Quotes by American Authors - Page 3127

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Howard Zinn
This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.
Franz Wright
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
Maya Angelou
My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.
Henry Beston
One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.
Sam Harris
You might have good, moral efforts of working hard and earning money in order to help feed the poor or something along those lines - and then you get the money you’ve been seeking and you see and feel and taste how sweet it is and you only want more and more and more for…yourself.Money corrupts its own intentions.
Cole Ryan
I don't have time is the worst possible excuse for I'd rather be doing something else. You MAKE time! Whether it be family, friends or an activity, like reading it's all in what you WANT to do. The heartbreaking moment is when you have extended time & devotion sometimes years with someone you knew to be worthy who can return it & they CHOOSE not to.
Gypsie M. Holley
How would your life be different if you learned to let go of things that have already let go of you? From relationships long gone, to old grudges, to regrets, to all the 'could’ve' and 'should’ve,' to the dead friendships you still hang on to... Free yourself from the burden of a past you cannot change.
Steve Maraboli
Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child’s growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who “can’t stop now” to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is“too silly for anything,” should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that “bump of inquiry” was put on top of our skulls.
Ernest Vincent Wright
To help you fill in the details of the world you are creating, imagine that your characters inhabit a real world. Daydream what it would be like to be there. What would your characters eat, what would they talk about, where would they get their supplies, etc. Keep asking the question, “What happens next?” Show your characters actions and write down their thoughts
Christopher Paolini
I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless.
Donald Miller
Lying is second nature to him... More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.
Tony Schwartz
We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone. (pg. 134, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
Whether one likes it or not, every reader is at the same time an interpreter. That is, most of us assume as we read that we also understand what we read. We also tend to think that our understanding is the same thing as the Holy Spirit’s or human author’s intent. However, we invariably bring to the text all that we are, with all of our experiences, culture, and prior understandings of words and ideas. Sometimes what we bring to the text, unintentionally to be sure, leads us astray, or else causes us to read all kinds of foreign ideas into the text.
Gordon D. Fee
All I can tell you is this. Some hearts break from grief some from joy. Some even break from love. But hearts break because they are too small to contain the gifts life gives us. Your task will be to let your heart grow large enough not to break
Catherine M. Wilsonson
Sex pretty much cures everything.
Chuck Palahniuk
He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul.
o.henry
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
General Omar N. Bradley
I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.
Brian Andreas
It would be a very long time before we saw any of our original pursuers again. At least, it seemed kinda long. But nothing warps time quite like childhood. I remember visits to faraway worlds that lasted only a few days but felt like entire lifetimes. And then there were the endless journeys between destinations that somehow went by in the blink of an eye. You know how it goes.
Brian K. Vaughan
The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.
Jaron Lanier
Let a smile be your umbrella, and you'll end up with a face full of rain.
George Carlin
A truth told once is no match for a lie oft repeated.
James Rozoff
It is not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do , it is that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.
Gary Keller
Flame is not the only fire.” Her tone turned almost stern. “You have brought your folk another spark far greater than any flame. You have opened their eyes to the world, Aljan, shown them lands and peoples formerly beyond their ken. You have whistled them out of their cramped, closed, inward-facing ring and led them into my Dance, the Great Circle and Cycle encompassing all. <…> Nay, flame has not been the greatest of my gifts to you. Knowledge, Aljan, that even now remakes the world. Knowledge is the fire.
Meredith Ann Pierce
It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
Christopher Isherwood
The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies."Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women -- as if women actually own them?""You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."Rachel smiled."You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging.
Michael Connelly
If you’ve already worked in some capacity or done any internships, your contacts are everybody you’ve met in your work plus all your personal contacts. If you haven’t been employed yet, you still have plenty of contacts. “Take out your college yearbook,” says Wein. “Who sat next to you in class? Who do you know that’s gone into the field you’re interested in? You don’t have to know them well to put them on the list.” You’d also include any contacts your parents have, friends of your parents, people you met on family vacations, even kids you knew in summer camp.
Kate White
I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.
Ann Druyan
Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?
Amy Tan
Values are the measuring stick for howyou make decisions in business: goal setting, employee conduct, recognition, discipline—everything.
Amber Hurdle
If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.
Ray Bradbury
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
Confidence comes from relentless pursuit of perfection.
Debasish Mridha
The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world.
Hubert Selby Jr.
Confession is good for the soul, they say. I'd imagine this is true. But my sins were too convoluted. And from the little I understand--too damning.
Kate Karyus Quinn
Wilson (1975) defines biological communication relatively broadly as 'the action on the part of one organism (or cell) that alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism (or cell) in a fashion adaptive to either one or both of the participants.
Robert K. Vander Meer Michael D. Breed et al.
The best bubbly I ever tasted was laughter.
Richelle E. Goodrich
it is what it is
Hank Knabe
Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
Tennessee Williams
Happiness does not mean being free from problems and trials, but finding purpose in problems and trials can result in abundant happiness.
Hank Smith
You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.
Marilyn Monroe
My words are like a musical instrument, softly & seductively playing under the moonlight as they penetrate the depths of your loins!
Rokk-I La' VON
Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.
Jane Hirshfield
Always take a compliment, Caroline. Always take it for the way it was intended. You girls are always so quick to twist what others say. Simply say thank you and move on.
Alice Clayton
You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.
Kenneth Eade
Maligned –powerfully-drawn characters acting out a disturbing view of our future.” -David Compton, New York Times Best-Selling author
Kathleen Papajohn
To think is to have doubt....yet even thinking will bring you to "no thought"....eventually.
Vivian Amis
Some irony. The girl who couldn't face her own bullshit . . . suddenly forcing everyone else to.
Rick Remender
We might define an eccentric as a man who is law unto himself and a crank as one who having determined what the law is insists on laying it down to others.
Louis Kronenberger
There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.
Jesmyn Ward
Donald Trump is launching his own nonprofit group: Borders without Doctors.
Joel Berg
February is the cruelest month in western Oregon.
Judy Nedry
If I bother to listen, I can navigate by failure just as much as I can navigate by success.
Sharon Weil
Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.
Dean Koontz
You never know how the tough times you are going through today will inspire someone else tomorrow.
Tim Tebow
We need to understand the more government spends, the more freedom is lost...Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.
Ron Paul
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
Grace Murray Hopper
The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention...
Will Schwalbe