Quotes by American Authors - Page 3227

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.
Richard Ford
If he loves you he will meet your effort.
Shannon L. Alder
Do not confuse location with direction. Location is where you are, direction is where you are going.
Laura Busche
She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing. Caleb?Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal.
G.S. Jennsen
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance.
James Baldwin
I believe a boy can have anything in life that he wants once he starts working for it. The main thing is not to give up. It makes no difference how tough things get, just bow your back, keep working, and put your heart and soul into it. As you go along your way, live a good clean life, don't hurt anyone or anything, and always be honest. It doesn't hurt to pray a little, too. If you do all those things-someday you'll have your pony and gun. You'll get help when you least expect it.
Wilson Rawls
Do Something!I was sitting on a plane after a long, tiring business trip. I was a bit grouchy and irritable because the rigorous schedule I had made for myself left me exhausted. Looking to not talk to the person next to me and simply endure the flight, I decided to open my newspaper and read about what was happening in the world. As I continued to read, it seemed that everywhere I looked there were stories of injustice, pain, suffering, and people losing hope. Finally, fueled by my tired, irritable state, I became overcome with compassion and frustration for the way things were. I got up and went to the bathroom and broke down.With tears streaming down my face, I helplessly looked to the sky and yelled to God. “God, look at this mess. Look at all this pain and suffering. Look at all this killing and hate. God, how could you let this happen? Why don’t you do something?”Just then, a quiet stillness pacified my heart. A feeling of peace I won’t ever forget engulfed my body. And, as I looked into my own eyes in the mirror, the answer to my own question came back to me… “Steve, stop asking God to do something. God already did something, he gave you life. Now YOU do something!
Steve Maraboli
Autopilot is great, and removal of thought is one of the highest ideals of training. But removal of thought in the moment must be preceded by purposeful thought beforehand.
Chris Matakas
All souls make choices throughout their lives, some are good and some are evil - their fate with the universe has no bearing on those choices. Their choices permit them to be whole or to remain fragmented
Nancy Straight
I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
Tara Brach
We have become a nation of biblical illiterates.
Billy Graham
Time was like that, though - racing forward when she wanted it to slow down, then crawling to a stop when she could least bear it.
Aprilynne Pike
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions.... [W]hen the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.
Jonah Lehrer
His hands lay flat on either side of him, his arms at his sides. He seemed barely to be breathing; she wasn't sure she was breathing herself. She slid her own hand across the bedsheet, just far enough that their fingers touched-so lightly that she would have probably hardly been aware of it had she been touching anyone but Jace; as it was, the nerve endings in her fingertips pricked softly, as if she were holding them over a low flame. She felt him tense beside her and then relax. He had shut his eyes, and his lashes cast fine shadows against the curve of his cheekbones. His mouth curled into a smile as if he sensed her watching him, and she wondered how he would look in the morning, with his hair messed and sleep circles under his eyes. Despite everything, the thought gave her a jolt of happiness.She laced her fingers through his. "Good night," she whispered. With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.
Cassandra Clare
Beware of what you let enter your heart. There will come a day when you'd give anything to remove it.
Yasmin Mogahed
The past is gone. My life is a miracle! With gratitude to God, I am still here to remember and to tell what happened to me during the Holocaust of WWII.
Leah Cik Roth
One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
Cheryl Strayed
You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.
Sam Lipsyte
A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)
Jonathan Santlofer
I stare at him. "You can't risk not winning. Not because of me." Sean doesn't lift his eyes from the counter. "We make our move when you make yours. You on the inside, me on the outside. Corr can come from the middle of the pack; he's done it before. It's one side you won't have to worry about." I say, "I will not be your weakness, Sean Kendrick." Now he looks at me. He says, very softly, "It's late for that, Puck.
Maggie Stiefvater
I want you to want me. But I want you to want me for all the right reasons.
Nessie Q.
Three carefully stringed words are worth more than a book of gibberish. It's not the word count but the impact of those words that counts.
Richelle E. Goodrich
We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything.
Sylvia Plath
Let us not talk about problems. Let us think and talk about solutions.
Debasish Mridha
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
Cormac McCarthy
The external only creates dependency.
Bryant McGill
What you resist, persists....Let go and your life will flow.
Nanette Mathews
A dream is a manifestation, just like what you live is a manifestation, but a dream is quicker and easier to achieve, and not so troublesome if there's something you don't want.
Abraham-Hicks
Everything is falling into place perfectly. We have four dirty DEA agents working with a terrorist group and killing Americans on American soil. The headlines are going to write themselves and we're going to get our candidate into the White House. When that happens, we'll get the war we want. The war we can win.
Katie Reus
We are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night. That is how it ends.
Arnold Weinstein
Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.
