Quotes by American Authors - Page 412

She slips into the seat at our table, refusing to look up at me. I reach for her hand, sending a shiver through me when our finger tips touch. She glances at me, her eyes filled with a feral fear that reaches into my depths, pulling on emotions I refuse to acknowledge. Things I can’t feel now. Won’t feel ever again.
Christine Fonseca
TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.
John Updike
[On visitors after having a new baby...] "Put a lock on the door, barricade it if you have to. No one gets past that front door unless they come bearing one of two things: food or cleaning products!
Claudine Wolk
Controversy is a last resort for the talentless.
Criss Jami
We see what we want to see, what we expect to see, instead of what's really there. I don't think we do it on purpose, most of the time. We just get kind of stuck. We start thinking that the way things are is the way they'll always be. But that's not true. It can't be true. Because the world is never still.
Lauren Miller
It is only possible to live happily ever after on a daily basis.
Margaret Wander Bonanno
You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.
John Williams
Ish #303 "It's a street food vendor! Stop asking for the health score rating.
Regina Griffin
It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.
John Steinbeck
Love is the blind revelation of arrogance.
Lionel Suggs
I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.
Joan Didion
..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.
Zora Neale Hurston
Property taxes' rank right up there with 'income taxes' in terms of immorality and destructiveness. Where 'income taxes' are simply slavery using different words, 'property taxes' are just a Mafia turf racket using different words. For the former, if you earn a living on the gang's turf, they extort you. For the latter, if you own property in their territory, they extort you. The fact that most people still imagine both to be legitimate and acceptable shows just how powerful authoritarian indoctrination is. Meanwhile, even a brief objective examination of the concepts should make anyone see the lunacy of it. 'Wait, so every time I produce anything or trade with anyone, I have to give a cut to the local crime lord??' 'Wait, so I have to keep paying every year, for the privilege of keeping the property I already finished paying for??' And not only do most people not make such obvious observations, but if they hear someone else pointing out such things, the well-trained Stockholm Syndrome slaves usually make arguments condoning their own victimization. Thus is the power of the mind control that comes from repeated exposure to BS political mythology and propaganda.
Larken Rose
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
Chuck Palahniuk
She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.
John Green
As we drove off into the moonless night, raindrops danced through our headlights like the fireflies of my childhood. I silently cursed the frailty of happiness and doubted whether it ever existed for me. I could remember happier times, though, and those memories fluttered about my mind like fireflies, beckoning with their elusive splendor. But chasing memories held no more promise than catching fireflies. The pursued feelings either vanished or lost their magic upon examination, hardly the green-glowing beauty seen at a distance. So I looked ahead of me and dreamed on into the darkness, hoping to one day find someone who would love me.
Scott Gaille
Stiff, huh? I think seeing you roll around on the floor in that tight little outfit accomplished that.
Collette West
Speak with silence, listen with heart, and forgive with kindness.
Debasish Mridha
The things that were once sweet to me are now bitter. The sun is not half so bright. The stars seem dimmer. All this wealth and luxury feels meaningless. All the world is in your shadow, Zahra. I cannot help but see you when I close my eyes.
Jessica Khoury
A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.
Marie Rutkoski
Weston: Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?Wesley: No.Weston: That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison, right? You recognize it when you see it?Wesley: Yes.Weston: Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.Wesley: Doesn't scare me.Weston: No?Wesley: No.Weston: Good. You're growing up. I never saw my old man's poison until I was much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?Wesley: How?Weston: Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body.
Sam Shepard
There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.
J. Paul Getty
Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
Pico Iyer
Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.
Peter Kreeft
Find Meaning, Find Yourself.
Diana Dentinger
All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Kindness is the supreme intelligence.
Bryant McGill
Wylan summoned every bit of bravado he'd learned from Nina, the will he'd learned from Matthias, the focus he'd studied in Kaz, the courage he'd learned from Inej, and the wild, reckless hope he'd learned from Jesper, the belief that no matter the odds, somehow they would win.
Leigh Bardugo
Got a lot of sinful idears--but they seem kinda sensible.
John Steinbeck
The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.
Joshilyn Jackson
Though I'm not sure, I thought I saw women dressed in black, with her head and face covered by a black veil, duck behind a tree as we approached the road and parked car. Hiding so we wouldn't see her. But I caught a glimpse, enough to reveal the rope of lustrous pearls she wore. Pearls that were there for a thin white hand to lift and nervously, out of long habit, twist and untwist into a knot. Only one women I knew did that--and she was the perfect one to wear black, and should run to hide!Forever hide! Color all her days black! Every last one!
V.C. Andrews
Presidents make history. I'm just a tool of history.
Chris Weitz
Music is the one place in mass media where kids editorialize to kids.
Don Williams
I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.
