Quotes by American Authors - Page 305

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
Ray Kurzweil
The eyes were larger and gray and in a certain light looked soft, gentle, and even innocent. Then the light would change, the innocence would vanish, and the eyes looked like year-old ice.
Ross Thomas
I sprinted into the conference room as my boss, and the owner of this law firm, Cherie Poitras, grabbed her client around the waist, a woman dressed to the nines in high heels and a cream suit. The woman had actually crawled up on the conference table and lunged for her husband. Cherie and I wrestled her off, but not before the husband’s attorney put him in a headlock to keep him from strangling his soon-to-be ex-wife. Even in a headlock, the husband, a local politician who stressed the sanctity of marriage and traditional values, struggled to get at his wife, his arms and legs flailing around...
Cathy Lamb
When you put your hand to the plow you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.
Alice Paul
This year I've been figuring out who I am. I've been learning what I want, and it's the same as what I've always wanted, only I'm different. Leaders live and grow and learn. They run into dragons, get burned by them, temper their swords in the fire, and take them on. That's what I want to do. That's who I want to be. Not the girl cowering in her father's office. I want to be fierce.
Robin York
In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
John Green
To attempt to know myself ‘apart’ from God is to choose to know nothing more than ‘a part’ of myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The adventure of life is to learn. The purpose of life is to grow. The nature of life is to change. The challenge of life is to overcome. The essence of life is to care. The opportunity of like is to serve. The secret of life is to dare. The spice of life is to befriend. The beauty of life is to give.
William Arthur Ward
You don’t need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you’ve written, you should be able to point to any given element—be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point—and say why it’s there.
Diana Gabaldon
Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.
Paul Newman
Pain will come with time, but time will heal the pain.
Anthony Liccione
I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.
Sarah Ruhl
America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.
Alistair Cooke
I come from a State that raises corn and cotton and cock-leburs and Democrats and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.
Willard D. Vandiver
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
Louise Erdrich
Jesus Christ.” The fury on Nick’s face was enough to send me reeling and he hit the table hard enough with his hand that it made the plates and the silverware on the table bounce and clatter. “You give me the names and approximate location of those men who gave you that ultimatum and I’ll kill every goddamned one of them.”I sighed before I said quietly. “I already did.
Cheyenne McCray
I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay.
Jaeda DeWalt
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
Lorrie Moore
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
Bob Dylan
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us.
Terryl Givens
People hide the truth to protect those they love!
Craig Mercier
All things come round to him who will but wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Lopez made sandals out of one tire. He sold them at ten cents each, because people sometimes needed only one.
Warren Eyster
To sate your need without love is theft
Robin Hobb
UGH. Boys. They're like French class--no matter how much I study, I'll never be fluent in the language.
Jen Calonita
The most amazing thing about little children ... was their fantastic adaptability.
Kristin Hunter
We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end.
Jessica Khoury
Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.
Tim Wise
The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.
Jebreel Nahaary
Bacteria and other microorganisms find it easier to infect people who worry and fret.
Leo Rangell
Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.
David Wong
ISIS was not particular about how their soldiers made it to Jannah, so long as they inflicted maximum damage..
Kenneth Eade
You can have unbelievable intelligence you can have connections you can have opportunities fall out of the sky. But in the end hard work is the true enduring characteristic of successful people.
Marsha Evans
You don't have INSOMNIA. You're a writer with an unfinished book!
T.N. Suarez
But I say that this isn't the Underground. We are the Underground. You . . . me . . . all of your brothers, sisters, friends. This cavern is nothing more than a hole in the ground. We make it something more. No matter where we are, so long as we survive and stick together, the Underground is not lost.
Gillian Bronte Adams
The moment I met her she struck me dumb, deaf, and stupid. At only eighteen, she’d had everything— brains, beauty, class. And she’d known it too. In the eight years since, I’ve watched her toy with one man after another, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months. But the affairs always ended the same. With her handing him his hat and a don’t-slam-the-door-on-your-way-out.
Magda Alexander
Nothing seems crazy when you're used to it.
Sarah Silverman
There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.
Elyn R. Saks
The price one pays for having a kind man at one’s elbow.
John Hersey
He might kiss like a damn sex god and rev her engine like no other, but he clearly wasn't for her.
Carrie Ann Ryan
Do not let the roles you play in life make you forget that you are human.
Roy T. Bennett
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.
Stephen King
Will you be satisfied with the fruit of your life's work? Will the efforts you are making now bring you satisfaction when the things of time are receding and eternity looms ahead?
Raymond L. Cox
'Lady Wisdom' is my wife and those I reach with Truth understood are my children".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
Theology is not superior to the Gospel. It exists to aid the preaching of salvation. Its business is to make the essential facts and principles of Christianity so simple and clear, so adequate and mighty, that all who preach or teach the Gospel, both ministers and laymen, can draw on its stores and deliver a complete and unclouded Christian message.
Walter Rauschenbusch
Work democracy cannot be imposed on people as a political system. It depends on the consciousness on the part of the working people in all professions of their responsibility for the social process. This consciousness may be present or it may grow in an organic manner, like a tree or an animal organism. The growth of this consciousness of social responsibility is the most important prerequisite for the prevention of the cancer-like growth of political systems in the social organism. If they are allowed to grow, they will sooner or later bring about social chaos. Furthermore, such consciousness of responsibility alone will, in the course of time, bring the institutions of human society into harmony with the natural functions of work democracy. Political systems come and go without stopping or fundamentally changing the social process. But the pulse of human society would stopand not return should the natural life functions of love, work and knowledge cease for only one day. Natural love, vitally necessary work and scientific search are rational life functions. They can inherently be nothing but rational. Consequently, they are diametrically opposed to any kind of irrationalism. Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is — in the strictly psychiatric sense—a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.
Wilhelm Reich
There are many gods . . . gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones--. . . . The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods.
Rudolfo Anaya
The fears we keep alive, will be a recurring haunt until it dies, or we do.
Anthony Liccione
As long as you have a Cell Phone you're never alone
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?
Susan Abulhawa
I didn’t know I was in a prison until I was told I could go no further than where I am. It was in that moment that I determined to free myself. I am becoming much greater than I am today. I need the belief to grow.
LaShawnda Jones
Forever and ever, kid, until you're sick and tired of seeing me.
Marie Lu
It’s often mistaken for good advice, but wisdom cannot be imparted to someone. Wisdom can only be earned; it’s a by-product of experience, not necessarily knowledge, otherwise I would be stalking Oprah right now, begging for a transfusion.
Renee Carlino
In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy.
Terryl L. Givens
As our children turn even five or six degrees away from us, we have to be aware of our fear and our excitement and our hope for them. And as that five or sex degrees turns into ten or twenty degrees, even ninety degrees, we have to monitor those feelings every step of the way-and ultimately realize that our child is another human being and not necessarily and extension of us.
Daniel Gottlieb
The assumption of no God cannot be proven by science." - Scientific Faith"Under the Thelián Sky: Beyond the Great Unknown" (c) 2012
Frank Olvera
When it comes to loving people, let's not allow it to be something we do on the side. Let's make it a lifestyle. Whether we are at the gas station, picking up groceries, even waiting to get our car repaired, there is always an open opportunity to love someone in need.
Jarrid Wilson
Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things—elves and fairies—and now we don't. Now we see them, right?
Thomm Quackenbush
Try not to be self-conscious […] or so critical. Don’t mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human, which we unfortunately happen to be.
Andrew Holleran
A Very Short Song Once, when I was young and true, Someone left me sad- Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.
Dorothy Parker