Quotes by American Authors - Page 3348

The kind of people we have in Washington only trust what they think they own.
Stephen L. Carter
There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
Elizabeth Gilbert
We are all Masters. Every thought, word, and action creates our individual reality from one moment to the next. Each individual’s creation, combines to form a shared reality that we all experience…. Consciousness. Being Masters requires us to take responsibility and great care in all that we do, so that the greater, combined consciousness is not hindered by our individual limitations. As Masters, we all have the ability to create, and live in Nirvana. Actively engaging in this personal responsibility, gives each of us the power to live harmoniously as well as to contribute positive re-enforcement to the greater Consciousness that we all share
Gary Hopkins
My love life couldn't be more nonexistent if Julius was all all-girls' boarding school with a moat full of alligators around it.
Flynn Meaney
We are here for the evolution of our soul. This evolution happens through the management of both the ups and downs of physical life. Evolution is halted by pretending to be happy all the time
Renae A.Sauter
Some birthdays make you happy.Some birthdays bring you down.Some birthdays make you jump for joyWhile others paint a frown.Regardless of your feelingsOr if you’re far or near,The earth was blessed this special dayWhen Heaven placed you here.
Richelle E. Goodrich
If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?
Paul Russell
Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")
Cornell Woolrich
In a fight between a shifter and a witch, the shifter would often win—but only if they could keep the witch from speaking, usually by severing the throat or tearing out the tongue. If the witch was powerful enough, and quick enough, physical size didn't matter. Catherine had heard of the horrible ways the witches could kill their victims. Cooking them alive from the inside out, restricting oxygen flow through the nasal and oral passages by creating a vacuum, drowning them with vapor pulled from the very air.It made fights between shifters look almost humane by comparison.
Nenia Campbell
Shine as if you are the brightest star.
Debasish Mridha
I was beautiful; after all, my skin was as rich and dark as wet, brown mud, a complexion that any and every pale white girl would pray for - that is, if she believed in God. My butt sat high in the air and my hips obviously gave birth to Creation. Titties like mangoes, firm, sweet, and ready. My thighs and legs were big and powerful, kicking Vanna White and Cindy Crawford to the curb.
Sister Souljah
Today is filled with solutions, be positive and enthusiastic at ALL times. Why worry or live in fear, it will probably never happen!
Ron Barrow
Teaching is the best way to learn. Never stop learning.
Debasish Mridha
We all have our own battles to fight, and sometimes we have to go it alone. I'm stronger than you think, you'd be surprised.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!'
David Keirsey
An expectation is a thought.It has no power or influence.
Dee Dee Artner
She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord." "Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said. "It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like." "I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife." "Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism." "No heaven?" "That's heaven." "What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?" "We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison.
Michael Cunningham
That means life itself is a fairy tale. Like the characters, we all live and love and search for a happily-ever-after.
Gena Showalter
My father taught me how to understand and be sensitive to others, which is probably the most critical aspect of leadership. Without it you are only a manager.
David Morehouse
It's strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary.
Veronica Roth
The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.
Washington Irving
His eyes were like two wafers of slate, grey and lifeless.
Steven Ramirez
To know myself as woman in the image of God to know God as Mother and to know my own mother as a window into God: these three are inseparable.If one is implausible to the heart the other two are as well.
Roberta C. Bondi
Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.
Criss Jami
Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law.
Lawrence Lessig
Write about the dream you see during wakefulness.
Debasish Mridha
Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say. A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism.
Robert T. Pennock
The structure of a 'writing schedule' is only there as a frame. You provide the image, the emotion, and the sentiment in your own time.
Margaret Aranda
Dear Little Children, don't ever give up on your dreams.
Heather Wolf
If you don’t want to be foolish, don’t try to fool anyone.
Debasish Mridha
But as I mastered the material, homework ceased to be necessary. A no homework policy is a challenge to me," he adds. "I am forced to create lessons that are so good no further drilling is required when the lessons are completed.
