Quotes by American Authors - Page 418

In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.
Heather Paxson
It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Murray N. Rothbard
With them I gladly shared my all and learned the great truth that where God guides He provides.
Frank N. D. Buchman
I need someone who can be invisible, who can become a ghost. Do you think you can do that?"I'm already a ghost, she thought. I died in the hold of a slaver ship."i think so.
Leigh Bardugo
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
Is it possible that we never feel grown-up because, as our capabilities increased with age, so increased our responsibilities?
R.C. Sproul Jr.
It's amazing how willingly one can tell to a new face, and how restrained one may be from telling a familiar one.
Lauren Lola
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
Richard Peck
A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
I said, "I'll take the T-bone steak."A soft voice mooed, "Oh wow."And I looked up and realizedThe waitress was a cow.I cried, "Mistake--forget the the steak.I'll take the chicken then."I heard a cluck--'twas just my luckThe busboy was a hen.I said, "Okay no, fowl today.I'll have the seafood dish."Then I saw through the kitchen doorThe cook--he was a fish.I screamed, "Is there anyone workin' hereWho's an onion or a beet?No? Your're sure? Okay then friends,A salad's what I'll eat."They looked at me. "Oh,no," they said,"The owner is a cabbage head.
Shel Silverstein
Money's easy to make if it's money you want. But with few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.
John Steinbeck
He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.
C.J. Cherryh
From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.
Hunter S. Thompson
But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone--
Hubert Selby Jr.
Before you find your soul mate, you must first discover your soul.
Charles F. Glassman
Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.
Mark Twain
He's thought he was willing to do anything in order to get what he wanted, what was right for his kind. He'd been certain any sacrifice was possible.He'd been wrong.
Linda Howard
I have learned that in every circumstance that comes my way, I can choose to respond in one of two ways: I can whine or I can worship! And I can't worship without giving thanks. It just isn't possible. When we choose the pathway of worship and giving thanks, especially in the midst of difficult circumstances, there is a fragrance, a radiance, that issues forth out of our lives to bless the Lord and others.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all.
Richard Bachman
Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat.
Ann Landers
But you don't have a husband yet?"Elina shook her head, her gaze focused on the stream. "No. I have nothing to entice a man. No raids. No bounty on my head. No one fears me." She looked him in the eyes. "As far as the tribes are concerned, I am nothing.""But you're cute.""I am...cute?""Aye. Cute. In the Southlands, cute can get you a baron and a full staff.
G.A. Aiken
[Discipline i]t’s the ability to overcome the urge to grab the bright and shiny and interesting to finish what you’ve started.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.
Orson Scott Card
How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, "Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?" To which the man responded, "That's your worry.
Max Lucado
The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.
Sri Chinmoy
The person with the least worry over the compromises he must make is, of course, the person who doesn't compromise.
Mark Sundeen
She hated the way roses smelled, their sweetness too fragile. She wanted a garden of evergreens. A garden of stones. A garden of swords.
Keirsten White
Violent overthrow of the revolution is revolutionary, and compromise with the revolution is revolutionary.
Douglas Wilson
Whenever you deny the hand of Justice, Violence almost always steps in.
Suzy Kassem
Oh, sometimes it's just easier to please people," Maria said finally.
Lois Lowry
We know enough to know that all of this is not quite right. And we know enough to know that settling for what’s not quite right is quite wrong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given.
Timothy Snyder
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy
Kahlil Gibran
If a person fights, that's their own choice," Angel says. "But getting two roosters to fight or two dogs like pit bulls to fight, the animals don't have a choice there. They can't decide not to fight.
Denise Flaim
To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?
Charles Finch
You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.
Wilhelm Reich
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills in the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation in its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?
Rebecca Solnit
I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...)I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar......like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...
Jack Kerouac
The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.
Brent Weeks
A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.
Mark Lawrence
Even a single thread of hope is still a very powerful thing. Grab onto it with both hands and never let it go.
Lorri Faye
A lot of people have asked me how short I am. Since my last divorce I think I'm about a hundred thousand dollars short.
Mickey Rooney
If your going to be a jackass then do it outside of your home, as your home is supposed to be a place of love and safety, it's your sanctuary from the outside world. The only place where we can truly be accepted.
Lisa Marie Main
Answering the call of God is not something we do after details have been laid out. Nor is it something we do because others want us to do it. It's something we do because we know it's right. Because we love Him.
Sondra Kraak
There is no one way to be a magician any more than there is only one way to be human.
Laura Lam
America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.
Charles P. Pierce
Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.)
Rachel Held Evans
The Angel Gabriel disappeared once for sixty years and they found him on earth hiding in the body of a man named Miles Davis.
Christopher Moore
I can always pray to God with confidence because my righteous state is a gift given through grace in faith on the cross by Jesus!
Alisa Hope Wagner
Unconditional Love is the outer expression of Inner Peace.
Alaric Hutchinson
You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you...
George R.R. Martin
There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.
Henry Ward Beecher
I learned not to fear infinity,The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,The wheel turning away from itself,The sprawl of the wave,The on-coming water.
Theodore Roethke
I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.
Rachel Cohn
That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed, undersized, grinning, buck-toothed rat!!" Yossarian sputtered.~ Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The secret of every man who has ever been successful lies in the fact that he formed the bait of doing those things that failures don't like to do.
A. Jackson King
Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.
Larry McMurtry
Zoological Parks South of Florida“Cuba has several zoos, the largest of which are in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. The Havana National Zoo is dedicated to going beyond the mere display of animals and attempts to maintain a more natural habitat, supporting and promoting breeding programs for various species with follow-up scientific research programs.” From page 500, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning author Captain Hank Bracker. Available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillon.com and other Independent book outlets.
Hank Bracker
I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.
Nikki Giovanni
Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!
Eliezer Yudkowsky