Quotes by American Authors - Page 3232

I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.
Cassandra Clare
We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
Erich Fromm
But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
Jaron Lanier
Failure is our best teacher but fear of failure is our worst enemy.
Debasish Mridha
That was the ballad of suburbia: give me loud to drown out the silence.
Stephanie Kuehnert
No man can take your freedom from you. They can limit your mobility, but that's about all they can do
Danielle Steel
After a debauch of thundershower the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
One's true religion is what one cares about most.
Walter Starcke
...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.
Michelle Latiolais
Let’s have a life with momentum and action. Set a goal for every day and every season.
Debasish Mridha
Let's never stop holding each other's hands.We all need to have our hand held sometimes.
Scott Stabile
It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
George R.R. Martin
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
Chris Hedges
Marriage is deep. Don't marry someone shallow, it will cause both of you to drown
Shon Hyneman
Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
Donella H. Meadows
In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability.
John Gray
And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what?...to talk.("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
Networking is an investment in your business. It takes time and when done correctly can yield great results for years to come.
Diane Helbig
Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
James Wood
Emma was horrified and transfixed at the same time. She was watching Jonah Kinlock doing what he did best. There was a certain macabre beauty in watching form and function wedded together. In Jonah's case, a dance of beauty and death.
Cinda Williams Chima
Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.
Flannery O'Connor
Dating in highschool was very different. Boys suddenly went up your shirt, girls were expected to give blow jobs and be sexy. You had to be hot, but not a slut. You had to be into sex, but never have it. Except when your boyfriend wanted it. If you had sex you had to keep it a secret, but also be very good at it. Except not too good, because this better be your first time.
Amy Poehler
While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.(pg.87, "Think Little")
Wendell Berry
I'm hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what's going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I'm also making you miserable.
Orson Scott Card
Strength of character means the ability to overcome resentment against others, to hide hurt feelings, and to forgive quickly.
Lawrence G. Lovasik
Umasi kept walking, out of sight and into the glittering night. Meahwhile, Zen lay alone, defeated on the cold ground, knowing that he had truly been left behind. Then the memories returned, and for the first time in his life, he cried.
Isamu Fukui
Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Steven Pinker
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
JFK had to act before his fragile body betrayed him.
David Pietrusza
Once more Jane sat staring at the telephone. This time she was filled with a confidence that was new to her. Stan Crandall. Stanley Crandall. He liked her! He had seen her once, and even though had been rumpled and grass-stained and having a terrible time with Sandra, he liked her well enough to go to the trouble of finding out her name and calling to ask her to go to the movies. Jane smiled at the telephone and gave a sigh of happiness
Beverly Cleary
Today was my forty-fifth birthday. Impending old age and a problem marriage were staring me in the face. Not a good place to be. I figured that right now, I had two choices — crawl out of the pit, or wallow and die. To wallow or not to wallow? That was the question. Look at Scarlett O’Hara. Did she cry and whine when Rhett walked out the door not giving a damn? Well, okay, she did. But not for long, I’ll bet. Not Scarlett. Same story here, baby, same story here.
Karen Cantwell
Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.
Jim Butcher
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
Phyllis Diller
O wad some power the giftie gie us to see some people before they see us.
Ethel Watts Mumford
Who are they to give stars or dots? They're Wemmicks just like you."Eli to Punchinello (p. 25)
Max Lucado
Every idea is my last. I feel sure of it. So, I try to do the best with each as it comes and that's where my responsibility ends. But I just don't wait for ideas. I look for them. Constantly. And if I don't use the ideas that I find, they're going to quit showing up.
Peg Bracken
You will not able to find peace if you are the source of unhappiness for others.
Debasish Mridha
In the writers mind, even a backstory has a backstory.
Terry a O'Neal
As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.
June Casagrande
Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery and every truth easily becomes a lie.
J. F. Stone
I do enjoy writing, and I hope someone gets something interesting out of this book. I already have. Now, If I ever have to write a book that is not about me, I may be totally stumped and have writer's block. We will see. Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn't know what to do next. You could hire someone to write it for you if you can't write it yourself. That doesn't seem to matter. Just don't hire some sweaty hack who asks you questions for years and twists them into his own vision of what is right or wrong. Try to avoid doing that.
Neil Young
It’s not how you start that’s important, but how you finish!
Jim George
The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.
Jodi Picoult
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
John Gardner
Orange?" He seems unconvinced."Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset," I say. "At least, that's what you told me once.
Suzanne Collins
Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Leaving knots untied and scattering seeds to distract them will only work on vampires with OCD.
Molly Harper
Give me a half hour's conversation. I will know more than I will reading 20 magazines.
Joseph Kennedy
It's time for everybody to start becoming conscious of their conscience.
Suzy Kassem
When Jesus was interrupted, He started where He was and helped those in need who were nearest to Him. There is always another mission “out there”—the next cause, the next city, or the next country that seems to be the most important mission we could pursue. Jesus illustrates that our greatest mission is often the person in front of us.
Dillon Burroughs
Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Will Rogers
Metal business cards are a good investment. Especially if you were to meet Magneto. He would have no other choice but to be attracted to you.
Ryan Lilly
The time to right the wrong ticks with precission.
Aneta Cruz
Instead of playing to win, I was playing not to lose. It reminds me of the story I once heard about two friends being chased by a bear, when one turned to the other and said, "I just realized that I don't need to outrun the bear; I only need to outrun you.
Sean Covey
It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, and his gun and his wagon, and his waiting horses. She had no conception of what was being asked of her, but she knew that there could be no viable alternative. She dashed inside the orphanage and grabbed the few things that belonged to her.
James A. Michener
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal.
Chris Hedges
What are you?' She asked. He shot her a brief glance and looked away. He stared at the scenery of the pastures and distant rows of trees. She knew he was not going to answer the question. In the brightening daylight, she could see that most of the blood on him was restricted to his mouth and hands. It dawned on her that it wasn't his blood, but the blood of something he had caught and eaten.
Shirley A. Martin
Old age has its compensations. More than ever I see each day as a gift from God. It is also a time to reflect back on God’s goodness over the years and an opportunity to assure others that God truly is faithful to His promises.
Billy Graham
He knows every hair on your head, and he sees every tear you shed.
Craig Groeschel
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald