Quotes by American Authors - Page 405

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

I found God. He is not in heaven or in the heart. He is not in the sky nor is he flying high. He is not very big nor gigantic. He is almighty, all powerful, and very beautiful. He lives everywhere in every flower and every little speck of dust. He knows everything you do, and he does everything for you. He can feel every little change and memorize everything…so strange.

You are the artistic painter of your success. Paint your life day-by-day, into the masterpiece of excellence you want.

His father always treated him as if he were capable of great things. Which made him want to accomplish great things.

Our eyes see only that which language can explain, but our hearts see that which is invisible and unexplainable.

Here is a piece of advice. Never pay attention to what a man says when he comes. Anything might be blurted out at that moment, and it rarely means anything.

He'd learned long ago: perfection isn't what families are all about.

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.

America's mission is to join the most ancient civilizations with the most modern. John Augustus Roeblin

The Republicans have their splits right after election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.

Truth is easier for a child to handle than evasiveness.

Some people suffer from the green-eyed monster called envy.

YOUR WORDS ARE MADE OF THE AIR I BREATHE.

We're all that matters. Our lips touch with each word he speaks, his stare so intense that I know he can see straight through to my soul.

This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.

That is always our problem not how to get control of people but how all together we can get control of a situation.

Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

There’s a little angel on one of my shoulders saying that this is a wicked thing to do. Then there’s a little devil on my other shoulder, and she looks a lot like you.

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.

But if there must be an end, let it be loud. Let it be bloody. Better to burn than to wither away in the dark.

After all these years, my heart still wants you. It still misses you. it still aches for you. I can't control what my heart wants, I could just deny it of it... Love, Viv

For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.I fought with my knuckles white as stars,and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart,and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,but I could never make dying beautiful.The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free.I suppose I love this life,in spite of my clenched fist.I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,like a prayer on a dying man's lips,like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take meSometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,but you still have to call it a birthday.You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the wordsWe're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music,the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open.The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.I know the heartbeat of his mother.Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own,and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!

four meta-movements that separately and together are redefining the American dream: living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity.

The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.

I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.

It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light.

Have intention, sacred will travel.

There are some people that if they don't know you can't tell 'em.

Sure. What's the worst that could happen." Twenty minutes later, we had our answer. "I can't frecking believe this."I cringed. "I'm so sorry.""I'm bald!" Giguhl continued. "I look like a freak.""It's not that bad," I said. But it was. Oh, my lord was it bad. I'd never seen an uglier cat in my entire life.

He moved to sniff some white-and-yellow flowers.A nightmare. This was a nightmare. “You can’t really like flowers.”Again those dark eyes shifted to her. Blinked once. I most certainly do, he seemed to say.

Happiness comes from within. It is not dependent on external things or on other people. You become vulnerable and can be easily hurt when your feelings of security and happiness depend on the behavior and actions of other people. Never give your power to anyone else.

I'll never forget the first time Davram took me by the scruff of my neck and showed me he was the stronger of us. It was magnificent! If a woman is stronger than her husband, she comes to despise him. She has the choice of either tyrannizing him or else making herself less in order not to make him less. If the husband is strong enough, though, she can be as strong as she is, as strong as she can grow to be.

Irreverence is our only sacred cow.

You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.

Hey, if it's a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it's your last.

Don't allow life to pass you by because you are afraid of [looking] stupid.

Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can’t give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street.

There was no burger so soggy that he would not eat it. No tequila so mean that he would not drink it. No car so covered with birdshit and rust that he would not drive it around town (and if it were a convertible, he'd have the top down, even in rain, even in snow). There was no flag he would not desecrate, no true believer he would not mock, no song he wouldn't sign off-key, no dental appointment he wouldn't break, no child he wouldn't do tricks for, no old person he wouldn't help in from the cold, no moon he wouldn't lie under...

The true energy of Love confidently and unwaveringly burns away all sediment that clings to story while dropping us hard into the naked and raw hum of Right Now.

In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

All my life I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate. Tone of voice means a great deal to me in the course of debate. I despise the arrogance and doting self-regard so frequently found among the very bright.

It's not enough merely to believe there is a God. You must believe in the God who is there.

We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.

You were lookin’ at me like you wanted to kiss me.”I force a laugh. “Yeah, right,” I say sarcastically.“Nobody’s watchin’ if you want to, you know, try it. Not to brag, but I’m somewhat of an expert.

Privilege" is something else."Privilege" is a judgment."Privilege" is an opinion."Privilege" is an accusation.

If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.

There you are! Aren't you precious?

The monkeys, she explained, were considered reincarnated politicians, which made Rue laugh and the stick entirely understandable.

Thou mayest choose an helpmeet," said the King to me.An helpmeet? What the great googly-moogly was that?

Falling in love is more than infatuation. It is the need to feel whole, to feel safe, to be healed, to join together with someone, heart and soul.

I remember three years ago looking into the entrance pool of Julia’s stately domus and finding I was beautiful.

If you’ve come to see that the image you absorbed while growing up is not valid, and you launch out on a prefabricated Journey, you are most likely to simply replace it with another, fancier paradigm – the mind is that easily fooled by its own base view.

Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke.