Quotes by American Authors - Page 3160

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.
Gayle S. Rubin
You know that you are a writer if you are imaginative. You know that you are a writer if you are curious. You know that you are a writer if you are interested in the things and people of the world. You know that you are a writer if you hold a minie ball in your hand and wonder about its story. You know that you are a writer if you like the sound of rain on the roof. And if you want to tell someone else about your heart and how waiting for the thunder sometimes makes you feel, if you work to find the words to do that, then you are a writer. --Maureen O'Toople in the short story "Your Question for Author Here
Jon Scieszka
The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. ("Speak To Me Of Death")
Cornell Woolrich
Ultimately, it's my choice and only my choice.
J.A. Redmerski
They were full of suspicion and wonder, which I had grown to recognize as two very dangerous things.
Erin Forbes
The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.
Mark Twain
Sin may have the power to kill and destroy, but God is the Creator of life. He can create it from nothing, and He can restore it from death.(John 11:25-26)
Charles R. Swindoll
An ugly smile. An ugly soul.
George R.R. Martin
I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.
Dara Torres
Go that way, past the viaduct, and the wops will jump you, or chase you into Jew town...Polacks would stomp on you...Micks will shower you with Irish confetti from the brickyards.
Mike Royko
A Bostonian - an American broadly speaking.
G. E. Woodberry
Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.
Henry James
What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.
Cynthia Bourgeault
No, but I imagine there's a gun tucked away somewhere on your body. And I know what you can do with that, hotshot."He took a step toward her. "With what, sweetheart? With the gun? Or the body?
Lynn Raye Harris
Surround yourself with beautiful and positive people, who love you and believe in you.
Bryant McGill
the key to human development is building on who you already are
Tom Rath
Real limitations can be reasonably challenged and expanded, but a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.
Bryant McGill
football is like life - it requires perserverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.
Vince Lombardi Jr.
Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.
Tom Robbins
Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, "Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.
Charles Bukowski
Why won't they let me be? I just need to rest, that's all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
George R.R. Martin
We don't merely want to see beauty: we want to become part of it.
Tobin Hart
When you get up in the morning, you have two choices - either to be happy or to be unhappy. Just choose to be happy
Norman Vincent Peale
Imitation cannot go above its model.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's the wrong way. She's farther away from the door now. It occurs to me that some people only have book smarts.
Kendare Blake
Each person has goals. Some goals are open, visible to all who care to observe. Others are more private, shared only with one's closest friends or associates.Some are dark secrets that one hopes will never see the light of day. But eventually, inevitably, those deepest goals must be made manifest if they are to be reached. They must be opened for someone to hear, or see, or offer assistance.Everyone who brings those goals into the light must be prepared for either acceptance or rejection. And he must be ready to bear the consequence.All of them.
Timothy Zahn
As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.
Patricia Lockwood
In Jump Time’s developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society.
Jean Houston
Master Yourself and you master your environment! Such is the nature of wisdom.
D. Nicole Williams
Because of you, I can see and realize the beauty of life.
Debasish Mridha
Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
Ann Patchett
She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art.
Duff Brenna
Sometimes we feel that the busier we are, the more important we are--as though our busyness defines our worth...We can spend a lifetime whirling about at a feverish pace, checking off list after list of things that in the end really don't matter.That we do a lot may not be so important. That we focus the energy of our minds, our hearts, and our souls on those things of eternal significance--that is essential.--Joseph B. Wirthlin
Carolyn J. Rasmus
I don't understand boys.
Ally Carter
Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Hey, where are you going?" His voice, confused yet curious, called after me. "Hey. Why didn't your mother name you Maybe, or We'll see, or What's-Your-Number? That way, we could call our first born Absolutely.
Linda Kage
You may be going through a storm right now, but understand that the sun will shine again. It is during the storm that you learn the lesson. You can either let it make you or break you. Take this time to reflect on your choices in life. Many times we create our own storms by the choices we make. Right now while you are in the midst, decide to not go backwards, move forward with more positivity.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
George W. Ball
I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.
Khaled Hosseini
The less you knew, the fewer monsters you’d attract,
Rick Riordan
I homeschool my children not to prepare them for tests but to prepare them for life.
Tamara L. Chilver
But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn’t let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it’s born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns.
Christopher Pike
One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, "What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?
Robert M. Price
What's pretty important, and least was for me, (related an exceptionally good pinch-hitter on the pressures involved with failing with so much at stake) you can't be afraid to enjoy the moment.
Tim Wendel
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
Hannah Arendt
There's nothing you can do, Sirus. No one can do this for me, and no one can swoop in and rescue me every time I'm challenged. I have to do this on my own.
Heather Brewer
Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.
Bryant McGill
That's it! Stretch way beyond your perceived limitations..Go for yours like you own it already, because you truly do.
Sereda Aleta Dailey
...in my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books.
Lisa Factora-Borchers
Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.
Penn Jillette
If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.
Lindsay Buckingham
You can follow others into mediocrity, or you can create something that will be remembered
Candice Galek
A digital wall of masks stared back at him. His finger rolled the mouse in a slow downward scroll.t"Okay, you bastard. Where are you?
Lisa Kessler
Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.
Robert E. Howard
Cultivate your curves - they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided.
Mae West
Farmers worry only during the growing season but town people worry all the time.
Edgar Watson Howe
Want? Yes, she whispered, her eyes sliding closed. Yes I want to keep you more than I want to breathe.
Skye Jordan
What have you done to your hair?” Mom’s broken voice said, pinning me back to this tiny hospitalroom.“Holy shit!” Icka patted her head as if searching. “You think the nurse stole it? She looked shady.
Phoebe Kitanidis
The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.
Jennifer Senior