Quotes by American Authors - Page 331

Driving your car through deep pools of flood water is a great way of making your car unreliable. Smart people turn around and avoid it.
Steven Magee
Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.
James Purdy
Communism in AmericaIn the early 1920’s, fascism was undermining all vestiges of democracy in Europe and dictatorships were prevalent in most Latin American countries. Therefore, communism was considered by many as the best alternative for the working masses, and was embraced by many scholars, artists and authors, as a viable alternative form of political thinking. Many people in the Hollywood film industry became members of the “Communist Party of America,” or at least they agreed with the communistic views and became what was called “fellow travelers.” The Communist Party meetings were where people of like mind could gather and share ideas, as well as help each other with their budding careers. The United States Government had other ideas and some of the most serious attacks on personal rights took place during these early years. Constitutional rights were thrown out of the window as some government officials took unlawful actions against foreign immigrants and labor leaders. Being more tolerant politically, Mexico attracted many Americans who felt persecuted in the United States. Heading south of the border was a geographic cure that many of them embraced.
Hank Bracker
While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation.
Rachel Held Evans
Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.
Aberjhani
We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.
Raquel Welch
Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year's experience repeated 20 times. (Stephen M R Covey to Richie Norton when Norton asked if he was too young to train older executives for Covey.)
Richie Norton
I made the first cut razor thin. A gentle kiss on virgin skin.
Madeleine Kuderick
the light too brief to finish any work —the woman seeks to amplify the dark
Leatha Kendrick
Seriously, who curses you with their dying breath and says, I hope your eye twitches!
Rick Riordan
Life gets easier when you are ready to face the stress and storms of life.
Debasish Mridha
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
Daniel Kahneman
You can't make a difference unless you are different.
Chris Hodges
Math is a very peculiar thing, for in it all numbers have a double but not all have halves.
Willa Valentine
Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer.
Chris Hedges
It’s one thing to be an undead fiend of darkness, but it takes an immense amount of work to look cool while doing it.
Garon Whited
Kindness is the greatest love,it is the healing touch,it is the light of our soul,it is a message from the heart.
Debasish Mridha
Surprise is where creativity comes in.
Ray Bradbury
I am fallen, flawed and imperfect. Yet drenched in the grace and mercy that is found in Jesus Christ, there is strength
Adam Young
Were you born this infuriating?""It's taken me years of practice.
Misty Massey
But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
Dennis Lehane
Nurturing, Providing, and loving you passionately. May that be, my number of responsibilities. As one to the end, forever more. That's how long I desire, our love to last for. Providing for you many and joyful memories. In hours of darkness, as well as brightness. I plan to supply for you. For your love for me and happiness, is all that matters to me.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Family was very important to us. It was one of the only things we had, and what kept up grounded. Some of the best times we had were the times when we were all together. It didn't matter what we were doing. During the holidays or just on a weekend afternoon, the whole point was just being together. There doesn't seem to be as much of that going on today. People are so busy. But family is everything.
Clara Cannucciari
And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.
Nicholaus Patnaude
The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that.
Krista Tippett
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the hottest bitch of all?
Sara Humphreys
Marry me, Lada. It is the perfect solution." Lada laughed. Mehmed's smile grew, until he realized her laugh was not a sweet breeze of delight, but a brutal desert wind carrying stinging sand in its wake. "I will never marry.
Kiersten White
You will be your best self when you take time to understand what you really need, feel, think and want.
Deborah Day
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I guess that’s how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news.”“I’m sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone … outside my life. Get it out of myhead, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe.”She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes.“I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed?
Julia Glass
Misdirection. False signals. Spreading confusion. This is the Tao of deception.
David Ignatius
I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do?
Jack Kerouac
How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?
David "Doc" Luben
Luckily, common sense had never been a strong suit of mine and my feet moved faster than my brain.
Katherine McIntyre
What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.
Ruth Ozeki
Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.
Anne Rice
Postpone facing a fear and it's sure to grow bigger with each passing day
Jennifer Archer
Other inflationists realize very well that an increase in the quantity of money reduces the purchasing power of the monetary unit. But they endeavour to secure inflation none-the-less, because of its effect on the value of money; they want depreciation, because they want to favour debtors at the expense of creditors and because they want to encourage exportation and make importation difficult.
Ludwig von Mises
It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
I have my booksAnd my poetry to protect me;I am shielded in my armor,Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.I touch no one and no one touches me.I am a rock,I am an island.
Paul Simon
Rarely do I truly understand the disease which ails me. Therefore, rarely do I truly understand the fix that would cure me. And so maybe I should truly contemplate how rarely I recognize that God understands both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
Sherman Alexie
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The best way to develop people is to constantly get them out of their comfort zone.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Seek not outside yourself heaven is within.
Mary Lou Cook
Every time you ask for forgiveness, you recognize that the biggest problems you face in life exist inside of you, not outside of you.
Paul David Tripp
Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.
Betty Smith
Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.
Bryant McGill
People must come to the understanding that they do not have a fixed identity. They have the power to identify and alter features of their personalities that they find negative or unpleasant.
Lisa Firestone
Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.
Jed McKenna
Personally, I like to imagine the Godhead dancing it a rhythm of its own, something even grander than a waltz, touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, and hearing, creating wonder after wonder, and when it's finished, looking upon the handiwork and saying, "This is great!
Lisa Samson
If you don’t have a teacher, don’t worry. Learn by observing the best teacher which is nature.
Debasish Mridha
What does it mean to be alive?
Debasish Mridha
I know betrayal can unravel a man. I learned early on from watching my parents that men are capable of doing terrible things to women when they feel deceived. When the bubble of trust and honesty bursts, nothing is off-limits.
Sadeqa Johnson
Falling in love doesn't always lead to heartbreak, honey. With the right man, it can be a one-way ticket to paradise.
Catherine Anderson
Wake up. Be thankful. For whatever happens on this day, you are endlessly given the chance to start again-to be alive. And all of us should wish for that.
Carew Papritz
Man has naturally and universally a capacity for religion—and not only a capacity, for the vast majority of the human race practices or professes some form of religion.
Billy Graham
Beyond the clumsy, brute force tools of will, determination and hard work — and free from the heavy attachment of want, and the illusions of burden and blocks, is the true technology of creation through beingness.
Bryant McGill
In our desire to achieve success quickly it is easy to get our values mixed up and call evil good and good evil.
Billy Graham