Quotes by American Authors - Page 3315

You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I believe that we belittle survivors by assuming that they will fail.
Toni Bernhard
I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.
Harry Nilsson
She relaxed a bit—well, as much as one could relax while being half-naked and bleeding in front of a vampire. She was the picture of a tasty meal to one such as he.
Kiersten Fay
We girls are prewired to like things that make you suffer.
Victoria Scott
Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell.
Joe Bageant
I don't think a tough question is disrespectful.
Helen Thomas
To some extent, the direction of one's chosen path automatically selects for the paths that may cross it. A warriors path will intersect the paths of other warriors, allies and enemies alike. A workers path will interest the paths of other workers.But as with games of cards and dice, sometimes unexpected crossings occur. Some are driven by chance, others by design, others by a change in one's goal.Some are driven by malice.Such manipulations can prove effective in the short term. But the longer-term consequences can be perilously difficult to predict.The path of Arihnda Pryce is one such example. A deep and perceptive study of it can serve as a valuable lesson.And as an even more valuable warning.
Timothy Zahn
He’s at the library, I think. Safe and sound in his world of books... Maybe he’ll write one someday.
Lurlene McDaniel
I thought we were perfect for each other.""There's no such thing as perfect," Eli commiserated.
Rachel Higginson
Bitch (noun): A woman who won't bang her head against the wall obsessing over someone else's opinion - be it a man or anyone else in her life. She understands that if someone does not approve of her, it's just one person's opinion; therefore, it's of no real importance. She doesn't try to live up to anyone else's standards - only her own. Because of this, she relates to a man very differently.
Sherry Argov
When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It's all a matter of perspective.
Harvey MacKay
No,” he muttered, running a hand through his copper hair. “No. No. There are dozens.”“Kell?” she asked, moving to touch his arm.He shook her off. “Dozens of ships, Lila! And you had to climb aboard his.”“I’m sorry,” she shot back, bristling, “I was under the impression that I was free to do as I pleased.”“To be fair,” added Alucard, “I think she was planning to steal it and slit my throat.”“Then why didn’t you?” snarled Kell, spinning on her. “You’re always so eager to slash and stab, why couldn’t you have stabbed him?
V.E. Schwab
She averted his eyes, but not before he recognized the pain in them, a tormented and languished gaze, a stare preserved for people who were able to love deeply enough that they could be destroyed by it.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.
Mary E. Pearson
Nobody can go back to how it was. The dust bowl dried us all up bitter as seeds and spat us out all over the land and none of us yet has taken root.
Katherine Longshore
God’s genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime. ... I would make something happen.
Louis L'Amour
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.
Carl Sagan
You and me? We are never going to be just friends. The only time I'm not adoring you is when I am too busy hating you and wishing to God I never met you...
Thomm Quackenbush
If someone hates you, secretly they are admiring you. They deserve you love and not your hate.
Debasish Mridha
Satan impregnated my mother one lovely spring morning. We didn’t have the heart to tell my father.
Holly Hood
Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue."But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?""It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting...
Robin Sloan
All human beings wield influence—a powerful sword granted at birth. Wield your sword with care.
Richelle E. Goodrich
My goal tonight is to maintain a steady stream of invincibility. If I hit stage four—“I’m Invisible”—I’ll likely pass out, and that would ruin all my fun.
Kendall Grey
Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.
Hunter S. Thompson
from Taking Your Clothes to the Salvation Army:Okay, so strangers will be grateful for this, will wear the socks to keep their feet warm, blow their noses in your handkerchiefs, pull up the shorts, tuck in the size large shirts (too small for our boys, too big for our daughter), and bits of you will be out there, engaging in a life you no longer have.
Jane Yolen
It does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants
Louisa May Alcott
You need some coffee, don't you?""Yes, I've only had a gallon.
John Grisham
Yes. But I let you leave again, last year after you were crowned. And all those nights I brought you to Wonderland in your dreams, even though it pained me for you to abandon our dreamscapes and return to the mortal realm, I let you go each morning to live your reality there. It may not seem much when compared to your mortal’s gallantry. But for me—self-seeking, arrogant prig that I am—that is the sincerest form of sacrifice. Letting you go. Do you not see that?
A.G. Howard
It was as if some great ocean of destruction had rolled its unyielding tide through the city and then, upon its terrible recession, left behind only a shoreline of concrete sand and crushed humanity.
Jay Posey
Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. "The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Isn't it funny how we live inside the lies we believe?
A.S. King
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.
John Updike
He flashed a grin over his shoulder at me. "Ready to be astounded?"I eyed him. "You're not going to drop your trousers and demand I admire your gorgeous testicles, are you?""Not after you disparaged their beauty.
Katie MacAlister
We weren't really friends yet, just knowers of each other's secret stuff.
M. Beth Bloom
Speak for yourself. Only rank ignorance measures a man by appearances.
Janny Wurts
We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.
Lemony Snicket
They got under each of my shoulders and pulled me up, Padma walking in front of me and holding her arms out for good measure. I walked on my own, but I knew that if they hadn’t been there, I might have fallen more than once. Side by side, we marched into the Ocean, all of us crying for
Kiera Cass
Every morning, whether I've slept or not, whether I've made it through the day without crying or given in and sobbed in the shower, where no one can hear me― the sun comes up, and I make my choice.
Robin York
Forgiveness does not come easily to us, especially when someone we have trusted betrays our trust. And yet if we do not learn to forgive, we will discover that we can never really rebuild trust.
Billy Graham
Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.
Rebecca Woolf
Here I was just thinking all these wonderful things about you and now you’re trying to strip down before we can have sex.”His hands casually held in the air, he explained, “I was hot.” “It’s seventy degrees in he
Devon Ashley
Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.
Jason Jennings
Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience.There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us.
Mary Pipher
Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do.
Lauren Groff
When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
Brené Brown
Justice? -- You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.
William Gaddis
Let's be honest. Sometimes art is dangerous, though. And that's why governments sometimes get nervous about art. But one of the things I truly believe is if you try to suppress the arts, then I think you are suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of the people.
Barack Obama
Those who really can receive bread from a stranger and smile in gratitude, can feed many without even realizing it. Those who can sit in silence with their fellow man not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief, and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart, can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The awkwardness of getting reward in a well-off society is that the creation of appetite often requires undoing the work of satisfying appetite.
George Ainslie
No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.
Thomas Jefferson
For linear-thinking companies, the six Ds of exponentials are the six horsemen of the apocalypse—no question about it.
Peter H. Diamandis
Follow your passion? Sure...but for most one needs to follow their passion after work and on weekends.
Bobby Darnell
You are stronger than me," Asa says. "And in bravery and strength, there is a kind of beauty.
Matthew J. Kirby
Newt shook his head, his face a mixture of anger and awe. “What you did was half brave and half bloody stupid. Seems like you’re pretty good at that.
James Dashner
Only you can see what your mind is prepared to see.
Debasish Mridha
Bad ages to live through are good ages to learn from.
Eugen Weber
Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. 'So that's what it's like!' he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it.The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn't afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.Next he went through his pockets, thinking he'd be helping to identify him.The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; he'd left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he'd paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life - death - was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt. ("Dusk To Dawn")
Cornell Woolrich