Quotes by American Authors - Page 3041

I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
Barack Obama
The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.
Julian Bond
It is my job-no,-my privilege-to make the fire become an inferno. -Gray
Gena Showalter
I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.
David Lynch
Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.
James Rozoff
A sign of gratitude is a thankful smile.
Debasish Mridha
Certainly no one has ever died of an unrequited passion—it's usually the ones that are requited that get people in trouble.
Mercedes Lackey
If I was an eccentric old spinster in a Merchant Ivory movie, I'd want to share my lovely cottage with Holly and that's the truth. I'd do the cooking and leave the decorating to her, and we'd be inseparable.
Lisa Samson
When you pour out words from your heart to your lover, make sure they aren't on a paper vessel and lost to the wind.
Dixie Waters
Home is— Where the heart wants to dwell, Where the mind wants to dance, Where the air is always pleasant, And where love is always abundant.
Debasish Mridha
Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.
Catherynne M. Valente
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
Gregory Bateson
The suicide! What would he have done if death did not exist?
Marty Rubin
What would I do if you never came here?' But I was ALWAYS coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens
We add caveats to prayers like seasoning to bad sauce. We hope for something else or something more, but we forget. Sometimes life isn’t the pleasure of the taste, rather the nutrition we get from it.
Shannon L. Alder
Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn't have to pull it down and use it on yourself.
Dennis McFarland
Perhaps we are all shells; but some of us have found the pearls inside, and this makes all the difference!
C. JoyBell C.
We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
But, Leader, she is wrong - "Maybe she is," Quill say and looks at Becca. Her heart pounds so hard she can barely hear him. "But you don't know that for sure, now do you, Banshee?
K. Weikel
I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.
Joshua Ferris
Love was as flawed and terrible and beautiful as we were. To be alive meant looking for it in ourselves and in others, an imperfection searching for an impossible perfection.Because in that journey was where truth resided.Love wasn’t about being held. It was about being freed.
Emma Raveling
Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do-can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops or we can make music.
Barbara Sher
Hekate smacked the mirror down. "I'd never fancy you," she retorted to Hermes. "And if you ever try to kiss me, I'll--I'll keep a snake hidden in my clothes and make it bite you. On the lips. And on both ears.""See, your threats are still age twelve," Hermes said. "I'll help you work on that.
Molly Ringle
She [Ayn Rand] had to declare that....altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. (About Ayn Rand)
William F. Buckley Jr.
DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties")
Ellen Willis
I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.
Abraham Verghese
It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.
Kay Ryan
The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Eudora Welty
You should do that more often,” he said. “Laugh, I mean.”“I know.” But that sounded sad, and she didn’t want to be sad, so she added, “I don’t often get to torture grown men, though.”“Really?” he murmured. “I would think you do it all the time.”She looked at him.“When you walk into a room,” he said softly, “the air changes.
Julia Quinn
He'd missed matching wits with her. "Shall we duel with our lips?" "You may find yourself eating grass for breakfast.
Vicky Dreiling
Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.
Helene Hanff
When we know Love, fear has no value in our presence. There is no pressure to perform and mask our humanity. We can BE and when we BE. We can inspire others to BE.
E'yen A. Gardner
When everyone is famous, no one will be famous.
michael p naughton
It is darkness that reveals the brightest stars and most ardent wishes.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.
Walter Williams
I want a fairytale romance in a make-believe land. Let’s run through the beautiful meadow and pretend the walls aren’t closing in. One trip and the world will consume us but don’t hesitate and don’t look back. This world of make-believe survives solely on your faith.
Kayla Krantz
Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury.
Margot Adler
Whatever man imagines is possible
Julie Andrews Edwards
You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!
Becky Lewellen Povich
I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.
Terry Tempest Williams
I've always thought it would be nice to have the house to myself for a while. This place gets so loud all theme and there are always so many people in it. But I guess I'm grateful for all the noise and chaos. I don't know if I want to be alone in the quiet with my thoughts these days.
Keary Taylor
We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.
Marianne Williamson
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
On a surface level, all one finds is repeated forms of shallow whispers. Having the courage to explore deeply, a wealth of buried infinite lifetimes emerge - an undeniable force.
T.F. Hodge
Our education system is today run by left-wing elitists who believe the US is too big, too arrogant, and must be reigned-in... Real sad.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Resting in God's unchanging love today as I embrace His living word with His seed of wisdom and knowledge unfolding a life deep in me changing me day by day into His likeness
John M Sheehan
Forget the past and live the present hour.
Sarah Knowles Bolton
There is a certain transcendent joy in creating a thing of beauty. But even more fulfilling is to become a being of beauty.
Philip Gulley
Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.
Brenna Yovanoff
Class never runs scared.It is sure-footed and confident.It can handle anything that comes along.Class has a sense of humor.It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations.Class never makes excuses.It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices.Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money.Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it.Class is real.It can’t be faked.Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down.Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself.If you have class, you’ve got it made.If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.
Ann Landers
But even the most bitter fruit can contain something sweet at its core. A taste you would never have encountered if you had not been willing to endure the bitter first.
Cameron Dokey
Your healing begins with a step of faith in the Great Physician, Jesus Christ.
Hector Perez
Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?
Calvin Trillin
Just smile, breath, and give thanks (and there is always a reason to), because it beats the hell out of the alternative.
Crystal Woods
I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Change will not successfully happen unless the emotional component is solved.
David W. Earle
What do you think of the old boy?" said Jean."He's got a strangely sunny view of ten years of defeat", said Locke, "but if I get killed in the next six weeks, I want him to speak at my funeral.
Scott Lynch
We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.
Jack Kerouac
In the afternoon the ship's company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic meodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody mourned. We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional and I do not endorse it).
Mark Twain