Quotes by American Authors - Page 3166

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
Marilynne Robinson
You know what? We need a recession in this country, because that would finaly weed out al the subnormal, underdeveloped, stupefied, puerile people in this workforce.
Jen Lancaster
The human mind was a devious organ, however, and it chiseled in stone that which would be best left unrecalled.
Raymond L. Atkins
I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?"The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap."Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that.
Therese Anne Fowler
Arrogance is an illusion of superiority one perpetrates upon their self. Some may ultimately find their way through the illusion, but only after many losses.
Debra Crown
You can make your marriage a little bit of heaven on earth by following God's plan of teamwork.
Jim George
An Authorpreneur focuses on establishing one's brand to the consumer using different avenues to promote their work.
Geraldine Solon
AWESOME things come to those who focus on the positive, recognize the blessings, find the humor and never give up!
Tanya Masse
My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
Aspen Matis
For the company to assemble at a late hour and engage in unusual, exciting and severe exercise throughout the entire night, is often too great a tax upon the physical system. To dress too thinly, and in a state of perspiration to be exposed, as ladies at the ball frequently are, to draughts of cold, is oftentimes to plant the seeds of a disease from which they never recover. Again, to come in contact, as ladies are liable to, more especially at the public ball, with disreputable men, is sometimes to form alliances that will make a lifetime of sorrow.' —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball, 1883
Alice Simpson
women were beyond me.they saw somethingdepraved.there was one waitressa little older thanI, she rather smiled,lingered when shebrought mycoffee.that was plenty for me, that wasenough.- Young in New Orleans
Charles Bukowski
I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.
Tim Kreider
We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, “Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine.” So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there’s a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination.
Bell Hooks
Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.''Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
Margery Williams Bianco
We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place.
Chris Matakas
Everyone's dying, Milcah. Some people are just dying sooner than others.
K.K. Hendin
One of the greatest gifts to give our friends and others is a prayer.
Ellen J. Barrier
War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
Mitch Albom
The missing aren't missing, they're only departed
Trenton Lee Stewart
I listened to God and to my husband, not the the enemy's whispers, not to other people's opinions.
Lynn Austin
God wants us to know we are saved, for saved people are dangerous people, willing to face off with the world, unafraid of the consequences since they know that, whatever happens, they will have eternal life.
Max Lucado
We have all sorts of words that could describe us. But we get to choose which ones are most important.
Jennifer E. Smith
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.
John Green
Ain't the best prayin' jest bein' with God and talkin' a while, like He's a good friend, stead a-like he runs a store and you've come in a-hopin' to git a bargain?
Olive Ann Burns
He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.
Jonathan Edwards
To make money buy some good stock hold it until it goes up and then sell it. If it doesn't go up don't buy it.
Will Rogers
Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.
Carl Sagan
Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature.
John Gierach
Lucille must have fed him a Vallium smoothie this morning.
Janet Evanovich
She licked her parched lips, moistening them, preparing them. “You could lose your job.”“You could be expelled.”“It’s unethical.”“Dangerous.”His mouth hovered only millimeters over hers. “We doing this?”She hooked her arms around his neck. “God yes.
Shelly Bell
Let's look at one more quick example of modern evolution atwork. In the early 1800s, light-colored lichens covered many ofthe trees in the English countryside. The peppered moth was alight-colored insect that blended in unnoticeably with the lichens.Predators had great difficulty distinguishing the peppered mothfrom its background environment, so the moths easily survivedand reproduced. Then the Industrial Revolution came to the English country-side. Coal-burning factories turned the lichens a sooty black. Thelight-colored peppered moth became clearly visible. Most of themwere eaten. But because of genetic variation and mutation, a fewpeppered moths displayed a slightly darker color. These darkermoths were better able to blend in with the sooty lichens, and solived to produce other darker-colored moths. In little over a hun-dred years, successive generations of peppered moths evolvedfrom almost completely white to completely black. Natural selec-tion, rather than "random accident," guided the moth's evolution-ary progress.
David Mills
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.
Dennis Lehane
The capacity for love that makes dogs such rewarding companions has a flip-side: They find it difficult to cope without us. Since we humans programmed this vulnerability, it's our responsibility to ensure that our dogs do not suffer as a result.
John Bradshaw
I was lonely. I felt it deeply and permanently, that this state of being on my own might never disappear. But I welcomed the lonliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It's never lonliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.
Rachel Sontag
Theoretically the planet could suddenly crack in half, leaving me on one side and you on the other side, forever and tragically parted, but I’m not worried about that, either. Some things,” Jace said,
Cassandra Clare
I have a sure knowledge that Thanks are the highest form of thought, and that true gratitude brings unbounded happiness doubled by miracles.
Raymond D. Longoria Jr.
How much energy they put into harming each other. How little into saving.
Suzanne Collins
I didn't want to hurt him!" Ender cried. "Why didn't he just leave me alone!
Orson Scott Card
You are my finest knight
Carolyn Parkhurst
When women agree with me I always do the other thing
Charles Bukowski
Excuses are a time thief. Have a goal, accept responsibility, and take action!
Steve Maraboli
The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa.
Teju Cole
What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
Erma Bombeck
Life is short and there will always be dirty dishes, so let's dance.
James Howe
The moon is the same but the observers are different.
Debasish Mridha
To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.
Louis L'Amour
A statue stands in a shaded placeAn angel girl with an upturned faceA name is written on a polished rockA broken heart that the world forgot
Martina Mcbride
The Jews have always been students and their greatest study is themselves.
Albert Goldman
I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They ’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
Emily Dickinson
Names and knowledge change, the way the turningworld brings color or deep shadows, without a soundeven as soft as the twist of a key in a lock.
Jeannine Atkins
All are at war with the one who wars against self.
E'yen A. Gardner
Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.
Robert E. Barron
Ish #109 "If MapQuest says make a right, go straight. You'll get there quicker.
Regina Griffin
Life is a game that you win when you solve the puzzle of yourself.
Bryant McGill
A failure establishes only this that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.
Christian Bovee
And our tears are an expression of that which we cannot express. Tears are perfect prayer.
Ronald Chapman
My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.
A.K. Kuykendall