Carrie Fisher
Continuing to play the victim is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blaming others for your station in life will indeed make you a victim but the perpetrator will be your own self, not life or those around you.
Bobby Darnell
I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.
Audrey Niffenegger
With battle-weary arms, Sheridan slugged his way across the luminous waves sending light-filled droplets splashing into the air like Fourth of July sparklers.Stumbling onto the lake’s rocky banks, he clawed desperately at the animal skin suit, yanking at the fastenings and peeling back the suffocating shroud in a fitful temper tantrum. He collapsed onto the glitter washed shore, his chest heaving, his forehead pulsing with pumped up veins.“That was a nightmare!” Sheridan rasped between gulps of air. “Like some sort of freaked-out acid trip!”“All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it may lead.” Kunchen said calmly.
Phillip White
You’re supposed to pinch yourself – not the one you’re dreaming about.
Nicki Elson
why can't you see i'm a kid', said the kid.Why try to make me like you?Why are you hurt when I don't cuddle?Why do you sigh when I splash through a puddle?Why do you scream when I do what I did?Im a kid.
Shel Silverstein
You can stuff yourself with emotional fulfillment until it’s dribbling down your chin & your ego will quickly chomp it down and demand more.
Stan Slap
She does know Harrison prefers men, right?”“Let her have hope,” I said, smiling to myself.He turned his attention back to me. “Yes. Hope is good. Bianca, I-” He grinned wickedly. “I knew you’d give in sooner or later.” He put his hand on my knee and ran it smoothly up my thigh. “You’re finally going to admit that you love me, aren’t you?”I swatted his hand away. “First of all,” I began, “I don’t love you. I love my family and maybe even Casey and Jessica, but romantic love takes years upon years to develop. So I don’t love you. But I will admit, I’ve thought a lot about you lately and I definitely have feelings for you… feelings other than hatred for the most part. And maybe it’s possible-in the future-that I… could love you.” I hesitated, a little scared of the words that’d just left my mouth. “But I still want to kill you most of the time.
Kody Keplinger
A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human.
Donald Miller
Later—how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you—Philip stood in the kitchen doorway.
Dexter Palmer
Her back bows over the kitchen island, our empty plates rattling with the thrust of my hand. Two orgasms later, she stumbles into the living room to work on her homework, argument forgotten.
Pam Godwin
It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.
Albert Einstein
You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed.
Rick Riordan
People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.
Adriana Trigiani
The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.
John Perkins
Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for
Janis Joplin
BETRAYALNo failure in Life, whether of love or money, is ever really that simple; it usually involves a type of a shadowy betrayal, buried in a secret, mass grave of shared hopes and dreams.That universal mass grave exists in a private cemetery that most... both those suffering from the loss, but especially those committing the betrayal, refuse to acknowledge its existence.When you realize you've been deeply betrayed, fear really hits you. That's what you feel first. And then it's anger and frustration. Then disspointment and disilussionment.Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate effects and consequences of betrayal on our hearts and spirits; and on trust and respect for our fellow brothers and sisters.In writing, there are only really a few good stories to tell, and in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of the most powerful stories to tell.Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise- by trading in our integrity and failing to treat life and others in our life, with respect and dignity. That's really where the truest and the most tragic failures comes from... they come making the choice to betray another soul, and in turn, giving up a peice of your own.
José N Harris
Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
Germany Kent
Take off my clothes and there becomes a man. Take off my skin and there becomes my bones. Break all my bones and there becomes my heart. Smash my heart and there becomes my soul. And that you cannot take. And what is my soul?...It is everything that make a man. It is everything that makes this man.
Carew Papritz
What other thing, Eve?""I love you. Sometimes it makes my stomach hurt, but I kind of like it. Tired now, come to bed. Love you.
J D ROBB
Death didn't bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Love is pure; love is eternal. Love is perfectly divine.You're my love; you're my joy.You're my valentine.Life is a present; life is a miracle. Life is a song divinewhen you touch my heart, hold my soul.Oh my pure valentine. Life is joyful; life is wonderful.Life is love's shrine.When you're my moon, I am your star. Oh my eternal valentine.
Debasish Mridha
For all of the blessings of your life, be always grateful.
Debasish Mridha
With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, then for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear to be the boundaries and smack against them like a heart against the rib cage. If we reveal boundaries in the course of our movements, then we will expose the inherent lie in the use of the word freedom. I want to keep breathing and moving until I arrive at a place where motion and strength and relief intersect. I don't know what's ahead of me in the course of my life and this civilization. I just don't feel I have reached the necessary things inside my history that would ease the pressure in my skull and in my future and in my present. It is exhausting, living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.
David Wojnarowicz
She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.
Upton Sinclair
Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.
Glenda Bailey-Mershon