Quotes by American Authors - Page 3257

I just don't believe in wasting time. I see that all around me. People who live like they will be here forever. Using people, hating people, hating themselves, destroying the ones they love, destroying themselves. I believe in figuring out what you want and reaching out. And grabbing it. Is that so bad?
Lynetta Halat
Tears are the safety value of the heart when too much pressure is laid on it .
Albert Smith
I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.
David Leavitt
We're supposed to love flowers, yet we rip them from their homes, and give them to people who don't love us."-Toril Withers (Dark Winter).
John Hennessy
I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren’t drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.
James M. Cain
Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?""I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.
Cassandra Clare
He gaped at her. "You want me to wear it?"t"Yes. That's what a chain of diamond is for....Wear it. Wear it all the time, even when you sleep. I need you to wear it. I got it for you."t"You've had it for twenty years." At least.t"I was trying it on.
Erin Kellison
The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
Bella Abzug
Dream bigger before you can't remember to dream at all.
Ellen Hopkins
The man armed with knowledge has a better chance of survival than the man who is simply the fittest. Knowledge is the true strength. Muscle is where the myth is.
Suzy Kassem
She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hoping to inhale the odor of a werewolf, a csordásfarkas. As if his scent was a charm. She smelled nothing but hay burned by the afternoon sun.
Jody Shields
I’m begging you, for the love of all that’s filthy and wrong in this world, have a good time with tall, dark, and raspy, okay?
Terri L. Austin
We are to be generous not just in the results of our work, but also IN our work.
Matt Perman
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley
The more alien that you make your environment, the more likely it is that you will be sick.
Steven Magee
She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.
Evan S. Connell
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man's determination. -Tommy Lasorda
Tommy La Sorda
Each moment has an unrealized dimension of beauty that only your perspective can liberate.
Bryant McGill
Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.
Madeleine L'Engle
We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
Richard Marius
The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most important. And if each were to speak what it meant, they would say things so different you would not know it wa sthe same story they were speaking of.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.
Barbara Kingsolver
Men do with opportunities as children do at the seashore they fill their little hands with sand and then let the grains fall through one by one till all are gone.
T. Jones
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Ambrose Bierce
Being in a relationship doesn’t mean that you never get aroused by anything else ever again. It just means that you don’t act on it. I think it’s healthy to maintain the ability to be aroused in other situations. Relationships shouldn’t be a prison.You’d have gotten hard before, and you should now. As long as you know that the only person you’re going to be sliding your big hard cock in to, we’re fine. There really is a happy medium between the craziness of your parents with their compulsion to continue having sex with anyone they wanted, and couples who expect one another to be perfect at all times with the idea that no feelings of sexuality outside of the relationship are acceptable. Both of those types of relationships would never work for me. What’s perfect for me is that we stay ourselves, and make each other truly happy
Ella Fox
Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.
Pearl S. Buck
Your Temporary Santa, "He says presents aren't important, but I think they are- not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say 'I understand you.
David Levithan
Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.
Khaled Hosseini
I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If nightmares can come true, and sometimes they do... then so can our happiest dreams.
Emma Chase
The only way that we can protect each other is if we are together. If we face things together. If we trust each other.
Cassandra Clare
Where personal experience is concerned, we all speak a different language.
Marty Rubin
You know something? There are sandstorms that strip man and horse and bury them — I've seen them. I saw bones piled higher than my head for the folly of a bad king and those who wanted his throne. I lived through a blizzard that froze every other living creature solid. Against those things, you're only a man. I can deal with you.
Tamora Pierce
He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.
H.W. Brands
one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.
Herman Melville
A team that has character doesn't need stimulation.
Tom Landry
Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.
Rob E. Boley
You've always been skinny,always will." I can feeleachreclusivebonepoke through,the bones of Embarrassment,Anger,Relief.I push some back in,but leaveAngersticking out.
Thalia Chaltas
Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.
Alfred Korzybski
Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages, that was not secret.
Robert David Steele
Men are created different they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman
Once upon a time You dressed so fine
Bob Dylan
Her kiss was a good-bye and a promise and a dream.
Shannon A. Thompson
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.
Adyashanti
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from govern
William O. Douglas
Coachella is a festival fashion show where people dress up like hippies and pretend that Passion Pit is as good as the Rolling Stones.
Caroline Kepnes
Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.
Maxwell Perkins
Her idea of a romantic setting is one that has a diamond in it. If you feel the need to marry a doctor I suggest a dermatologist. Good hours free Retin-A.
Rita Rudner
Our toil is sweet with thankfulness Our burden is our boon The curse of earth's gray morning is The blessing of its noon.
John Greenleaf Whittier
They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
W.E.B. Du Bois
By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted sun.
H.P. Lovecraft
A pure democracy is generally a very bad government, It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.
Noah Webster
It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, ‘Thirteen inches in the Poconos.’‘Is that I porn film?’ I asked.
George Hodgman
I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?''Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.
Charles Bukowski
For the moment, everything had disappeared: the church, the battle, the screams and shouts and the rumble of limber wheels along the rutted road through Freehold. There wasn't anything but her and him, and he opened his eyes to look on her face, to fix it in his mind forever.
Diana Gabaldon
I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer’s imagination.
Pat Conroy
Did you ever think about boys?' I say, staring up into the dark. 'There wasn't room,' she whispers, and her voice is unbelievably sad. 'At first, after Connor, I was just waiting. I was going to get a new boyfriend soon- as soon as I was prettier or better, more perfect. But after a while there was no room for anything else. If I though about kissing or sex, I just started feeling ugly, too awful for anything good.
Brenna Yovanoff
I can always make up my mind better when there's a man around, because I know the thing to do is just the opposite to what he says.
Sophie Kerr
I cannot explain how two souls join. No man or element or god ever could. But you are tied to each other. Because of that—because of your true, consuming, pure love—you will thrive together . . . or you will perish together.“I don’t understand.” I swallowed, trying to make sense of it all.If he hadn’t heard your voice, he’d be fine. But once he aged, however many years from now that might come, you would have found yourself deteriorating then. Or if you had disobeyed Me so fully that I had to kill you, he’d have died in the same breath. You are tied through your souls. Now, what happens to one body happens to the other. And since your voice has taken hold of him, killing him slowly, you fall down with him. Slower, of course, as you are still Mine. But it will consume you eventually, all the same.
Kiera Cass
Every person, I have come to believe, has a moment or a place in life when all four points of the compass converge, from when or where their life finally takes--for better or for worse--its fated course.
Peter Geye