Quotes by American Authors - Page 395

I am natured into blissful radiance by nature, Natura, and my elemental friends.
Amy Leigh Mercree
These days. Most of us have the attention span of a meth-addicted squirrel.
Kristen Lamb
A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.
Henry Miller
I'm convinced my heart knew who it belonged to, long before I met her.
Karla Campos
All progress begins with a decision. Effective leadership requires decisive action. Embrace the process of deciding, yet recognize when you have reached a choice point.
Angie Morgan
I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do.I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't.
Matthew Quick
In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth around, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.
Kim Stanley Robinson
The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth.
Monique Truong
You can do almost anything if you are willing to clarify your commitments and make incremental investments over time to achieve them.
Michael Hyatt
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it
Marianne Moore
We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, 'Behold. This is the worst thing man can do'.
Irene Gut Opdyke
There’s nothing wrong with accumulating wealth, receiving recognition for your efforts, and having some power and status--what’s wrong is when you think that’s who you are.
Morton Shaevitz
I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Now, with regard to the people who have done things we call "terrorism," I'm confident they have been expressing their pain in many different ways for thirty years or more. Instead of our empathically receiving it when they expressed it in much gentler ways -- they were trying to tell us how hurt they felt that some of their most sacred needs were not being respected by the way we were trying to meet our economic and military needs -- they got progressively more agitated. Finally, they got so agitated that it took horrible form.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Recognize at all times the paramount right of your Country to your most devoted services, whether she treat you ill or well, and never let selfish views or interests predominate over the duties of patriotism.
Henry Clay
Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
Elizabeth Gilbert
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
I love you, more, I think, than I know, but our kind of love isn't a sword. It's a light. Not a fire. A small light, just bright enough to read love letters by and keep the animals at a growling distance. In time it will go out. All lights go out. So do all fires, if it's any comfort. Love me, and look at me, and remember me, as I'll remember you.
Peter S Beagle
Keegan had never realized how absolute silence could be in the minutes before dawn. Maybe because the expectation of battle filled the air, not even birds sang.
Julia Crane
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
Donna Tartt
This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.
Norah Vincent
The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.
David Ebershoff
What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up—Ho-HO! Now you’ve got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You’re not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I’m talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it.
Libba Bray
In Paris, everything was fixable for the right price.
Peggy Kopman-Owens
Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
Often subtle clues are not obvious enough for the stubborn or stupid. This is when God stops throwing crumbs and starts throwing the whole piece of bread. If you step on moldy bread then you know you have waited too long.
Shannon L. Alder
Some people are only “believers” because they want God to give them things; a thrill, money, spiritual gifts etc. but they never think twice about what THEY can give to God. They are Christian parasites, always wanting more, rather than Christian servants, who are always willing to give.
Lisa Bedrick
Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
Henry Miller
There's no way to tell what will make someone break down in tears. There are some who will cry at the merest melancholy word, and there are some who need the longest, cruelest speech to even dampen one eyelash. There are those who will cry at any sad song but no sad book, and there are those who are immune to the most saddening newspaper articles but will weep for days over a terrible meal. People cry at silence or at violence, in a graveyard or a schoolyard.
Lemony Snicket
Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The great thing to learn about life is first not to do what you don't want to do and second to do what you do want to do.
Margaret Anderson
I freely admit I'm confused. I'm a confused and troubled individual but at the same time...Its Free!
Craig Ferguson
Sometimes you think you're helping someone up, but they're actually pulling you down. This is the painful dynamic of dealing with someone who is incurably selfish.
Steve Maraboli
Now there was no sign of any foul weather, but when one wishes to do a thing . . . one finds no lack of reasons for the doing.
Howard Pyle
Even when I'm sleeping, I go to places where you are.
Crystal Woods
The critic is to art what the limp penis is to sex.
Steve Maraboli
Understanding your importance does not minimize those around you, it brings fulfillment to everyone.
E'yen A. Gardner
The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.
Thomas Merton
You know that movie, where the little boy says 'I see dead people'?The Sixth Sense.Well, I see them all the time, and I'm getting tired of it. That's what's ruined my mood. Here it is, almost Christmas, and I didn't even think about putting up a tree, because I'm still seeing the autopsy lab in my head. I'm still smelling it on my hands. I come home on a day like this, after two postmortems, and I can't think about cooking dinner. I can't even look at a piece of meat without thinking of muscle fibers. All I can deal with is a cocktail. And then I pour the drink and smell the alcohol, and suddenly there I am, back in the lab. Alcohol, formalin, they both have that same sharp smell.
Tess Gerritsen
Our work in the world calls for many hands at the wheel. Planet earth is crying out in pain, and Christians have to pick up their crosses and follow Christ, his apostles and saints. These were all shining lights in a broken world ...
Erwin K. Thomas
Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.
Kristin Hannah
Leaders lead themselves first and foremost. Only then can they act as example and inspiration to others.
Christopher Babson
It’s all in my mind.I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy."You need to wake up, Ella."The words are a command I cannot obey.
Beth Revis
Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.
Dan Pearce
By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.
Eli Pariser
Not many people get every single thing they want plus all the things they didn't think to ask for in the same day.
Stephenie Meyer
Civilization is held together by duct tape and spit, and I'm worried about the duct tape.
Jacqueline Patricks
Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.
Marjorie Holmes
You can say anything to anyone, but how you say it will determine how they will react.
John Rampton
Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.
Tim Weiner
The people you think are the happiest are usually the saddest; that's because they see more and feel deeper than others do. They are the sensitive and they see beyond the veil of what's tangible and what's not. They wear no masks and can see through the masks of others. The sensitive to life are few in number, which is why they feel so alone...because they are all alone.
Donna Lynn Hope
Sometimes standing up for what you believe means standing down and allowing the universe to do its work.
Gregor Collins
A hater is a person with a complete understanding of your destiny but assigns him or her self as a representative to work tirelessly on your misery.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
we're looking for a planeet on the strength of a song. it's crazy I know, but its the only chance we have to do something useful." ...Evan Wilson said gravely "I think you're as crazy as Heinrich Schliemann - and you know what happened to him!""What" ..."you don't know what happened to him?" she asked her blue eyes widening in astonishment."Ever read Homer's Iliad, Captain?" ..."I don't know what translation you read Doctor, but there was no Heinrich Schliemann in mine - or in the Odyssey." "That depends on how you look at it." smiling she settled back into her chair and went on,"Heinrich Schliemann was from Earth, pre-federation days, and he read Homer too. No, not just read him, believed him. So he set out at his own expense-mind you, I doubt he could have found anyone else to fund such a crazy endeavor - to find Troy, a city that most of the educated people of his time considered pure invention on Homer's part." "And?""And he found it. Next time you're on earth, stop by the Troy Museum. the artifacts are magnificent, and every one of them was found on the strength of a song.
Janet Kagan
He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself.
Lois Lowry
For the sun to shine, you gotta have some rain. You need the damn rain.
Khali Raymond
Scientific advancement carries risk,” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine—they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.”Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility?
Dan Brown
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti