Quotes by American Authors - Page 3155

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.
Rebecca Solnit
The process of fostering the growth of another living being—either plant or human—is a delight for the soul.
Catherine Carrigan
What can I now do to use my misfortunes constructively, to turn my suffering to advantage by finding something worthwhile to do that I could not have done so well if these tragedies had not occurred?
James C. Crumbaugh
The only real influence I've ever had is myself.
Edward Hopper
Nothing is wrong. It’s merely what you think is right and wrong that has you confused.
J.L. Beck
What's wrong with people is people. There's no cure for that.
Marty Rubin
Just cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.
Karen Tei Yamashita
The simple truth is that technology is still a poor substitute for human interaction.
Robert G. Thompson
These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always descending a hill, rounding a corner, stepping into the street with a companion who urges me on, while I look back over my shoulder at the sight which recedes, vanishes. The present of my consciousness is itself a mystery which is also always just rounding a bend like a floating branch borne by a flood. Where am I? But I'm not. "I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more. . . .
Annie Dillard
They drove back to her house in silence. Terrance pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. Turning toward her, he said, “Khadejah, I really like you a lot and I don’t want to hurt you. But I’m not a virgin and I like to have sex. If we’re going to keep seeing each other, you’ve got to make a decision, because if I can’t get it from you I’ll get it from someone else.” He looked her straight in her tear-filled eyes. “I need to know whether to get a room for after the concert. Let me know tomorrow.” He reached over and opened her door. Khadejah didn’t say a word. She got out of the car and went into the house.Terrance sat there for a few minutes wondering if he was being fair. She had to know that he was having sex. Damn, I should feel honored that she’s still a virgin, he thought. Shit, I’ll just have my cake and eat it, too.Ten minutes later, Terrance was knocking on Adrienne’s door. “Hey, can I come in?
Tracy L. Darity
Students in the school of prayer never graduate from the school of the Gospel.
C.J. Mahaney
He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.
Brian Krans
But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral distinction…There is a battle going on right now over the words we use, over who has the right to speak and who does not. (Katie Kitamura)
Carolina De Robertis
Since the early 1920s a unique spiritual path has existed in Japan. This distinctly Japanese version of yoga is called Shin-shin-toitsu-do, and it combines seated meditation, moving meditation, breathing exercises, and other disciplines to help practitioners realize unification of mind and body. Besides yoga, it is a synthesis of methods, influenced by Japanese meditation, healing arts, and martial arts; along with Western psychology, medicine, and science. Shin-shin-toitsu-do is widely practiced throughout Japan, although it is almost unknown in other countries. Through its principles of mind and body coordination people have an opportunity to realize their full potential in everyday life.A remarkable man created this path, and he led an equally remarkable life. He was known in Japan as Nakamura Tempu Sensei, and this is his story.
H.E. Davey
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Sid Ziff
When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice—twice—we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner—everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there.
J.D. Salinger
One piece of wisdom a writer quickly learns ~ typos keep you humble.
E.A. Bucchianeri
You would run much slower if you were dragging something behind you, like a knapsack or a sheriff.
Lemony Snicket
Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.
Jonathan Gottschall
I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?
Camryn Manheim
Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are.
Julie Powell
People live their lives now in fear of the afterlife, and in the process, they forget that they are still alive! And for as long as you are alive, my friend, you have the chance to break free from any bondages whatsoever, that your fellow man has put you in. Your passion should not come from any one religion; your passion should come and should be fueled by, the fact that you are human and that you have been given this life to leave your stamp of beauty and of progress upon mankind!
C. JoyBell C.
Every student should know that statues are meant for sitting. If we're to endure their terrible old faces leering at us, the least they can do is offer shade or a comfortable perch." Nigel Bristow to Max McDaniels
Henry H. Neff
If you have the gift of frustration and the deep sense that the world is a mess, thank God for that; not everyone has that gift of vision. It also means that you have a responsibility to lead us in new ways.
Shane Claiborne
On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.
Edward Conlon
Someone tried to kill me, and I’m going swimming. I’m going swimming, because it doesn’t matter. I’m going swimming, because I don’t matter. I’m going swimming, because that’s what Claires do. We swim and we daydream and we read and we wait for someone to care, and they never, ever, ever do.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in itsvalue.
Charles Dudley Warner
I'm not Bonnie™ or Chloe. I'm the essence of her, the nontrademarked person the camera can never capture and my parents have no right to sign over. There is a sovereign nation encased in this skin that MetaReel can never trademark.
Heather Demetrios
Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything.
