Quotes by American Authors - Page 3221

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn't I?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grace does not make sense. It's not supposed to make sense. Grace cannot be calculated or formulated, earned or even rewarded for a job well done. Grace is a gift, not a salary.
Michelle DeRusha
Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won’t — and if they don’t notice, I know it’s frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn't change anything — because your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for, but to the gift itself.
John Green
Unreasonable," "unrealistic," and "impractical" are all words used to marginalize a person or idea that fails to conform with conventionally expected standards.
Chris Guillebeau
Forgot to live-tweet the election last night, so I'm post-tweeting today. I'll start as soon as my fingers unclench from their rage fists.
Stephen Colbert
When power is discovered, man always turns to it," Bateson wrote darkly. "The science of heredity will soon provide power on stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation, or humanity at large, is a separate question." He had preempted the century of the gene.
Siddharta Mukherjee
Live simply, laugh joyfully, love tremendously, and leave silently.
Debasish Mridha
People take one another for granted
Nina LaCour
Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life and from their hands it comes in fair articulate forms to bless the world.
Josiah Gilbert Holland
What is the purpose of my life, is it doesn't have to do with learning to let go?
Jack Johnson
When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response.The gray area between yes and no.Silence.
Dan Brown
My mother does not own my hands, though she works hard to train them. My mother does not own my eyes, though she frequently directs their focus. My mother does not own my mind, though she yields great influence upon it. My heart, however, she owns completely, for it was hers the day I was born.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Often people just don't see what I see. They have too much doubt. You can't do your best when you're doubting yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, who will?
Michael Jackson
That excuse only works until you discover the person is merely an individual like any other.
G.S. Jennsen
That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.
Preston Sturges
Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.
Bell Hooks
To find yourself, get lost for others.
Debasish Mridha
In my clinical experience the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
Rollo May
She'd thought there was no greater connection than destiny decreeing them joined. But there was - the choice they'd made to love each other.
Kresley Cole
Sometimes the best gifts are the ones you can't get on your own.
Shannon L. Alder
Happiness was an evasive emotion that could not be fabricated, duplicated, or happened upon. It was something that was only handed out to a select few, but just like his mother, Ethan realized that he was never meant to have it.
Belinda G. Buchanan
Jesus doesn’t make up the difference. Jesus makes all the difference. Grace is not about filling gaps. It is about filling us.
Brad Wilcox
To say "He was a young fool, and now he's an old fool" is to make a distinction without a difference.
Gary Inbinder
I will never know you well enough. I will always want more.
Priya Ardis
I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ... ('Adopted-orphan smile', I mean, that's not bad, come on.)
Gillian Flynn
It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task oftmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The goal of prayer is the ear of God a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.
E.M.Bounds
It still hurts," she whispered. "Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.
Jodi Picoult
Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance—such abuses of the freedom of speech—a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Learn to trust yourself and you will create a meaningful life.
Lynn A. Robinson
Artists have a unique ability to paint the world, and to help people see injustice. They do it not with guns, but with pens and guitars and paintbrushes.
Teresa R. Funke
Claiming our birthright means living in beauty inwardly regardless of our outer circumstances. It means cultivating the qualities coded in our hearts.
Lori Cash Richards
A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.
Emily Dickinson
Those who trade with heaven by prayer grow rich by quick returns.
William S. Plumer
I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.
Sylvia Plath
She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story.
Catherynne M. Valente
She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means...Her smile is her revenge.
Lauren DeStefano
Before my first visit to Waorani territory, I was introduced to don Casimiro Mamallacta, a traditional Kichwa healer and family man living in the outskirts of the jungle town of Archidona, by his daughter Mercedes, whom I met at the Jatun Sacha biological station. During the years that I was collaborating on the demarcation effort and in between the work sessions, I lived with don Casimiro's family.
Jonathon Miller Weisberger
People from my first home say I'm brave. They tell me I'm strong. They pat me on the back and say, 'Way to go. Good job.' But the truth is, I am not really very brave; I am not really very strong; and I am not doing anything spectacular. I am simply doing what God has called me to do as a person who follows Him. He said to feed His sheep and He said to care for 'the least of these,' so that's what I'm doing, with the help of a lot people who make it possible and in the company of those who make my life worth living
Katie J. Davis
If the forces are intense, (..) almost no company earns attractive returns on investment.If the forces are benign, (..) many companies are profitable. P. 25
Michael E. Porter
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
You didn't play baseball that well with two hands. How do you think you're going to make it with one? "If you're just going to tell me what I can't do, you can leave.
Mary Jane Auch
I dye my jeans jet black once a week, but they never seem dark enough. I bleach my hair bright white twice a month but it never seems light enough. I drink two and a half bottles of champagne every night but I never seem drunk enough. And I know I’m not high enough until someone grabs my face to check my vision to see if I’m still responsive— And even then, I’m thinking to myself that I should probably do one more line, you know, just to be safe.
Kris Kidd
He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;
Robert A. Caro
There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I don’t believe that we can blame our actions on our upbringings. If we could, then nobody would be responsible for anything they do.
Anne Blankman
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.- Mark Twain
L.A. Smith
Sometimes, the things people don't say are louder than the words that come out of their mouths.
Robin Benway
Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.
Warren Spahn
Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around.
Criss Jami
The words of the twenty-third Psalm had come back to her, verses Mutti had helped her memorize as a young girl--Elise Neumann
Jody Hedlund
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
Janet Fitch
My secret is that I choose to be the person that I want to be. That I don't believe in destiny or predetermination, but in choice, and that each of us chooses to be the person we are. Whatever you want to be you can be, whatever you want to do you can do, wherever you want to go you can go. The world, and the life ahead, is ours for the taking. The future is unwritten, and you can make it whatever you want it to be
James Frey
If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.
Shane Claiborne
Write the story. Don't write sentences.
James Patterson
The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.
J. Courtney Sullivan
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.
Thomas A. Edison
No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.
Marty Rubin
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Am I in trouble? He chortled, "well, a bunch of not-so-friendly thugs were waiting to ambush you and blow up your apartment. If that doesn't qualify as trouble, I don't know what does.
Melissa Cutler