Quotes by American Authors - Page 3303

Work/life balance is not about escaping work. It’s about living exactly the way you want to when you’re at work.
Stan Slap
Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
No life is messier than one in ministry
Jerry B. Jenkins
I don't do what I'm told, but I might do what you want if you ask me nicely.
Cassandra Clare
Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society — national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera — that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission.
James Alexander Thom
O my love! In this loveless world, you are my world.
Debasish Mridha
It is curious why anybody should pooh-pooh a study of fossils or various forms of rocks or lava. Such things grant us our only vision into Natural History’s big book; and it isn't a book in first-class condition. Far from it! Just a tiny scrap; a slip; or, possibly a big chunk is found, with nothing notifying us as to how it got to that particular point, nor how long ago. Man can only look at it, lift it, rap it, cut into it, and squint at it through a magnifying glass. And,— think about it. That’s all; until a formal study brings accompanying thoughts from many minds; and, by such tactics, judging that in all probability such and such a rock or fossil footprint is about so old. Natural History holds you in its grasp through just this impossibility of finding actual facts; for it is thus causing you to think. Now, thinking is not only a voluntary function; it is an acquisition; an art. Plants do not think. Animals probably do, but in a primary way, such as an aid in knowing poisonous foods, and how to bring up an offspring with similar ability. But Man can, and should think, and think hard and constantly. It is ridiculous to rush blindly into an action without looking forward to lay out a plan. Such an unthinking custom is almost a panic, and panic is but a mild form of insanity
Ernest Vincent Wright
A flower cannot be more beautiful than your thoughts.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
Across the rectory's east lawn, through a blizzard of flying leaves, something long and thin was flapping in the wind. A ragged figure in a white nightgown hanging lifelessly from the trees.
Cash Peters
According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.
John Irving
Today I am in control because I want to be. I have my fingers on the switch, but have lived a lifetime ignoring the control I have over my own world. Today is different.
A.S. King
Let the warning of the tyrants of the past be recognized for it shall be the same one ringing out when the tyrants of the present are unleashed.
Sai Marie Johnson
The effects you will have on your students are infinite and currently unknown; you will possibly shape the way they proceed in their careers, the way they will vote, the way they will behave as partners and spouses, the way they will raise their kids.
Donna Quesada
Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
Dennis Lehane
Self-improvement and practice are the golden tools for earning the award of excellence.
Mark F. LaMoure
But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.
Lauren Oliver
For many years, I searched for this connection outside of myself but always to no avail. It was only when I turned inward did I find this power.
David W. Earle
The call of community isn't about finding people just like us, or at the exclusion of any people. Community in the biblical sense is clearly about unlike people finding Christ at the center of their inclusive life together. Thus, issues of community reflect powerful dynamics of how God brings very diverse people together for his glory and his witness in the world.
Hugh Halter & Matt Smay
I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?
Nicholas Sparks
Half of what we do depends on how smart we are, the other half depends upon how we do it
James E. Brown Jr.
Twists, turns, virgins and bad boys. I love a good YA read. Do you?
Jennifer Bardsley
And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.
Mark Doty
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
Arthur Golden
Vyck had often encouraged him to engage an opponent's mind rather than its weapons. often this advice was accompanied by the casual remark that if he couldn't outwit a fox he shouldn't be in the woods.
Gwendolyn Druyor
Savannah’s breath caught in her chest at the realization of how close they were standing. He brushed a strand of hair off her face, his finger leaving a line of heat across her cheek. If they hadn’t been surrounded by people, she would have thought he was about to kiss her. Or maybe he was about to kiss her. Right here, in front of everyone.
Michelle Madow
I may have been in stage four, but I wasn’t completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out.
Richard Engel
Love, in short is the most dangerous emotion human can experience
V.C. Andrews
Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
George Washington
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
Benjamin Franklin
Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
Amy Tan
Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Wernher von Braun
Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before.
Wendell Berry
The old idea, or rather the old prejudice, that women are protected by men was so deeply ingrained in that society that they overlooked what was the most obvious, that is, that the weakest and the disadvantaged are the most exposed.
Ruth Klüger
The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.
Richard Nelson
But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like a dark, dark ink.
Lemony Snicket
It’s an act of our will to choose to see people simply as wildly loved by God, to assume their beauty before guessing their depravity.
Mary E. DeMuth
Life is not only merriment,It is desire and determination.
Kahlil Gibran
People are always waiting around for that magical person who’ll walk into their life and fix them, who’ll offer up some vital piece they’ve been missing and make them complete. They spend years trying to fit their broken edges against another person’s and call themselves whole and healed. The only problem with this, of course, is that expecting anyone else to fix you is an unequivocal disaster.You can't wait for a man to come around and put you back together. You have to put yourself back together first, and become the kind of woman who deserves a good man.
Julie Johnson
Some people dream of success, others stay awake to achieve it.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Ray Bradbury
Every marriage that ends in divorce; every serviceman who kills him- or herself; and every time a young warrior experience substance abuse issues, we witness a casualty of war.
Jay Kopelman
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
Terence McKenna
Even not choosing is a choice.
Denise Grover Swank
We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on,
Orson Scott Card
It was Christmas Eve. Big snowflakes fluttered slowly through the air like white feathers and made all of the Heavenly Valley smooth and white and quiet and beautiful.Tall fir trees stood up to their knees in snow and their outstretched hands were heaped with it. Those that were bare of leaves wore soft white fur on their scrawny, reaching arms and all the stumps and low bushes had been turned into fat white cupcakes.
Betty MacDonald
Old school mission statements defined what an organization did. Contemporary mission statements define why an organization does what it does.
Del Suggs
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
Mark Twain
We all want to feel like the most beautiful girl in the room, to be chosen and loved forever. The Cinderella story gives us hope of our impossible dreams becoming true.
Beth Moore Jones
The lower a human being descends, the more asleep and inhumane he becomes. Those beings that lack Compassion, Love, and Peace are the true targets of the ego system...
Jacqueline Ripstein
It was then that we connected. His sound bounced through my head and out my eyes, painting my world with new shades of color. I still remember the smile that unnoticeably took my face as I inched for another touch.
Charles Lee
Equal opportunity is good but special privilege even better.
Anna Chennault
Nothing made sense. Every decision felt wrong. Every direction I looked led down a path I was unaware about. For years I have worked toward one goal, stayed focused on one place I wanted to get. But now that goal felt like it wasn't quite right.
Nichole Chase
Future strong is as focused on the success of every individual as it is on organizational success — creating an environment where people can achieve their dreams and full potential.
Bill Jensen
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?
Stephen King
I ask for a decreedooming my bitter enemies to laughteradvanced against them.
John Berryman
We are all just humans trying to survive in this crazy world, in the spaces between birth and death.
Melody Lee
I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.
Joyce Carol Oates
Faith is never blind when others see it in our actions.
Charles F. Glassman
Forgiving someone else doesn't give them a free pass. It gives you a free pass to move on.
Charles F. Glassman