Quotes by American Authors - Page 3280

Act according to your capacity.
Debasish Mridha
I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.
Shirley Jackson
An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.
Bryant McGill
You’re only as happy as your least happy child,’ is the best description of motherhood I have ever read.
Sarah Payne Stuart
Sensual indulgence weakens the mind and debases the soul. The moral and intellectual powers are benumbed and paralyzed by the gratification of the animal propensities and it is impossible for the slave of passion to realize the sacred obligation of the Law of God, to appreciate the atonement, or to place right value upon the soul.
Ellen G. White
Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own.
Gina Greenlee
I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Pressure knocks at my doorA clock ticks and demands its dueThe lava burns from the floorBut not in a game like it used to.So little time to figure it all outSo many distractions to prevent successI’m in a dark forest with no path or routeBut this internal fire knows no rest.
Justin Wetch
He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)
David R. Slavitt
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
Love is a poison,' her father responded. 'One you grow accustomed to, but does not kill you.
Janell Rhiannon
A lie is nothing more than the truth told in reverse
Arthur C. Buckner
As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid.
Aberjhani
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Edward L. Bernays
They are faithful, even if we are not.
Ashlee Willis
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.
Toni Cade Bambara
When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.
Bell Hooks
But I don't care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don't think they're real or important or you think that we'll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that's not really my business. I can't tell you what's real for you. But in return, you can't say what's real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.
Patrick Ness
One of the obstacles to recognizing chronic mistreatment in relationships is that most abusive men simply don’t seem like abusers. They have many good qualities, including times of kindness, warmth, and humor, especially in the early period of a relationship. An abuser’s friends may think the world of him. He may have a successful work life and have no problems with drugs or alcohol. He may simply not fit anyone’s image of a cruel or intimidating person. So when a woman feels her relationship spinning out of control, it is unlikely to occur to her that her partner is an abuser.
Lundy Bancroft
...when a wife wouldn't testify, little punishment was meted out. Alex came to understand that only those who pressed charges ever became truly free, because the life they were leading was a prison, even if most of them wouldn't admit it.
Nicholas Sparks
Once again, we come to the holiday season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
Dave Barry
I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to his or her fellow human beings.
Margaret Mead
All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants--and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.
Elizabeth Enright
Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.
Fern Schumer Chapman
As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine.
Noriko Nakada
When Johnny Depp saw it, he was so excited he fluffed up to twice his normal size.
Diane Messidoro
Well don't you know the sound of anger brings a dark result.And every insult is like a lightning bolt.
Third Eye Blind
(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another...the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.)That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.
M.F.K. Fisher
Hey listen, I already have a complete list of silver linings. It's the goddamn cloud that's killin me.
John L. Parker Jr.
Danny was the least of her worries. She had heard the people on the street and could see the headline now: “Pittsburgh Invaded by Vampires.”Oh fudge. Jack was so going to kill her.
Stacy McKitrick
Her eyes fluttered open. She was lying in Sylvain's lap, his arms tight around her. She reached up and touched his face wonderingly."Why are you crying?" she whispered.He didn't answer. Instead he rocked her like a baby, his face in her hair. Listening to her breathe.
C.J. Daugherty
So now George has arrived. He is not nervous inthe least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now—an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line: "Good morning!" And the three secretaries—each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style—recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply "Good morning!" to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)
Christopher Isherwood
If you ever want to remember anything, tell it to a child.
Charmaine J.Forde
After mutual respect and understanding are achieved, it is possible to establish real, sincere relationships, which is the foundation of a solid long-term collaboration.
Ron Garan
Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.
Orson Scott Card
They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience—and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?""What kind of experience?”“Well—places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak—but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier—and that’s a fact.”“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”“Much, much sillier.”“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to—if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it—then it can be kind of marvelous.
Christopher Isherwood
Spent my whole life,” Morganith went on, staring miserably into her drink, “thinkin’ that out there somewhere was ah woman who would love me incredibly and I would love her incredibly. Like ah fire consumin’ the very air. Then I meet her, and she leaves me.” Morganith snapped her fingers lazily. “Just like that.
Ash Gray
There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.
Frank McCourt
Through science, she could reach anyone at anytime around the world, but no one seemed to know what to say.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.
Donald Miller
A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.
Jim Harrison
The disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, tell of a dream he had. In the dream, the very incarnation of the Evil Impulse appears in the form of a sinister heart. The Baal Shem Tov seizes the heart and pounds it furiously. He would destroy evil and redeem the world. As he pummels it, he hears an infant’s sobbing emitted from the heart. He stops beating it. In the midst of evil is a voice of innocence; there is goodness entangled in evil.
Harold M. Schulweis
Love's the sonstood stammering elocutionwhile the poor ship in flames went down
Elizabeth Bishop
A positive attitude will help you be more inspiring and motivating to others.
Susan C.Young
Don't ever let someone tell you the value you don't have, in order to be in someone's life. That is often the value they feel you have, not that person.
Shannon L. Alder
Oh, dear God and baby Jesus in the manger, my eyes!” Dee shrieked. “My eyes!
Jennifer L. Armentrout
Man’s nature and destiny are revealed in the Scriptures.
Billy Graham
Parenting the outside of the child is as useless as polishing a rotten apple.
Benjamin Lotter
Angels and demons are shaped by humans. Even god is shaped by humanity. Who you are has been codified by the humans around you… family, friends, and even enemies.
Ben Tousey
At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When you choose to forgive the same people over and over again you do so because you don't want to believe your time loving them was wasted. Bad relationships over time can become investments, that are hard to let go of. The key to freedom is to realize that love is never wasted. The only thing wasted in life is the time you spend focusing on an unhappy situation that will never change to fit your needs, and not realizing the true investment of time and love are the lessons God wanted you to learn.
Shannon L. Alder
There are times in every commander's life when he must yield the stick of authority to a subordinate.Sometimes the reason is one of expertise, when the subordinate has skills the commander lacks. Sometimes it is positional, when the subordinate is in the right place at the right and the commander is not. Often it is anticipated there will be loss of direct communication, which means the subordinate may be given general instructions but must then carry them out on his own initiative as the situation flows around him.No commander enjoys those moments. Most subordinates fear them, as well. Those who do no fear already betray the overconfidence that nearly always leads to disaster.But the moments must be faced. And all will learn from them, whether to satisfaction or to sorrow.
Timothy Zahn
I have never tried to walk through a mall in the Christmas season dressed like a jolly old elf. You might as well dress up like a pork chop and walk into an alley full of starving dogs.
Thomm Quackenbush
Maybe your mind won't remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.
Erica Bauermeister
It is only by risking ... that we live at all.
William James
I prefer men who don't fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them.
Ben Marcus
Your American fairytales end that way.  Real fairytales end in blood or tears.
Luna Lindsey
Never diagnosed the enemy before.
Henry V. O'Neil
My vision is to help each man, woman and child connect with their inherent psychic ability. I believe that each person has the potential to tap into their abilities and access them to empower their life and reach their full potential.
Sandy Anastasi