Quotes by American Authors - Page 3059

Do you understand? I don't want you to do a thing if you don't understand it.
Kristin Cashore
RYLAN!"I feel Ivy's palm on my chest and, with a powerful shove, she pushes me back, away from fire, danger, and death. In that moment after the tree plunges, I see Ivy for a single second as I fall. In those emerald eyes is a look of complete calm, undying gratitude, and powerful, protective love.The tree crashes down, the sound echoing in my head.For an eternal moment, I sit there on my butt, staring at the spot where Ivy was standing. I'm numb, only registering the slightest changes; the wind dying down, the rain lessening.What just happened?Desperately, I look side to side, praying that Ivy jumped to the side and what I saw was just an illusion made up by my panicked mind.But Ivy's nowhere. And there's an arm sticking out from under the trunk."IVY!"I sprint to the fallen tree. The smoldering wood stings my hand when I grab the trunk, but I grit my teeth and bear it. Pulling with all my might, I throw the remains of the tree aside.Ivy's lying there, her eyes closed and her lower half on fire."No..." I fall to my knees and yank off my sweatshirt to try and smother the flames, but they burn strong, and soon the fabric's on fire. I toss it away, not knowing where it lands as I'm unable to tear my eyes off the most gut-wrenching sight of my life. My hands go to my head and my shouting grows even louder. "No, no, no!"This can't be happening. She can't be—
Colleen Boyd
This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.
Adam Gopnik
We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again
Sharon Salzberg
True peace of mind is calm in your heart that you can’t explain.
Ron Baratono
human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.
Edward Said
He was Death, and he'd ridden in on a pale horse...
Sherrilyn Kenyon
As worthless as guilt was known to be, he couldn't help feeling it, seeing his wife work herself to exhaustion for a parish tea that would last only two hours.
Jan Karon
Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.
Charles Sanders Peirce
I love children. Eating them, that is.
Keith McGowan
If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.
Roger Zelazny
I rise from the moist crevice of thought, I beat on the shores of her holy body, I fall from the sky in silver sheets of sadness. Rise onto me my precious sun.
A.P. Sweet
Men have dragged us by our hair through the ages, and whether they give us crumbs or bright, shiny rocks, they truly give us nothing at all. If you have not opened your legs for them so that they could drawl out as babies or crawl in as men, they they will leave you to starve like a dog on the street. So now we are done playing the way they want us to play. Now we are moving to music they cannot hear, to a rhythm they cannot understand. They call it madness and we call it truth and find me the magistrate you can trust to judge between the two? Bah. So we dance on, we dance on.
Toby Barlow
The little weasel ripped all the buttons off my couch.Ivan Petrovsky, pg 350
Kerrelyn Sparks
On my more difficult days, I'm not sure what's more of a pain in my ass -- being black or being a woman. I'm happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.
Roxane Gay
Like fear and fury. It is energy from another realm, threads from beneath the sur­face, an immortal place never meant to be disturbed. Raffaele trembles.Something is poisoning the world.
Marie Lu
A wise warrior learns from her mistakes.
Leigh Bardugo
Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing.
Oliver Markus
Something is reflecting our thoughts back to us in obvious and not so obvious ways.
Bryant McGill
We need to teach a highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently for failing is one of the greatest arts of the world.
Charles F. Kettering
When a million little things go right, that’s called success. Failure functions as the great leveler. When things don’t go as planned, it’s humbling. It’s important to make mistakes along the way, or we would be impossible to live with.
Judy Frankel
People haven't always been there for me but music always has.
Taylor Swift
Olivia responded with confidence, “You’re the military. You’re in charge. Why would I be scared?
Jettie Necole
Honor begets honor trust begets trust faith begets faith and hope is the mainspring of life.
Henry L. Stimson
God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiety happens to be my own particular demon, a floating sense of doom that has ruined many of what could have been, should have been, the happiest days of my life, and more than a few times in my life I have been raised from such ruins, which is another way of saying that more than a few times in my life I have been raised from death - death of the spirit anyway, death of the heart - by the healing power that Jesus calls us both to heal with and to be healed by.
Frederick Buechner
Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.
Tom Robbins
Every human is unique every spirit is engaging.
Tim Mann artist
Be thankful for the blessings already on their way. And don’t be surprised if one of your blessings is to be the blessing for which someone else is thankful.
Charles F. Glassman
Ronan's second secret was Adam Parrish.
Maggie Stiefvater
What have I done to her?" Gabriel muttered to himself as he crossed the room to crank open a window. Cool air washed over his skin. "What the devil did she do to me?
Olivia Parker
Some people develop a wishbone where their backbone should be.
Shannon L. Alder
There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character.
Jodi Picoult
My Oneness will stop the machine that overtakes people's minds. Do we really need new clothes, or new cars, or new TVs? Should we really ingest food made from chemicals not of this earth? Should we really give our money to people who don't need it but want it to fill the evil greed inside of their body? No, we don't, but people need me to show them how to be free." Jimmy, "The One
Teresa Lo
Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz
To stay sane in a mad world is the real victory.
Marty Rubin
What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all.
Lisa Gardner
A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture and transform.
Diane Mariechild
There was no sound, but she felt a movement, a shifting of the air in her room, the warmth of another presence.Isabel opened her eyes. He was there, at the foot of her bed, a single candle in his hand, dressed only in shirtsleeves, waistcoat, and breeches.“Forgive me,” he whispered as he set the candle down. “I could not stay away.
Elizabeth Hoyt
I held out a lead figurine of Hades—the little Mythomagic statue Nico had abandoned when he fled camp last winter.Nico hesitated. "I don’t play that game anymore. It’s for kids.""It’s got four thousand attack power," I coaxed."Five thousand," Nico corrected. "But only if your opponent attacks first."I smiled. "Maybe it’s okay to still be a kid once in a while.
Rick Riordan
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
Edward Bellamy
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.
Robert A. Heinlein
Maybe the hardened clay was not as ugly as I had thought. Maybe what I resented was the color my father had painted me. The time had come to sand away some of that dreadful stain.
Zohreh Ghahremani
Sure, stories can be like a fire on a cold night. But they can burn too. There ain't nothin' can cut deeper or sting with more poison than words can.
Ellery Adams
I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic…
Ursula K Le Guin
Bad things happen in dark places.
Katy Lee
The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir’s big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else ... If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar.
Michael Muhammad Knight
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
John D. MacDonald
Well, I've kept you waiting long enough," he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.
Ray Bradbury
...our children must learn...to face full responsibility for their actions, to make their own choices and cope with the results...the whole democratic system...depends upon it. For our system is founded on self-government, which is untenable if the individuals who make up the system are unable to govern themselves.
Eleanor Roosevelt
His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.
Hugh Howey
I warned her that her lover isthe Picture of Dorian Graybutin reverse.Instead of the portrait taking inthe uglinessand sinso he can be anddowhatever he wantsInsteadhe lets himself be uglyso the image can staypristine- Dorian Grey
Abby Rosmarin
Little Fists, what's wrong?
Marie Rutkoski
You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.
Robert M. Pirsig
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
Margaret Young
The future will present insurmountable problems- only when we consider them insurmountable.
Thomas S. Monson
The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.
Alysia Abbott
Betrayal is never easy to handle and there is no right way to accept it.
Christine Feehan
It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...
Frederick Buechner