Christina Baker Kline
She asked, "Is there anything I can do to help?"He buried his nose in her hair, took a deep breath and sighed. "You help just be being here.""Well, that bit is easy," she told him with a smile. "Because I wouldn't be anywhere else.
Thea Harrison
It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier, and the reality...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.
Ann Marlowe
Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior. If a man lies to you, he is behaving badly and unlovingly toward you. He is disrespecting you and your relationship. The words “I love you” are not enough to make up for that. Don’t kid yourself that they are.
Susan Forward
Don't be angry, Finnula had said, be smart.
Sarah J Maas
I tended to be hard on the egos of a certain kind of men. The ones who normally swept women off their feet had never moved me much, because I'd always felt that if they swept me off my feet they'd practiced on a lot of women before me, and would practice more with women after me. I'd rarely been wrong on that. ~Anita Blake
Laurell K. Hamilton
The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.
Eli Pariser
Hate was the blazing beauty that consumed the world in its flames. Love could never consume anything but the heart of a fool.
Christina L. Barr
I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.
Anne Rice
She ate it and cried.Soon, he put the melting ice cream away."Shura," Tatiana whispered, "darling, forget what should have been. Remember all that was.""Tatiasha, babe," Alexander whispered, coming back to bed to be covered, "my one and only wife, forget our age, our splendid youth, forget it all and let our crazy love make us young.
Paullina Simons
What right does any church have even attempting to approve of lifestyles or certain acts for which God prescribed the death penalty in the Old Testament?
Billy Graham
Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
Victor J. Stenger
They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.
Neal Shusterman
Kicking a police car? Really?' Caleb shrugged. 'Car offended me. It was sitting right where I wanted to stand. What would you do?
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Back on the Hauser regime, I start the day with his notorious "pep breakfast" -- two raw eggs beaten in orange juice. Hauser describes it as a "creamy drink fit for a King's table." I do not feel the same way. This is so much worse than the raw eggs in milk that I drank for the Marilyn Monroe diet.If pneumonia were a food, this is what it would taste like.
Rebecca Harrington
If we define optimism broadly as the tendency to maintain a positive outlook, then realistic optimism is the tendency to maintain a positive outlook within the constraints of the available "measurable phenomena situated in the physical and social world" (DeGrandpre, 2000, p. 733). With respect to fuzzy meaning, realistic optimism involves enhancing and focusing on the favorable aspects of our experiences. Examples include being lenient in our evaluation of past events, actively appreciating the positive aspects of our current situation, and routinely emphasizing possible opportunities for the future. With respect to fuzzy knowledge, realistic optimism involves hoping, aspiring, and searching for positive experiences while acknowledging what we do not know and accepting what we cannot know.
Sandra L. Schneider
It's meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.
Koren Zailckas
If Amber kept up her act forever, it would only be a matter of time before the broken pieces of her real self were too small to ever be put back together. I didn’t know what happened to people once they were unfixable. I only hoped I never had to find out.
Cole Gibsen
What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
Ursula K Le Guin
It was your body....that danced at your first drum circle; it was your body that gave birth to your child; it was your body that got down and dirty in the back seat of your dad's station wagon; it was your body that shivered, sweated, clasped its hands, fell to its knees, wept, and laughed the first time you felt the presence of the goddess in your life.
Dianne Sylvan
She may be an old flame, but she still smokin'.
Lois Greiman
The morning sunshine brings the message that life is so bright and beautiful that the darkness of night has no power to hide it.
Debasish Mridha
[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.
Bill Bryson
As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.
Bill Bryson
In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves - this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.
Signe Pike
It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was truth that might be shattered by division.
John Steinbeck
Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.
René Girard
Step and land, step and land. That's all travel was. Throw in some running and a change of scenery. No big deal, right? And so, off he went. Off they went together.
Lynne Rae Perkins
We live, move, breathe, and having our being in the Love-Light of God
Gary Eby
Ride?" Rhage snorted. "Please. That thing is a sewing machine with an air dam taped to it. My GTO could dust the fucker in fourth gear from a dead stop."When there was an odd sound from behind, John looked back. So did the three Brothers. "What." Xhex bristled and crossed her arms over her chest. "I can laugh, you know. And that's . . . pretty damn funny." Rhage beamed. "I knew I liked you.
J.R. Ward
Accept obstacles as a strength building exercise on the way to success.
Debasish Mridha
Because I figure there's two kinds of people in the world. The ones who do everything that's laid out for them, the supposed-tos, and then there's the people that look above it and do what they want to do. I prefer the latter, but maybe that's just me. A not-supposed to.
Margaux Froley