Quotes by American Authors - Page 3234

Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.Or insanity.
Richard Kadrey
Satan perverts everything good by mimicking and mocking the real thing.
Billy Graham
I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not normally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jewller's box and found inside a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own. "Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased.
Laurie R. King
If it doesn't sweat, jiggle, or pant, it's not alive.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe.
Elizabeth Gilbert
MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.
Hillary DePiano
Aurora looked into the mirror and smiled. She was pretty. She was a royal princess. There was about to be a ball. These were things she could, once in a while, allow herself to be happy about.
Liz Braswell
I want you to spend the night,” you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, “Let’s have sex,” or “Let’s go to my place,” or even “I really want you,” I’m not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it with you.
David Levithan
A good leader is one who reveals to you your own potential and then inspires and shows you how to reach your potential.
Debasish Mridha
If I really wanted to say or ask anything important (to her imposing father) I could not trust my tongue to get it right.
Lynne Olson
Courage is not fearlessness.
Shannon Hale
White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Czechs simply don’t say they’re going camping or spending time outdoors. They say, in Czech, that they are going “into the nature” as though nature, příroda, is beyond a place in the woods or other forms of terrain, that nature was a state of mind and had the ability to reverse the crippling, chaotic aspects of life.
M.B. Dallocchio
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Ray Bradbury
To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.
Tom Clancy
Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
I yearn not for the easy path, but for the right path.  For 'easy' and 'right' are rarely compatible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A present reality, experienced in this life that begins in you, is known as; the kingdom of God.
Stacy Snapp-Killian aka StacyK
But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.
Maud Hart Lovelace
The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I’ve ever seen for fireworks… I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I’ve had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that’s why I wanted to head here this time. I know it’s ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago—angels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth—everything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we’ve already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we’d remember it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing with this whole trip—looking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn’t that the damnedest, craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)
Michael Zadoorian
Six years of dreams would end in eternal love, or an eternity of loss.
Michelle Hughes
The fortunate is he whose earnest purpose never swerves,Whose slightest action or inaction servesThe one great aim.Why, even Death stands still, And waits an hour sometimesFor such a will.
Ella Wilcox Wheeler
practice makes better
Brian Lies
It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather.
Ally Condie
People who leave Washington D.C. do so by way of the box - ballot or coffin.
Claiborne Pell
The purest regret, no matter what, is thinking you didn't love enough.
Criss Jami
This is a love story, Michael Deane says. But, really, what isn’t? Doesn’t the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk just as the Housewives live for catching glimpses of their own Botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors, and the rocked-out dude on ‘roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on Hookbook, and because this is reality, they are all in love—madly, truly—with the body mic clipped to their back buckle, and the producer casually suggesting just one more angle, one more Jell-O shot. And the robot loves his master, alien loves his saucer, Superman loves Lois, Lex, and Lana, Luke love Leia (till he finds out she’s his sister), and the exorcist loves the demon even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace, as Leo loves Kate and they both love the sinking ship, and the shark—God, the shark loves to eat, which is what the Mafioso loves, too—eating and money and Paulie and omerta` --the way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar, and sometimes loves the other cowboy, as the vampire loves night and neck, and the zombie—don’t even start with the zombie, sentimental fool; has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? This, too, is a love story.
Jess Walter
he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.
David Levithan
Contentment sounds ideal; and ignorance is bliss! But what remains of truth, justice and liberty? Why can millions of parent do what I did, and not give the law a consideration? Why do I have to suffer the losses of divorce—the pain and sorrow so accompanied the plight of once-parent, now non-custodial? So much more could be preceded by “why”—so as to leave nothing more. To speak, or think, of these many questions is to sound like I’m whining. But I am whining, about why….
H. Kirk Rainer
Few have heard of Fra Luca Parioli the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping but he has probably had more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.
Herbert J. Muller
Ideology is the light that creates darkness.
Robert Boswell
The more you smile, the more reasons you will find to smile.
Debasish Mridha
According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain.As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen.The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference.The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed.Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence.So why does Daniel feel like something more?
Nicola Yoon
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
Helen Keller
When you listen to G. T. Stoop, you understand the importance of being a honorable person, you get charged to fight for the truth, you get angry that so many politicians are playing games with people's trust.
Joan Bauer
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
Bill Bryson
The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.
Nathaniel Branden
Lord I submit my body to You. Help me to be disciplined in the way I care for it. Help me to choose health-filled and life-giving foods and be able to resist eating what I should not have. Enable me to make the right choices with regard to what I eat.
Stormie Omartian
We were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, "I can't follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment's passed.
Anne Rice
...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.
Hubert Selby Jr.
In summer, a soothing warm breeze on a beach is the most soothing music for the soul.
Debasish Mridha
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
…in silence learned the sweet solace which affection administers to sorrow.
Louisa May Alcott
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
Robert Pirosh
And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Yor great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love
Jonathan Safran Foer
I never gave him a chance to decide if I was worth loving. I'd taken that choice away from him - because I feared what it would be.
Rebecca Donovan
We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.
Marilynne Robinson
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.
Erich Fromm
The greatest obstacle to success is the fear of failure.
Debasish Mridha
There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.
Joanna Russ
There comes a moment in our lives when some of the pieces of the puzzle come together - where all our past experiences, both good and bad, are brought to bear in causing us to become who God intends us to be.
Michael Card
God wasn't love, couldn't be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.
Ellen Hopkins
I many times thought peace had come,tWhen peace was far away;tAs wrecked men deem they sight the landtAt centre of the sea,tAnd struggle slacker, but to prove,t As hopelessly as I,tHow many the fictitious shorestBefore the harbor lie.
Emily Dickinson
Eating disorder recovery becomes possible when you keep making the next right decision over and over. With time, these decisions become automatic.
Brittany Burgunder
Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
Bernie S. Siegel
The world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him
Dwight L. Moody
When a child keeps asking you to tell him/her a story, what they instinctively really want to know is their true purpose and mission in life. Sadly, this knowledge was never sought out by their parents, and explains why children's books are a very hot and lucrative industry. Instead of telling your child how to become a compassionate citizen of the world, or how to live a meaningful existence by being a positive asset to humanity, you are conditioned by society to simply read your kid a fairytale.
Suzy Kassem
When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can become a lose-lose situation: if we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all.
Sheena Iyengar
You will never be a leader in any area of your life if you are not a reader in those areas of life.
Jim George
The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we’ll gladly let everything else go to possess Him.
J.D. Greear