Quotes by American Authors - Page 377

When kindhearted people smile, demons shrink and turn away as if tormented by the gesture. But when those beautiful smiles are made to fade, every awful creature in the world stands surer. So do yourself and mankind a favor and smile BIG whether you feel like it or not.
Richelle E. Goodrich
It's terrifying to think you could become the next statistic.
DaShanne Stokes
Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet,” Morrie whispered.
Mitch Albom
There is no check-box for ethical leadership. It is an ongoing individual and organizational journey. We will never know everything that there is to know.
Linda Fisher Thornton
But you are crazy.”“I know.” She lifted a small box from the basket. “Do you know how I know?”Scarlet didn't answer.“Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” She shrugged, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. “No one believes me, but in some corridors, the blood has gotten so thick there's nowhere safe to step. When I have to pass through those places, I leave a trail of bloody footprints for the rest of the day, and then I worry that the queen's soldiers will follow the scent and eat me up while I'm sleeping. Some nights I don't sleep very well.” Her voice dropped to a haunted whisper, her eyes taking on a brittle luminescence. “But if the blood was real, the servants would clean it up. Don't you think?
Marissa Meyer
It is spring again, my heart is dancing with flowers with love and joy.
Debasish Mridha
The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.
Steven Pressfield
If there was such evil in the world, was it possible that there was good, too?
Patricia Briggs
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
Orson Scott Card
Life is pitifully mediocre without passion. Never let anyone take your passion away from you.
Keely Brooke Keith
Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.
Lundy Bancroft
Because," he said in an even voice, "you're used to winning, so you don't even think about how, every time there's a game, both sides get that 'rah, rah, team' speech from their coaches both sides hear 'you're the best!' 'You've got to win!' 'You're the greatest!' But half of the people playing that game are going to walk away losers. Half!
Margaret Peterson Haddix
The most important and most difficult thing that you can change is your fixed false beliefs.
Debasish Mridha
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham smoky to the taste thick-skinned and tender inside.
Marge Piercy
I've always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.
Karin Slaughter
Putting 100% effort into "trying" will always make you successful. With that in mind it's important to remember that the effort part is never easy.
Lindsey Rietzsch
Regrets are particularly poignant for the old, those of us who have used up most of the chances we'll ever get and are left to make peace with our failed choices. Most things distance themselves with space and time to eventually slide off the edge of our consciousness, but not regrets. You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return. And the longer you deny them, the more they punish you when they can no longer be held at bay.
Lionel Fisher
When question arise Dream or not to dream Always dream.
Debasish Mridha
I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.
Jeffrey Rasley
Nothing recedes like success.
Walter Winchell
Ever since my famous battle with Python, I've had a phobia of scaly reptilian creatures. (Especially if you include my stepmother, Hera. BOOM!)
Rick Riordan
everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location.
Lois McMaster Bujold
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
Rob Bignell
Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.
Jacqueline Koyanagi
The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.
Edwidge Danticat
Should I leave you two alone?" he asked, changing the subject."He's taken," I said, accepting the fact that forgiving himself was something Reyes didn't do. "Osh. By someone very special.""And who might that be?"This might be a little hard for him to swallow. Tact was definitely in order. Or I could just blurt it out and watch his expression go from content to disbelief to horror to a bristly, murderous kind of fury. I chose door number two. "He's destined to be with our daughter."Reyes's expression slowly changed from content to disbelief to horror to a bristly, murderous kind of fury. "Oh, hell, no." He shot to his feet. "A Daeva? Are you fucking kidding me?"Just like a dad."Yes, a Daeva. But I wouldn't dismiss him so offhandedly."He whirled around and scowled. Not really at me. Just in general. "What do you mean?"I pressed one corner of my mouth together in thought. "Okay, you know how I was the grim reaper all of my life, then suddenly I'm also this god from another dimension? And how you're the son of Satan all your life, then suddenly you're a god from this dimension? Who does that? Our lives are so weird. I think that maybe Osh is something else, too." I traced one of the dark lines on his face. "I think there's more than meets the eye. I see greatness in him, Reyes. I see a power beyond our imaginings. I see him giving his life for our daughter.""Oh." He sat back down, satisfied. "As long as he dies in the end.
Darynda Jones
It was a sickening, humbling, maddeningly powerless sensation this watching them and waiting for them to come to him. For the time they could be a family again. But Mickey did it like one’s tongue pointlessly finds a mouth sore over and over again, half to see if it was still there, half to see if it still hurt.
Genevieve Dewey
It is the littlest of flowers that fly the farthest . . . That have the courage to fly the farthest.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.
Julia Child
You can ignore me, Rachel, and you can try to treat me as a friend, but none of that will erase the fact that I think about kissing you every second I’m awake and dream at night of my hands on your body. And it sure as hell won’t erase that I’m terrified by how much I like you.
Katie McGarry
These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
She was the kind of art that was so valuable it wasn't even for sale, and she smiled when she saw Ash. His pulse jumped.
Rose Lerner
The three of you are enough to drive a mara mad.'She can wear my shirt," she growled in an imitation of Nash."No,she can wear my shirt,"she said switching to Tod's smoother tone.Then Sabine took off down the hall without a glance at any of us."I have a spare.Come on, Kaylee,before I choke on testosterone and melodrama.
Rachel Vincent
With her, and only with her, the dead in me is alive.
Becca Ritchie
I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all mean are created free and equal.
Seth Grahame-Smith
The Lord of Rags and Tatters.
Megan Whalen Turner
It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise.
Richard A. Epstein
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination.
Tommy Lasorda
In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.
Abraham Lincoln
Together we are better
John Paul Warren
God does not bless religious efforts—He blesses heart-felt obedience.
Jim George
It was hard to remember what I'd been so scared of. Being treated differently? Lack of acceptance? I was the one who hadn't accepted myself for who I was. I was the one who needed to be comfortable in my own skin. I hoped I could do that moving forward.
Kasie West
They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
Jane Yolen
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Yale Richmond
If I had known how good cooked meat tastes, I would have breathed my fire on all those pigs before I ate them.
Paula Quinn
Leaning forward in your chair when someone is trying to squeeze behind you isn't enough. You also have to move the chair.
Ellen DeGeneres
When I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone — not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I returned from school to find her standing at the door, a piñata in her hand, smiling her spellbinding, I-am-overjoyed-at-the-sight-of-you smile. Now when I imagine that scene, my mind’s eye puts a sombrero on her head, but I doubt she was wearing one. She had just come home from a trip to Juarez, Mexico, where she had obtained a quickie divorce. She told us she was taking us to live in Florida. We had no idea where – or what – Florida was. “There will be oranges there,” she said. “They’re everywhere. You can reach up and pull them off the trees.
Katie Hafner
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
W.H. Auden
In the land of the rejected, the field is flattened, open to much oppurtunity. Here flourish the weeds and nonstandard quality alike. No one aspires, because there is no pinnacle to reach — just be better than whoever is next to you. It is basic, fundamental, and often rude, with bonus points for creative solution. Hardly ever about who you are, but how you do, it's "run what you brung" not Formula 1.
Alec Mackaye
Tavi spent an eternity in misery, longing for death to bring sweet release from the unrelenting torment. The others gathered at the side of his bunk on the ship, keeping a deathwatch over him."I don't see what all the drama is about," Demos said, his quiet voice filled with habitual disinterst. "He's seasick. It will pass."~Captain's Fury
Jim Butcher
To make matters even more complicated, research has shown that we remember only 25-50 percent of what we hear. This inclination not only compromises our connection with another person, but we can fail to retain vital information. All this evidence demonstrates that it is imperative that we intentionally pay closer attention and strive to become an in-depth listener.
Susan C.Young
The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that.
David Guterson
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
Anne Fadiman
Do not allow another person to set you back. Continue moving forward not backwards. When someone pulls you back, be like the arrow to a bow and spring forth greater than ever. And, what they thought would be your disadvantage, you turn it into your advantage.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
If you fail in life’s journey, just don’t complain. Make it a part of your journey.
Debasish Mridha
When you love someone, show them in words AND deeds. To hear you're loved is nice but to feel loved is incredible.
Nina Guilbeau
Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,she slowly closed out of sight,and she was the woman I loved,but too many times she slept likea mechanical deer in my caresses,and I ached in the metal silenceof her dreams.
Richard Brautigan
As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you're given and you're grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one's own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.
Laini Taylor
I felt a warm hand touch my forehead. And then my cheek. I held my act steady though Akinli’s touch made me feel more than awake.“Where in the world did you come from, you beautiful, silent girl?” he whispered.
Kiera Cass