Alfie Kohn
... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.[2002] p.46
Gary Hamel
He remembers which sisterI like least and askshow she is doing.(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
Google and Apple offer the image of a pseudo-commons to Internet users. That image recalls Nick Dyer-Whiteford's claim that, in light of the structural failures of neoliberal policies, capital could "turn to a 'Plan B', in which limited versions of commons, pollution trading schemes, community development and open-source and file-sharing practices are introduced as subordinate aspects of a capitalist economy, where voluntary cooperation subsidizes profit. One can think here of how Web 2.0 re-appropriates many of the innovations of radical digital activists, and converts them into a source of rent." Indeed, with the rise of the trademarked Digital Commons software platform and with the proliferation of university-based digital and media commons (which are typically limited to fee-paying and/or employed university community members), the very concept of the digital commons appears to be one of these reappropriations. But if, as part of what James Boyle describes as the "Second Closure Movement," this very rhetorical move signals the temporary defeats of the after-globalization and radical hacker movements that claimed the language of the commons, perhaps the advocacy for ownership of digital wares (or at least a form of unalienable, absolute possession, whether individual or communal) would provide a strategic ballast against the proprietary control of large swathes of information by apparently benevolent corporations and institutions. While still dangling in mid-air, the information commodity's consumption might thereby be placed more solidly on common ground.
Sumanth Gopinath
For the next couple of weeks she held Peter like a secret in her heart, lying right under her necklace. I could see him written on her face, and Tik Tok, too, seemed to catch shadows of him, because he'd stop to stare at her, puzzled, as if he'd just seen the boy flit across her eyes-seen the ghost of the kiss lingering for a second on the skin of her neck before disappearing.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.
Caitlin Doughty
Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.
Bruce Sterling
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
Ernest Becker
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;
Walt Whitman
It's been a long time since I felt something like hope. Don't ask me to give it up for Netflix and a Prius.
Tiffany Reisz
If I rolled the dice carved out of my weathered boneAnd offered of my blood the libation to the faneWhen even the reaper’s mockery forsakes me aloneMy own clangorous thoughts are the last to remain
T. M. Lakomy
The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...
Maud Hart Lovelace
I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.
Robert Ludlum
Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.
Jonathan Haidt
New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with?America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag.And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now they're ahead?In most of the industrialized world, nearly everyone has health care and hardly anyone doubts evolution--and yes, having to live amid so many superstitious dimwits is also something that affects quality of life. It's why America isn't gonna be the country that gets the inevitable patents in stem cell cures, because Jesus thinks it's too close to cloning.Oh, and did I mention we owe China a trillion dollars? We owe everybody money. America is a debtor nation to Mexico. We're not a bridge to the twenty-first century, we're on a bus to Atlantic City with a roll of quarters. And this is why it bugs me that so many people talk like it's 1955 and we're still number one in everything.We're not, and I take no glee in saying that, because I love my country, and I wish we were, but when you're number fifty-five in this category, and ninety-two in that one, you look a little silly waving the big foam "number one" finger. As long as we believe being "the greatest country in the world" is a birthright, we'll keep coasting on the achievements of earlier generations, and we'll keep losing the moral high ground.Because we may not be the biggest, or the healthiest, or the best educated, but we always did have one thing no other place did: We knew soccer was bullshit. And also we had the Bill of Rights. A great nation doesn't torture people or make them disappear without a trial. Bush keeps saying the terrorist "hate us for our freedom,"" and he's working damn hard to see that pretty soon that won't be a problem.
Bill Maher
Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.
John Steinbeck
She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tel us who we are and what we think and what we do.
Elizabeth Strout
Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it.
Hanne Blank
The worst enemy of our humanity is our self-doubt.
Lolly Daskal
Let love bloom like a flower with the fragrance of the garden of your heart filled with beauty, joy, and happiness.
Debasish Mridha
Don't stare at the past or you'll walk right by today's opportunity. Today is God's gift to you.
Benjamin Lotter
If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suppose it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns. All the little critters creep in close to listen when the human beings are in a good mood and willing to play some tunes.
Gary Snyder
It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.
Trevanian
There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.
Joe Hill
Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.
Marianne Williamson
Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.
Gordon W. Allport
Like a shot from a movie, the morning sun shone brilliantly around him like a god—his dark hair glinted warmly in the light, and his eyes gleamed bluer than the south Pacific Ocean.Taylor's mind went blank. And suddenly, she couldn't remember why the hell she ever had been angry with Jason Andrews.But then he spoke."Sleeping in this morning, Ms. Donovan?" he drawled.Moment over.
Julie James
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
Jack Kerouac
Forget and forgive your past. Focus on your future, but never forget to act at the present moment.
Debasish Mridha
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott