has given us a message that is not only for past times and this time, but for all time.
Billy Graham
Vampires took offense SO easily—and Parisian vampires were the worst of all.' - The Runaway Queen (The Bane Chronicles, 2) by Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson
Cassandra Clare
It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.
Michael J. Fox
I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future.
Robert David Steele
Cheat, defeat, repeat.
Elda M. Lopez
If you want to change anything or your surroundingChange your perception, it will change everything.
Debasish Mridha
Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds.
Alfred Korzybski
Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon.Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.
Julie Buntin
We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing.
Clifford D. Simak
How would your life be different if…You stopped making negative judgmental assumptions about people you encounter? Let today be the day…You look for the good in everyone you meet and respect their journey.
Steve Maraboli
To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" he said.I placed my hands flat on the table and leaned across it. "Stay the hell away from him.""Who? Oh, you mean the guy who's gonna bite it soon?" "He's not. He's going to be fine."He reached a hand out and placed it over my own. I snatched my hand back. He shook his head at me and whispered, "You can't stop it.""Watch me.
Megan Miranda
We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.
Neil Shubin
The picture to my left, that’s me. My name is Stephanie M. Wytovich, and yes, I am a female horror writer. But am I? No, of course not. I mean, if you want to bring my vagina into the conversation, then yes, I guess that’s technically true, but seeing that I don’t write with it, I’m not sure why that would be appropriate.
Stephanie M. Wytovich
For me, it´s sloth," I say. "Hedonistic sloth and escapism.
Suzanne Finnamore
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Philip K Dick
A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.
Philip Zaleski
Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.
Bill Bryson
As though sensing her heightening alarm, Pinfeathers halted his advance."I can’t help it that I’m susceptible to you," he whispered. "You know that. It’s just that you’re so...unreal...and so I have to touch you. If only to be certain that I’m not the one who’s dreaming. You see, I hear that sort of thing is going around.
Kelly Creagh
As much as he liked the idea of having best friends with whom he could share anything. it was like all he knew how to be was alone, apart.
Madeleine Roux
The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?
Robin McKinley
Guarding your heart and protecting your dignity are a little bit more important than clarifying the emotions of someone who's only texting you back three words. I've learned that from trying to figure out people who don't deserve to be figured out.
Taylor Swift
The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.
Patrick Ness
He (Peter) doesn't know if he's looking into the eyes of a madman, or the eyes of a King.
Roma Downey
Just because a man is dressed in a clean white robe does not mean his heart and hands are clean. Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal. Never judge a man by his image. Images can be bought or produced by any Hollywood producer, marketing team or fleet of stylists. Even kids know how to wear amazing costumes for Halloween. Always judge a man by the coloring of his heart and only his heart. Truth can be found in his record of actions, not intentions.
Suzy Kassem
Sam Littleton was a beautiful woman who would try to play women's games. That meant that if he asked her if she was upset with him about something, she would do what women all do at such times: She would deny that anything was wrong, then continue acting as if something was wrong, in hopes that he would do what men always do at such times -beg for an explanation, agonise over the answer, ask for hints, and agonise a little more.
Judith McNaught
I don’t think writers compete, I think they’re all doing separate things in their own style.
Elmore Leonard
Action is the only reality not only reality but morality as well.
Abbie Hoffman
If the natural environment is changed and the electromagnetic radiation levels increase, then it may cause illness and disease in humans.
Steven Magee