Bern Williams
So many stars are popping out above us it seems you could almost dip your fingers up there and come out with a handful of stars.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
I will give you anything to say you want to stay, you want me too.Say you'll never die, you'll always haunt me.I want to know I belong to youSay you'll haunt me...
Stone Sour
In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star
Bette Davis
There is nothing in this life that can destroy you but yourself. Bad things happen to everyone, but when they do, you can't just fall apart and die. You have to fight back. If you don't, you're the one who loses in the end. But if you do keep going and fight back, you win.
Alexandra Monir
My parents think the longer the name, the more powerful the sorcerer, so they named me Cassandra Morgan Ursula Margaret Scot. You can call me Cassie.
Christine Amsden
Life is not fair get used to used to it
Bill Gates
I love you because you have this fire in you that you don't even recognise, but I do. You're strong and you're a survivor.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
They say that wisdom comes from suffering. This is not true. Wisdom comes from having unconditional empathy for all mankind. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you. If you do not feel love for all mankind, nor see everyone around you as a valuable human and an extension of yourself, then you will never feel real empathy. And if you do not have empathy, then you will not gain, learn and remember valuable knowledge from your experiences, or those around you, so that you one day become wise. Yet most importantly, wisdom comes from having a good memory. If you do not remember anything, or are so disconnected from basic humanism to even care to dissect lessons to be gained from every experience in your life and from those around you - using simple reason and the juggling of feelings, then wisdom will forever remain a faraway planet to you.
Suzy Kassem
There are basically three types of songs: loved songs, unloved songs, and transitional songs written by tired people in between the two. Love songs are cheesy, unloved songs are depressing, and transitional songs are poetry. Transitions catch the world on fire, touching on relevant topics while speaking with giddiness and despair of the lover between.
Ace Boggess
Christine taught her that the world you inherited didn’t have to be the world you left behind. Nothing was pre-determined. Not even No Man’s Land.
Geonn Cannon
You can not love someone you do not appreciate and you can not appreciate what you do not see.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup
In the midst of prosperity, the challenge for believers is to handle wealth in such a way that it acts as a blessing, not a curse.
Randy Alcorn
Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent.
Aaron Sorkin
There is a very great difference — is there not? — between the temporal and the eternal judgments, a very great difference between a man's reputation and a man's character, for reputation is what men think and say of us, while character is what God and the angels know of us.
Price Collier
Excuse me? Do you mind if I sit next to you? This spot has the best view of..." I glanced out the window. "The... gravel roof.
Cindi Madsen
Each night we watched the sun set no matter where we were, and we'd wake up early to witness it rising again. That was the thing about life: even when the days faded to black, you were always given another chance. A second moment to try again to rise from the ashes.
Brittainy C. Cherry
While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams — ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain — Sophia always looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected from the normal destruction of the everyday.
Lauren Oliver
You sure you don't want me to come over? We could make a snowman in the garden, or one in front of the hotel for the guests' arrival tomorrow. Or we could build snow forts and have a snowball fight. Surefire way to wear you out and make you sleepy. Then we could have cocoa with marshmallows on top. And I've been dying to have a piece of that seven-layer chocolate cake. I can't quit thinking about it.
Terry Spear
PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schleicher.
Amanda Ripley
In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. P. 25
Michael E. Porter
Empathy requires us to step outside of our own agendas long enough to develop an understanding of the other person's perspective. It can be rightly stated that no relationship will be whole without ongoing displays of empathy.
Les Carter
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afreaid to ask even of herself the silent question- "Is this all?
Betty Friedan
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H.L. Mencken
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
Sebastian Junger
Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons - they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines.
Ray Bradbury
Success is the bridge between insanity and credibility.
Stewart Stafford
If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.
Eileen Myles
In terms of "quiet" bourgeois democracy two fundamental possibilities are open to the industrial worker: identification with the bourgeoisie, which holds a higher position in the social scale, or identification with his own social class, which produces its own anti-reactionary way of life. To pursue the first possibility means to envy the reactionary man, to imitate him, and, if the opportunity arises, to assimilate his habits of life. To pursue the second of these possibilities means to reject the reactionary man's ideologies and habits of life. Due to the simultaneous influence exercised by both social and class habits, these two possibilities are equally strong. The revolutionary movement also failed to appreciate the importance of the seemingly irrelevant everyday habits, indeed, very often turned them to bad account. The lower middle-class bedroom suite, which the "rabble" buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; the consequent suppression of the wife, even if he is a Communist; the "decent" suit of clothes for Sunday; "proper" dance steps and a thousand other "banalities," have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance. Narrow conservative life exercises a continuous influence, penetrates every facet of everyday life; whereas factory work and revolutionary leaflets have only a brief effect.
Wilhelm Reich
Be still sad heart and cease repining Behind the clouds is the sun still shining Thy fate is the common fate of all Into each life some rain must fall Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow