Quotes by American Authors - Page 386

Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it's some big scary thing, but it's the familiar that's always bothered me. It's heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it's walls and a ceiling and a cell.
V.E. Schwab
Deadlines just aren't real to me until I'm staring one in the face.
Rick Riordan
God will always watch out for our best, providing us with what we need and a soft landing when we seem to be falling.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
Life should not be an endurance event. No prestigious job, well-appointed house, or luxury vacation is worth your emotional, mental and, yes, physical health. In fact, the abrupt loss of all of these things through a cancer diagnosis can be the wake-up call that forces you to identify and begin correcting the things that aren’t working in your life.
Susan Barbara Apollon
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants of shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet and walk.
Katja Millay
You talk more when you're nervous," he said, still standing close to her."No i don't. That's absurd. I'm just trying to explain to you-""Do i make you nervous?""No. I'm not nervous.""You're trembling.""I'm cold. I'm wearing practically zero clothes."His glance went to her lips, then back to her eyes. "I noticed.
Michele Jaffe
Characters are the lifeblood of anygood book.
Craig Hart
It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.
Glenn Greenwald
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
Sam Harris
I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
Sylvia Plath
What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.
Chris Anderson
Sometimes you have to risk life, in order to live, and gamble death, to sacrifice life.
Anthony Liccione
Summer arrives with the morning sun.Beach time breezes in with endless fun.
Debasish Mridha
We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.
Christina Baldwin
Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.
Roxane Gay
The doctors agreed: He was going crazy...they didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
Robert Hughes
Any fool can hope when success lies plainly in view. It wants genuine strength to hope when matters are hopeless.
Michael Flynn
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.
Samuel P. Huntington
Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.
E. Joseph Cossman
Leadership isn't just about giving orders. A fool can give orders. A leader listens. He changes his mind. He acknowledges mistakes.
Brian Staveley
Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you.
John Boyle O'Reilly
This proves the significance of individualism; being able to face the music, to embrace it, and then create something beautiful from it. You can’t truly be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes and the pinnacle of life can only be reached when one can carve their own path.
Nadège Richards
There's something to say about inspiration - when it comes into your life...the feeling is insatiable.
Ann Marie Frohoff
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
Roger Ebert
Oh you're one of those people are you? The people who ask God for something and when they get it, they tell God to forget about answering that particular prayer because it's just happened. That's one of my pet hates, I'm sorry.
Elizabeth Newton
He taught me that it's okay to be a star, but to never forget that there are millions of other stars out there waiting for someone to recognize them for what they are - to treat people as if they too are important, special, and full of light.
Emily Page
I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can see.
Stacey Jay
Singing songs that make you slit your wrists
Gerard Way
The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.
Thomas Jefferson
The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
Larry Niven
Try to knock us down, we'll get up every time. "24/Seven
Big Time Rush
A friend drops their plans when you're in trouble, shares joy in your accomplishments, feels sad when you're in pain. A friend encourages your dreams and offers advice--but when you don't follow it, they still respect and love you.
Doris Wild Helmering
I’ve spent my entire existence watching over children, trying to keep the evil from tainting them. I look at the kids and see their inherent goodness, their innocence, and their compassion. They’re born that way. They only change, only turn their backs on the world, when the world turns their back on them.
J.M. Darhower
Never grow a wishbone daughter where your backbone ought to be.
Clementine Paddleford
...evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
John Steinbeck
Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.
Louise Erdrich
Grace will follow us even when we are going the wrong way
Ricky Maye
What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things— that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person.
C. JoyBell C.
After that there was silence for a while, only the sound of the shovel biting into the earth and the hissing splatter of the loose dirt.They stood him up, his back to the well.In the dark, desperate sky, just above the scalloped line the treetops made, three stars formed a pleading little constellation. No one looked at them, no one cared. This was the time for death, not the time for mercy. ("The Number's Up")
Cornell Woolrich
You must welcome bounty whenever it comes, hunti man. It is often inconvenient. But if you insist on accepting it only when it suits your schedule, you will find yourself very poor.
Sharon Shinn
All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people.
Ann Leckie
Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can’t simply decide to write—in any genre—if you don’t first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference.
Alistair Cross
I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.
Mary Gardiner Brainard
I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .
Carew Papritz
What exactly does that expression mean, 'friends with benefits'? Does he provide her with health insurance?
Chuck Lorre
I can't over-emphasize how important an exquisite perfume is, to be wrapped and cradled in an enchanting scent upon your skin is a magic all on its own! The notes in that precious liquid will remind you that you love yourself and will tell other people that they ought to love you because you know that you're worth it. The love affair created by a good perfume between you and other people, you and nature, you and yourself, you and your memories and anticipations and hopes and dreams; it is all too beautiful a thing!
C. JoyBell C.
Let's start with ice cream and go from there."t"You're gonna love it." Holly nodded. "All their ingredients are fresh, and they make the most delicious, wackiest flavors you've ever heard of."tClearly she'd forgotten that Lindsey had come from D.C. "Like what?"t"Honey lavender. Sweet corn raspberry. Toasted coconut fudge. Lemon fig....blueberry pie... marshmallow peach... salted caramel chocolate chunk...
Tracy March
If you are there for the Lord, He will be there for you. If you love Him and keep His commandments, you will have His Spirit to be with you and guide you.
Robert D. Hales
I sleep through the next day. Each time I go to the bathroom, I try not to look in the mirror. Once, I catch my reflection: it looks like I’ve been punched in both eyes.I can’t talk about the day that follows that.
Nina LaCour
By the way, I haven't heard an 'I'm sorry' from you yet." My sense of grievance had overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation.I am sorry that the maenad picked on you."I glared at him. "Not enough," I said. I was trying hard to hang on to this conversation.Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me."That's more like it.
Charlaine Harris
Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.
N.D. Wilson
There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever. There will be reckoning yet ... it may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just
Solomon Northup
It's so much more than a child's story. - Matt Chandler on LIFE Today.
Matt Chandler
I get it. You'd rather have him, broken, than me whole. If that didn't clarify my chances with you, nothing would. But you can't have what you want either, Deuce. I can't be your friend, feeling like this. Give me some time, and then... Maybe. No promises.
Ann Aguirre
By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around.
Scott B. Pruden
He had a thousand-year-old stare.
Louise Erdrich
Where did you think playing with angels was going to get you?
Nicki Elson