Quotes by American Authors - Page 317

In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.
Nicholas Carr
I think it simply comes down to fantasy being the language I speak. While I cannot get into epic sword and sorcery, I see the world as having the potential to be slightly off-kilter. I have run into people who do not quite seem human – though of course they are – and have been privy to coincidences that almost make me believe in magic. Fantasy is sometimes just asking yourself, “Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?
Thomm Quackenbush
Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.
Michael Montoure
The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sometimes the prize is not worth the costs. The means by which we achieve victory are as important as the victory itself.
Brandon Sanderson
You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.
John Green
Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don't do them anymore.
Rachel Caine
I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.
Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth
Life is about more that quotes about life
John Chaplin
No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.
Mark Helprin
And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
Man's strongest instinct is not sex or self-preservation. it's to level the playing field.
Ron Brackin
[My mom's] funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blue food. I think it's her way of saying anything is possible. Percy can pass seventh grade. Waffles can be blue. Little miracles like that.
Rick Riordan
It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Anthony Doerr
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
A smile and patience are two things that can never be over applied.
Gary Rudz
Without the mellifluous notes of memory, there would be no songs to sing, no ballads dedicated to past afflictions or affections, and no church hymns celebrating the trials and tribulations of saints, martyrs, and holy deities. Without respect for memories for days gone by, we would lack impetuses to write poems or produce literature reflecting the bitter hardships and ineffable joys of human life. Without a reference to the past serving as an ethical compass pointing the way forward, we would be oblivious to the inequities committed by foes and the glorious deeds performed by our ancestors; we would lack the essential evenhandedness required of every caretaker; and we would be poor stewards of this planet. The loss of memory severs us at the stem from one another. Without the bond of shared memories, we would each remain forever unconnected to our brothers and sisters. Without the twigs of memory, we would lead a life as dry and disjointed as withered leaves scattered by a cruel wind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
You should never apologize for existing, Lev. Not even to all those people out there who wish you didn't.
Neal Shusterman
Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
Raymond Carver
There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it.
John Welwood
I talk about writing and write so much because aside from music, it’s the only thing giving me peace and reason and purpose. Everyone is looking for answers but I don’t have them and I’m not the answer, but I feel like if I could see the face of God, I’d be better, healed—absolved. I feel like a bastard and like I’m pushing a Ponzi scheme every time someone comes to me for guidance and I push them to the “right” path when I’m just as lost as they are. And it makes me feel like shit every time someone wants to look up to me, or when people call me strong or brave or amazing or want to tell me how “great” I am. And then, the next moment, I’m fine, until the next tide of emotion comes again. I’m just a person who’s had a lot of time to think—a flawed and fucked-up person.
Phil Volatile
Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.
Donna Tartt
Only in a place like this do earth and sky come together in such a way that they bridge into one, and in such a place a person could put up her arms and find herself in heaven.
Laura Pritchett
But just now, he'd gotten on his knees and proposed marriage, like in a television commercial for a diamond ring. Except of course they had the roll of duct tape instead, which, when you came to think about it, was a far more practical item. Such a bad mistake it would be, to embark on marriage and adult life without a nice supply of duct tape.
Nancy Werlin
I thought I had found my true vocation and happiness, but in a strange way, they were just like my stepmother because they didn't want me to grow up either. This is really important you understand, Virginia, because I had gone from something very bad to something very good, but it was only halfway right. They loved me, but they wanted me to stay small like them.
Kathryn Wesley
Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.
L.M. Browning
In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own face in the glass I find letters from God dropt in the street and every one is signed by God's name and I leave them where they are for I know that wheresoever I go others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Walt Whitman
The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.
René Girard
There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.
Thornton Wilder
The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it. It is through empathic projection that we come to know our environment, understand how we are part of it and how it is part of us. This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality. An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.
George Lakoff
Some part of him had hoped that a woman might one day see beyond his scars to the man he was inside. But Megan was doing more than just ignoring his ugliness. She was _accepting_ it with a woman's gentleness, her touch soothing memories of savage pain, grief, loneliness.
Pamela Clare
The only person worth risking everything for is the one person that would never let you risk everything for.
Shannon L. Alder
(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?
Gregory Maguire
When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one. We cannot love when we feel fear.... When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all.
Gerald G. Jampolsky
A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.
Sean Wilsey
Gratitude is born in hearts that take time to count up past mercies.
Charles E. Jefferson
I’m not a bad person. I haven’t killed anyone. I (rarely) lie. I don’t kick little puppies. So why do people look at me as if the world would be a better place without me?
Gena Showalter
In the same way you can find God in the beauty of nature, you can find God in the beauty of the destitute. We're not meant to just admire the trees, we're meant to share life.
Cheryl Reed
It's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. ... you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
Ned Vizzini
There are poets,there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
Gregory Maguire
The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.
Eileen Myles
Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient
Milton Berle
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
John Steinbeck
Born on March 20, 1971, she celebrated her 100th birthday this past March. During the war she toured the battle zones, where British forces were fighting by giving concerts for the troops. The songs most remembered from that era are We'll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and There'll Always Be an England. During the Second World War she earned the title of “the Allied Forces Sweetheart.” And in 1945 she was awarded the British War Medal and the Burma Star for her untiring devotion to the Crown and the men in uniform. As a songwriter and actress, her recordings and performances were enormously popular. This popularity remained solid after the war with recording of Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart, My Son, My Son and I Love This Land, which was released to mark the end of the Falklands War. In 2009, at age 92, she became the oldest living artist to top the UK Albums Chart, with We'll Meet Again, The Very Best of Vera Lynn. Commemorating her 100th birthday she released the album Vera Lynn 100, in 2017, which number 3 on the charts, making her the oldest recording artist in the world and the first centenarian performer to have an album in the charts.Vera Lynn devoted much time working with wounded ex-servicemen, disabled children, and breast cancer. She is held in great affection by veterans of the Second World War and in 2000 was named the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.
Captain Hank Bracker
It's not that I'm ahead of my time, it's more that the world is running late
Josh Stern
If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?
Sherman Alexie
Our genuine happiness comes from doing things we feel good about, not from doing things that make us feel good.
John Bruna
The world does not have to change.... The only thing that has to change is our attitude.
Gerald Jampolsky
All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.
Michael Crichton
In real life, Snow White stays dead and Rapunzel grows old, alone in her tower. In real life, you gotta have enough sense to stay away from ugly bitches offering you shiny apples and have enough balls to cut off your own hair and use it as a ladder if needs be. In real life, you gotta save yourself and the only happy endings are the ones paid for in massage parlors.
Amy Sumida
If he sees you unclothed, I will have to kill him," he spoke in her ear. She didn't know if she should believe him or not, but she took no chances. "Tell him to leave, then," she said calmly but sternly.
Madison Thorne Grey
We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.
Bryant McGill
I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.
Erin Passons
His gaze slid over me like a veil of fire. He could ignite my deepest desires with a single glance. I decided right then and there no more reading romance novels by candelight.
Darynda Jones
Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.
Kilroy J. Oldster
A joke is never a joke if it is at the expense of another person's feelings
Heather Wolf
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that others are behind the time.
Martha Graham
I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else--and the one time I did it was took from me--they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby.... I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left.
Toni Morrison