Quotes by American Authors - Page 3330

Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
John Cheever
How much Romance do you like in your Fantasy? And, respectively, how much Questing do you like in your Romance?
Paula Millhouse
I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
Howard Zinn
There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them?
Mark Dunn
It is a tremendous gift to simply and truly listen to another.
Bryant McGill
The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I mean real magic of course-- because in a few pages, you'll discover that this is a magical pencil box hat, which is pretty lucky really, because you don't find too many of those nowadays.
Dianne Bright
Once we forget those who have contributed time and effort in making an endeavor successful, we forget ourselves.
Beem Weeks
Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly."The circus arrives without warning.
Erin Morgenstern
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass make love work when they have to bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
Sherwood Anderson
Nothing about you, my dear, has ever been lost on me.
Katie Cotugno
Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.
Jack Kerouac
Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible.
Lindy West
It is how we nurture the good and deal with the bad that ultimately shapes our destiny.
Charles F. Glassman
I always felt awkward and unfinished, unworthy of love, suspicious of affection offered. My mother's absence became a great presence in my life.
Marilyn Sewell
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W.H. Auden
It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
Louise Glück
My decisions determine my destination long before I ever get there. And once I do get there, I suddenly realize this is not the destination I had in mind because what I had in mind was the fantasy that my denial had created verses the reality my choices crafted.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Remember, every failure makes you stronger and wiser.
Debasish Mridha
It was enough just to sit there without words.
Louise Erdrich
I am not so delicate as that. And I would only require one thing of you, if our camaraderie is to be cemented."“Anything,” I say, relieved that I haven’t lost a chance at my first real friendship. "If ever I begin to follow you about in the manner of Mirabella to Baldric, be so loyal as to smack me about the face until I regain my senses and dignity.
Quoleena Sbrocca
Peace lets us to be more pleasant.
Debasish Mridha
Shamefully, all of us have wanted revenge on someone at some point for something. I've lived since before man and buffalo roamed this small planet. I have survived the beginning, bloom, and death of countless enemies, civilizations, and people. And the one truth I have learned most during all of these centuries is the old Japanese proverb. If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage “it takes six to stick” is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing.
Gary Rohrmayer
Burnout is a war that must be won on two fronts.
Jeanine Joy
Your life is a print-out of your thoughts.
Steve Maraboli
We don't get to choose what truths God reveals to us -- but we do get to choose what we do with the truths -- whom we share it with and how.
Carol Goodman
When we see death, we see disaster. When Jesus sees death, he sees deliverance!
Max Lucado
We finally settled on Francis Ford Coppola's version of Dracula, which, unfortunately, Gabriel seemed to think was a comedy. I think it was the combination of Keanu Reeves's British accent and Gary Oldman's elderly Count Dracula hairstyle. They're just misleading.
Molly Harper
The world, I think, will wait a long time for Nikola Tesla's equal in achievement and imagination.
Edwin Howard Armstrong
Time heals all wounds. But not this one. Not yet.
Marie Lu
I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.
Dennis Lehane
MmmmmmI like that thing you do with your tongue. What do you call it? Speaking? Yeah, I dig it
Bo Burnham
A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.
Sylvia Plath
And then I turn another corner, and my chest constricts so tightly, so painfully, that I can no longer breathe.Because there he is.He's engrossed in an oversize book, hunched over and completely absorbed. A breeze ruffles his dark hair, and he bites his nails. . . . Several other people are soaking up the rare sunshine, but as soon as they're registered, they're forgotten. Because of him.I grip the edge of a sidewalk café table to keep from falling. The diners stare in alarm, but I don't care. I'm reeling, and I gasp for air.How can I have been so stupid?How could I have ever for a moment believed I wasn't in love with him?
Stephanie Perkins
Who will guard us against the guardians?
Susan Ee
We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to sing, and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves.
David Platt
My point is that when you fall in love it's with a real person with flaws. Not with a perfect character from a fairy tale.
Mette Ivie Harrison
Your talent and giftedness as a leader have the potential to take you farther than your character can sustain you. That ought to scare you.
Andy Stanley
Peace is the only destination worth beginning a journey for.
Debasish Mridha
A temple, first of all, is a place ofprayer; and prayer is communion with God. It is the 'infinite in manseeking the infinite in God.' Where they find each other, there is holysanctuary--a temple.
B.H. Roberts
Beware: open-mindedness will often say, 'Everything is permissible except a sharp opinion.
Criss Jami
I think this dress will stun the nobility, and leave them stupefied with envy and lust," Madame Sandrine announced with relish."I'm just glad it's not crimson, like everything else you drape," Farah said to her husband as she glanced at her transformation in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors across from the raised podium on which she stood. The creation of blue silk evoked the midnight sky, as it wrapped her bosom and waist in bejeweled gathers before cascading from her hips in a dark waterfall. The shamelessly cut bodice was lent a hint of respectability by folds of a shimmering diaphanous silver material draping from a choker of gems about her neck and flowing down her shoulders like moonbeams. To call them sleeves would have been a mistake, for all they concealed.Madame Sandrine threw a teasing look over her shoulder at Blackwell. "How fitting that the color of blood is the one you prefer the most.""Not for her," Dorian rumbled.The seamstress lifted a winged eyebrow, but didn't comment. "Voila. I believe that is all I'll need from you today, Madame Blackwell. I can have these finished in the morning, and in the meantime I have a lovely soft gray frock hemmed with tiny pink blossoms that will bring out the color in your cheeks.
Kerrigan Byrne
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
Walker Percy
They send a person who can never stay," she whispered. "Who can never accept my offer of companionship for more than a little while. They send me a hero I can't help ... just the sort of person I can't help falling in love with."...As I sailed into the lake I realized the Fates really were cruel. They sent Calypso someone she couldn't help but love. But it worked both ways. For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest what if.
Rick Riordan
I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.
Elizabeth Gilbert
New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.
Robert Benchley
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Who hasn't been told "love you?" I don't put much stock in such words because it's the "I" that gives "love you" its true essence and intimate meaning, so unless someone can bring themselves to say "I love you," don't subtract from the significance by saying something less.
Donna Lynn Hope
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
...wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
Cassandra Clare
Strange how seeing the light can make a person feel so alone in the darkness
Jackson Pearce
The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.
Jennifer Egan
I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Although leaders and followers are closely linked, it is the leader who often initiates the relationship, creates the communication linkages, and carries the burden for maintaining the relationship.
Peter Northouse
Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.
Joseph Smith Jr.
I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism.
George Santayana
We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.
Siri Hustvedt
Sometimes I think things happen for a reason... And I think if we're meant to run into each other again, fate will make it happen.
Lauren Blakely
Lance?” I hear him whisper in the darkness.“Yeah, babe, I'm here.”“Come to bed.”I undress and crawl under the covers with him. His arms go around me and hold me tight.“I love you, Rick.”“I know, baby. I'm sorry.”“Me too.
Candi Kay