Quotes by American Authors - Page 376

It's easy to look at people and make quick judgements about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. what a person shows to the world is only one tiny facet of the iceburg hidden from sight. And more often then not, it's lined with cracks and scars that go all the way to the foundation of their soul.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
When you're in love you put up with things that when you're out of love you cite.
Judith Martin
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
Paddy Chayefsky
You can spit on a rose, but it's still a rose.
Marty Rubin
I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it."Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison every day," my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn't care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud.Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
Kathleen Flinn
When they realized they were in the desert, they built a religion to worship thirstiness.
Zach Weinersmith
Sometimes, you will go through awful trials in your life and then a miracle happens--God heals you. Don’t be disheartened when the people you love don’t see things like you do. There will be Pharisees in your life that will laugh it off, deny that it happened, or will mock your experience based on righteousness they think you don't possess. God won't deny you a spiritual experience because you are not a spiritual leader. He loves everyone equal. The only people that really matter in life are the people that can “see” your heart and rejoice with you.
Shannon L. Alder
The infinitude of Jiu Jitsu allows for the infinitude of the types of practitioners. There exists a game for each and every one of us which is specifically possible within the confines of our particular skill set.
Chris Matakas
What is beauty or ugliness but a false front that prompts man to make assumptions rather than delving deeper.
Kristen Callihan
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.
James Baldwin
Perfection does not take into account the viewer.' Pheidias had once said to me. 'It exists on it own, independent of and unconcerned with opinions or utility.
Karen Essex
Haven’t I proved to you yet that I don’t give a damn about your missing parts?
RaeAnne Thayne
From time to time, one must release the grime built up inside them to to free their emotions like the ocean.
Suzy Kassem
You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. I'm not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men's club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid's grades. Die at my desk, and they'll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt's hit the coffin.
Dennis Lehane
The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow.com, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. “How do you find the courage to travel on your own?” they wondered. “How do you keep from getting lonely? Don’t you feel self-conscious eating out alone?” After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There’s a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise.
Gina Greenlee
She really is a shining star. Imagine how far she's come since she was on the farm in Ohio. She's our Cinderella horse.I can't wait to start riding again.Will my leg work as well as it did before the surgery. What if it doesn't work at all?
Deanie Humphrys-Dunne
The path to Enlightenment is simple: Forgiveness, Acceptance, and Love.
Walter E. Jacobson
Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.
Seth Godin
Plunder, ravage and kill; the secret works of the repugnant. Since the fall of man and brother killing brother, evil has owned the night.
Dennis F. Larsen
Change is part of life. Civilizations rise and fall, the tides wax and wane, the planet undergoes periods of climatic revolution, the young grow up, and the old die. What will come is that what shall be. Survival as individuals and as a species demands fluidity of human thought and the demonstrated ability, temperament, and perseverance to change.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The bark on the tree was just a little softer.
Louis Sachar
Be awesome! Be the cause of someone's smile.
Debasish Mridha
Once she had said to him that what they had was grace. Even now, married properly, rank bestowed, it still was. And always would be
Anne Leonard
My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The beauty of agile comes in with its incremental nature and use of empiricism to focus on three “I”s - Interaction, Iteration, and Improvement.
Pearl Zhu
There are only two stimulants to one's best efforts: the fear of punishment and the hope of reward.
John M. Wilson
You try moving things with nothing but willpower. It's about as easy as trying to lasso a bull with a licorice
Richelle E. Goodrich
Faith is your anchor and sustainer in the new season. Faith that the one who called us is faithful. Faith helps you see in the dark. And when you feel like you can't see, Faith steadies your heart to trust what you know. What is true.
T.D. Jakes
A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Patrick Mendis
Man invents war. Man discovers peace. He invents war from without. He discovers peace from within. War man throws. Peace man sows. The smile of war is the flood of human blood. The smile of peace is the love, below, above.
Sri Chinmoy
I'm really very self-confident when it comes to my work. When I take on a project, I believe in it 100%. I really put my soul into it. I'd die for it. That's how I am
Michael Jackson
God is lovingly guiding our lives, and we can be confident of His authority over any situation we may face. He never allows anything to happen without a reason.
Teresa Santoski
The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically.
Victor J. Stenger
Living a life of service to others is the most powerful sermon of all, don't you think?
Serena B. Miller
The government wields a heavy hand, which is often used in an underhanded way.
Kenneth Eade
I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I've seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I'm really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home.
Kristin Harmel
All wise people say the same thing that you are deserving of love and that it's all here now everything you need. When you pray you are not starting the conversation from scratch just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.
Anne Lamott
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Colleen C. Barrett
The quality strategy is about making the right decision at the right time which requires quality information.
Pearl Zhu
Which is a sad thing when you're only seventeen.
Cinda Williams Chima
She couldn't detach from him, couldn't catch her breath, and didn't want to. Not ever again.
Kristin Miller
If you're right & I'm not, I'm going to be hell to live with, she said. So, you better think about that next time you want to be right.
Brian Andreas
Now you're just being silly. He's a mercenary- he's not going to go about penning love letters, and really, what would he write? 'Anna...love you...grrr?'" Olivia to Annalia
Kresley Cole
Each experience of love nudges us toward the Story of Interbeing, because it only fits into that story and defies the logic of Separation.
Charles Eisenstein
Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.
Gregory Benford
Worldliness is not so much what we do, it's what we want to do. It's an issue of the heart.
Britt Merrick
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
I'm not a Christian, but I have read his book.
Bill Maher
God tests His real friends more severely than the lukewarm ones.
Katheryn Hulme
As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.
Ann Druyan
Thousands of persons, many of whom never darkened the door of a college, have learned to read books that most of our college graduates fear to tackle. teachers who understand this fact can help a student read the books that educated the Founding Fathers but not by explaining in lectures what the author would have said if he had been as bright as the lecturer.
Stringfellow Barr
The defining moment when we finally admit, “I can’t do this alone. Its too much for me. Take it.”That’s the moment our heart cracks open, our will pours out and Christ stands ready with his arms stretched wide and his smile even wider.That’s the moment a miracle is born.
Toni Sorenson
We can have no significant understanding of any culture unless we also know the silences that were intentionally created and guaranteed along with it.– Gerald Sider.
Michelle Alexander
Build Icebergs, Not Skyscrapers
Miles Anthony Smith
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
Joyce Carol Oates
The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap.
Robert D. Putnam
When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better.The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. it's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet.
Elizabeth Gilbert
If you can love cats, you can love human beings, because you have to be able to love them without getting them at all.
Chris Kelly
One of the characteristics of some drugs (such as cocaine) is that they make a person feel strong and alert—when in fact the opposite is the case. Don’t allow yourself to be deceived.
Billy Graham
There can be no god without desire.
David Vann