Quotes by American Authors - Page 3138

Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.
Tom McNeal
Truth, or mystery basically, seeks the expression of itself. That is, evolution exists to create more mystery, not to answer or end the existing mysteries. This is why with every “truth” revealed, or every answer given, all that actually occurs is the creation of yet a more complex and mysterious question.
Darrell Calkins
Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them.
Brandon Sanderson
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
Ernest Hemingway
From the short story (and anthology containing it) DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE :Donny acted like he didn’t hear me. “You can’t send your mom off into eternity looking like that, Artie. She wouldn’t like it.” He reached into my mother’s casket, shoved his fingers into her mouth like it was the most logical thing in the world.
“Donny, you can’t --!”
“I’m just making her look right, Artie. It’s what she would want.” He tugged hard at my mom’s lips. I knew they were cold because I had kissed them a few moments earlier, and for a moment I felt convinced my friend had completely lost his mind. But when I looked inside Mom’s casket I knew Donny had done something only a best friend would think to do. My mother was smiling again. And she looked just the way I remembered her, the way I would always want to remember her. I got so choked up I couldn’t talk for a few minutes. 
Finally I managed, “My mother always told me you could make her smile.
Kenneth C. Goldman
To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.
Alan Joshua
People bond themselves into families and groups for protection, and strangers...strangers are always at risk.
Rachel Caine
The only way out is through
Robert Frost
I want the peace in knowing that is wasn’t for lack of hustling that I missed a target for my dream. I want to know that the one thing in my control was under control.
Jon Acuff
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.
Colson Whitehead
[D]on't try to know everything. You can't. Find Him in the Word, for the Holy Ghost wrote this Book. He inspired it, and He will be revealed in its pages.
A.W. Tozer
She went on tiptoe and pecked his cheek with a kiss. Daring of her, she knew.tHis green eyes went dragon-gold and sharp, the bones of his forehead morphing slightly to suggest the crowned brow of the dragon inside. At least he was smiling, though it was the kind of greedy grin that would send most people running in the opposite direction.tNot her.t"Let's just get this over with," she said.t"Yes." His voice had gone rumbly. "And then on to something else.
Erin Kellison
But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory.
John Green
all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.
Richard Brautigan
If we are merely a chance product of ‘random happenstance’ and nothing more, doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of ‘random happenstance’ with such methodical complexity?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you can not grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation?
Mark Twight
I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.
Julia Glass
In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change.
Thomas M. Disch
We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Willa Cather
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
James A. Michener
Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.
Paul R. Halmos
Misunderstandings are a normal part of life, and the outcomes of these depend upon how we choose to react to them.
C. JoyBell C.
We’re not a people worth saving, plain and simple. We’re completely beyond that—both the undead and the few still living. Yeah, 'living.' Some life, huh? But it’s the only life we could ever possibly live if we want to stay alive another day. It’s our life that terrifies me.
Bryant A. Loney
I am the common person researching the invisible world for the benefit of the global masses.
Steven Magee
Is God present or is he absent? Maybe we can say now that in the center of our sadness for his absence we can find the first signs of his presence. And that in the middle of our longings we discover the footprints of the one who has created them. It is in the faithful waiting for the loved one that we know how much he has filled our lives already. Just as the love of a mother for her son can grow while she is waiting for his return, and just as lovers can rediscover each other during long periods of absence, so also our intimate relationship with God can become deeper and more mature while we wait patiently in expectation for his return.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
As much as I think about sex, I can only with extreme difficulty conceive of myself actually performing the act. And here's another thing I wonder about. How could you ever look a girl in the eye after you've had your winkie up her wendell? I mean, doesn't that render normal social conversation impossible? Apparently not.
C.D. Payne
Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.
Terris McMahan Grimes
She growled.tHe gave her a considering look. "That's almost sexy.
Dana Marton
You won’t solve your problems by drowning others in them.
Richelle E. Goodrich
...I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.
Christopher Isherwood
She's your mate, Amren bit at me, not your spy go get her. She is my mate and my spy, I said too quietly. And she is the high lady of the night court. Not a consort,not wife. Feyre is high lady of the night court, my equal in every way.
Sarah J Maas
We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost.
Heny Rollins
Pride adversely affects all our relationships—our relationship with God and His servants, between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student, and all mankind. Our degree of pride determines how we treat our God and our brothers and sisters. Christ wants to lift us to where He is. Do we desire to do the same for others?
Ezra Taft Benson
When someone is stalking you because they think you are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?
Shannon L. Alder
People who can't be questioned often end up doing questionable things.
Jon Acuff
It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.And Lena knew she was.
Ann Brashares
Angels were created into form so they can interact with Earth in a physical way.
Eileen Anglin
Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong - but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I'd removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!
Donna Tartt
My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.
Jimmy Durante
As water changes its shape according to the shape of the vessel, I change myself by changing my thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Robert Hass
When I started to focus on all the beauty all around me, my whole world became amazingly beautiful.
Debasish Mridha
Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them.
Donalyn Miller
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If life is a classroom then you’re still in the learning process part. In the learning process part, if you make a mistake you can just erase it and try again. In a classroom your mistakes deserve course correction and education, not punishment. Here the goal is to teach you how to behave better, not to fail or get rid of you. In a classroom, you can be a work in progress, and that’s okay. In a classroom, you are free to make mistakes in order to learn, because mistakes are part of learning. There are still consequences to every choice, but in a classroom you can’t fail, because your value isn’t on the line. If life is a classroom, you have the same value no matter how much you struggle, how many mistakes you make or how you perform. If life is a classroom you are safe.
Kimberly Giles
It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I!
Conrad Aiken
The biggest battles you face in love are the battle to know your worth and the battle to know when your boundaries need to be protected.
Shannon L. Alder
Relax in your own home, Kylie. It's one of the few places on earth you're free to be as you really are.
Dorien Kelly
Kiss someone like kissing is the only way you have to communicate. There is no conversation. There is no sex. There are only two sets of lips that are ravenous to be recognized and treasured.
Roberto Hogue
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
William Gibson
I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.
Anne Rice
In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected.
Chris Matthews
Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
Benjamin Franklin
The security officer smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ to me before Igave him ID.”“It’s a sick world, Eve.” He resisted taking her hand for another squeeze. “A sick,sad world.
J D ROBB
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.
Christopher Bram
One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better
Larry Niven
One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades.
Sharon Salzberg
Sometimes you just need to be selfish to be self-sufficient.
Lois P. Frankel
She had become so much more accustomed to hard work and opposition than to adulation that the only emotion she had felt had been one of acute discomfort.
Margaret Landon