Quotes by American Authors - Page 332

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
Jim Bishop
Not everything.” Lily takes a deep breath and begins to pace the room. “Not everything, because you aren’t. It may feel like you are, and I totally get it, I really do. The world feels like it’s crumbling around you, and it makes you feel like you’re broken too, but, Jules, you aren’t. You are more than this, you’re more than this, this- stupid planet, this stupid country. They’re reacting to what they think you are, but it doesn’t make it true.” She preaches like it hurts her, and I recognize in the back of my mind that this is what she hasn’t told herself yet. And still she offers it to me.
Pega Rose
It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.("For The Rest Of Her Life")
Cornell Woolrich
The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
Erich Maria Remarque
No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.
David Darling
The voice blurs and fades, like a faint cry riding on the tails of the wind. I yawn and stretch, rolling over. I fold my pillow under my head and wait for the voice to return. When I hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing I allow myself to drift back into a dreamless slumber.
Lauren Hammond
Music is healing and soothing. It is the universal language of kindness and love.
Debasish Mridha
I don't know how it got to this, but I'm in a war. There's no chance for diplomacy. They want me dead and I don't think I can run from this. Not after what they've done to me. So if this is a war, then I'm going to take the fight to them. I'll raid their lair and I'll kill as many as I can. There seem to be endless numbers of them, but they've got to have a limit. Tonight we'll find out if there are more of them than there is fight in me.
Dennis Liggio
Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next...
David Abram
The role of godly parents is to make sure that the hearts and minds of their children are saturated with the Word of God.
Elizabeth George
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.
Verlyn Klinkenborg
The principal furniture in Billie's mind was a good-sized bed.
Budd Schulberg
One boy's a boy two boys are half a boy three boys are no boy at all.
Charles A. Lindbergh
If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.
Allan G. Johnson
Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.
Robin McKinley
George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: “Yes, this will do”. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving… me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha… Sad, sad, sad.
Edward Albee
Praying without gratitude, first, is more like complaining.
Charles F. Glassman
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
Chris Hedges
The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and when the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird’s wing beating, the world seems unreal.
Bernard Cornwell
A new star shines bright.Angels herald the good news.The Christ child is born.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Miracles need people as much as people need miracles.
Amy Neftzger
We have a right to decide how we want our bodies to look and feel, but unfortunately we do not exercise these rights. Instead, we tend to drift along, victims of our own ignorance of the fact that we can have what we want, if we are willing to take that first step toward developing the self-discipline to govern our thoughts.
Holly Mosier
Life was radical right after I met the monster.Later, life became harder, complicated.Ultimately, a living hell, like swimming against a riptide,Walking the wrong direction in the fast lane of the freeway, Waking from sweetest dreams to find yourself in the middle of a nightmare.
Ellen Hopkins
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Daniel Kahneman
But that’s what family is, isn't it? It’s traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It’s all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it.
Seanan McGuire
To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn't, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.
Howard Schultz
Life is an eternal journey in search of beauty.
Debasish Mridha
Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always the ones we actually believe. The theories we live are the ones we really believe.
R.C. Sproul
Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.
Fulton J. Sheen
The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.
Holly Black
Where there are two on point of independently distinguished purposes, you will find one infinite journey whose path is blazed with the guiding light of wisdom.
T.F. Hodge
God is great and God is good," Lisa says. "But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?
Suzanne Finnamore
Of all things we mortals are called upon to do, the most difficult is forgiveness; in order to truly do it, you will probably have to behave as if you already have forgiven for quite a while before you have actually done so.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
When you give away everything without expecting anything in return, only then will everything belong to you.
Debasish Mridha
Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I can turn into anything," he said with emphasis. "Even another werewolf." When Daisy blinked back at him, too dumbfounded to speak, Talent laughed, heartily. She'd been correct. He was devastating when he truly smiled. "Haven't you learned, woman? You've fallen off the map. Here there be monsters.
Kristen Callihan
For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.
R.C. Sproul
She wanted him, but she didn't want to want him.
Sara Humphreys
That's it, Uncle Huey!" Imogene Duckworthy whipped off her apron and flung it onto the slick, stainless steel counter. "I quit!" If only her voice didn’t sound so young.
Kaye George
The past is a place of learning, not a place of living.
Roy T. Bennett
Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
Richard Bach
Clarence Hurt was driving, and he got lost. “Does anyone know where the Post Office Building is?” Hurt asked at one point. “I can tell you,” Karpis said. “How do you know where it is?” asked Clyde Tolson, who sat in the backseat with Hoover. “We were thinking of robbing it,” Karpis said.
Bryan Burrough
Cheap jewelry, however, is worse than no jewelry at all, and there are very few things in life than are worse than no jewelry at all.
Jill Conner Browne
We often use the Bible as a source for personal validation and defense, a sidekick and a shield, but these will prove ineffective without first the other part. We must also allow ourselves to be wounded by it. We tend to forget its authority - that it is a double-edged sword. Our decrepit, depraved hearts must be completely ripped out in order to welcome that of God.
Criss Jami
My father's a large man, very strong, but he says fighting is for people who can't win with their brains. He also says there are times when you've got no choice but to defend yourself from common morons.
Carl Hiaasen
An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
William James
I died for beauty but was scarceAdjusted in the tomb,When one who died for truth was lainIn an adjoining room.He questioned softly why I failed?"For beauty," I replied."And I for truth, the two are one;We brethren are," he said.And so, as kinsmen met a night,We talked between the rooms,Until the moss had reached our lips,And covered up our names.
Emily Dickinson
How can I expect to get anything done around here with you touching me like that?
Faith Sullivan
All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
...his soul (was) ringing like a well-struck bell. But it was a bell that rang with more than joy and adoration — there was the sound there too of anger and resentment. She would not look at him because she did not want to be in his presence. She hated him and he (how could he not?) hated her in return.
Paul Hoffman
God's justice will always be found at the end of a pen.
Shannon L. Alder
I haven't devoured a soul in...What month is this? March?
Rick Riordan
It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.
Justin Cronin
...You're worried that you're going to go out of here and mess up your lines or trip on your high heels, but you're not. You're going to blow them away, just like you always do. You're a woman who knows what she wants, and you know how to get it. You're going to be the most, Margo, to say the least.
Laura Lascarso
That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.
Connie Willis
If you want to know the one thing that will allow you to grow faster than anything else, it is the belief that you may be wrong about absolutely everything you believe. When you can question your beliefs at every possible turn, your opportunities for growth expand exponentially.
Kelle Sparta
He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.
Robert A. Heinlein
Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy
Joseph Heller
Men write Bibles. God doesn't. God writes in stars and worlds and seasons and Hudson Rivers and beautiful women. Creation is the good book.
Mark Siegel
Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.
Ben Lerner