Quotes by American Authors - Page 419

I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.
M.B. Dallocchio
Or maybe they weren’t changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.
Eilis O'Neal
attraction, that's the farthest thing from an idea. That's an urge, an impulse, a force. It's subconscious, physical. You can't make everything cerebral.
Leah Stewart
Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
Lorrie Moore
Today is a beautiful day. Thank you!
Ron Barrow
...when we feel powerless, we stop trying to find a better way.
Walter Dean Myers
For your business to stand out and succeed, you have to put a primary focus on the social media space, go in big (halfway will not do), and do it better than most, right from the start.
Brian E. Boyd Sr.
She doesn’t like you, McNab.“I knoooow. I find that really attractive in a woman.
J D ROBB
THoughts have unique beauties, you will never be able to express it in words.
Debasish Mridha
Rising to her feet, she shot the Bird Man a furious glare, and then stormed off toward Savidlin's house. She was glad to be away from Richard, to be away from watching those girls pawing him.Her fingernails dug into her palms, but she didn't notice as she marched past the happy people. The dancers danced, the drummers drummed, the children laughed. People she passed wished her well. She wanted one of them to say something mean so she would have an excuse to hit someone.
Terry Goodkind
Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Robert H. Jackson
Everyone defends his treasure, and will do so automatically.The real questions are, what do you treasure, and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask. You can, however, save time if you do not protract this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it immeasurably.
Helen Shucman
Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs.
Jay Lake
When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.
Jodi Picoult
The experience of yearning is a composite of Nature’s purest impulse in you (the need for radical movement; think of all the analogies in all the religions and philosophies concerning the truth and beauty of light; if you take it literally, that means to become truth, beauty, light, get moving at 299,792,458 kilometres per second) combined with your unique qualities and talents of past/present/future (experiences, potentials, attractions and distractions, imagination, etc.). Simply put: need for radical movement in a definite direction.
Darrell Calkins
For while it is of no particular importance how many things you start in life, it is of great importance how many you finish!
Josephine Daskam Bacon
Though it doesn’t feel like it, crisis places us front and center of desire, which is the force of power.
S. Kelley Harrell
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
Frank Herbert
Teammates...were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C'mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home—the sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Books are Lighthouses erected in the sea of time." Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest
Alex St. Clair
When you are giving give with love and kindness.
Debasish Mridha
Faith never stays put. It's always challenging always questioning. That's what makes it real.
Patrick Carman
It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl.
Libba Bray
The look on his face made me want to die. It confirmed every mean and low thing I'd ever thought about myself, the stuff you hope and pray no one will ever know about you. Because if they knew, they would see the real you, and they would despise you.
Jenny Han
What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one?
Rebecca Serle
Life is so transient, finite, and fragile that there is no time to hate anyone.
Debasish Mridha
How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered life is attention to God in all we think, say and do. It is the growing realization of His presence in our most down-to-earth living.
Sue Monk Kidd
I will walk by myself and cure myself in the sunshine and the wind.
Charles Reznikoff
Take hands.There is no love now.But there are hands.There is no joining now,But a joining has beenOf the fastening of fingersAnd their opening.More than the clasp even, the kissSpeaks loneliness,How we dwell apart,And how love triumphs in this.
Laura Riding Jackson
Time is a Test of Trouble - But not a Remedy - If such it proved it proves too There was no Melody.
Emily Dickinson
Your girlfriend's sibling or parents might be totally nuts, but always defend them. Always. All a girl wants to do is to get along with her family and if you are on the side of making it easy, you will be loved eternally. It might be easier to condemn them - especially if she's doing that already - but, remarkably, even if they are murderers, she will find the good in them, especially if you start trashing them.
Mindy Kaling
... and her name was Freedom.
Pam Muñoz Ryan
I have just returned from Boston it is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.
Fred Allen
The story is always better than your ability to write it.
Robin McKinley
All I know about humour is that I don't know anything about it.
Fred Allen
When you are "off somewhere else" people notice. Have you found yourself in conversations in which you’re so concerned about what you are going to say next, that you don’t even hear what the other person is saying? Guilty as charged, right?
Susan C.Young
Then I had to decide if I needed to wear shoes that kicked ass or were good for ass kicking, on account of there's a difference you know. ~ Finger Lickin' Fifteen
Janet Evanovich
Writing comes from the fear of failure not from the joy of winning.
Debasish Mridha
Some man would come to her room. Maybe she would hesitate, and he'd grab her, pin her to the mattress, force her to cooperate.
Cherise Sinclair
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure: try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau
Who can protect themselves from betrayal? The day your brother wakes up and plans to do you dirty, there's no defense against that.
Ice-T
Just as teenagers can live in the same house as their parents, yet choose not to live “close” to them in partnership, so we can choose to be children of God, yet live very distant from God in our hearts. On the other hand, we can choose to have the closest partnership with Him, in which we know what He thinks, believes, and acts and what is important to Him. In this place of intimacy, we also discover just how close He wants to be with us.
Theresa Dedmon
Oops! We thought he had a gun!’ So you shot me in the back three times ’cause you thought I had a gun? I was gonna sue, but they said they was gonna kill me. I was 18 years old, I didn’t have nobody, I didn’t have all this. They kept pickin’ me up, kept lockin’ my ass up, beating me, until I dropped the lawsuit. When I dropped the lawsuit, that’s when everything stopped. That’s what the fuck happened to me. I was terrorized by some terrorists.
Jeff Smith
Instinct is a powerful form of natural energy perhaps comparable in humans to electricity or even atomic energy in the mechanical world.
Margaret A. Ribble
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold evermore wonders. -Andrew Harvey
Rob Brezsny
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bedearly - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.
Silvia Plath
So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.
Elizabeth Gilbert
When words don’t add up in love, it is because of six possible reasons: 1. They are afraid to tell you the truth because you will leave them. 2. They enjoy being a liar or playing people because of ego reasons and/or control. 3. They don’t know the truth themselves. 4. They are undecided. 5. They refuse to let their guard down and be vulnerable because you or someone else have hurt them tremendously. 6. You are not being told all the information because of a break down in communication.
Shannon L. Alder
Even locked doors can be unlocked in time.
Joanna Gaines
Did I ever tell you about the day I finally let go of him? That day that led me to you?
Sarah Addison Allen
If a man doesn't know how to dance he doesn't know how to make love, there I said it!
Craig Ferguson
Apathy is sustainable only as long as injustice doesn't harm us--and we don't care that it's harming others. Apathy lasts only until injustice knocks on our door, and we're forced to look into its eyes.
Ken Wytsma
Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.
Ron Suskind
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
Lauren Oliver
We read about you to be with you, to walk in someone else's shoes, to experience another life. Some of those lives are hard, and others are easy, but we're with you every step of the way. We read about people in impossible situations because we're dealing with horrible things ourselves, in our lives. And you going through your story helps us with ours, no matter how yours ends.
James Riley
Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, The True Story of Murder in a Small Town, begins on a steamy August night with two teenagers, brother and sister, on an evil mission deep in a rural Michigan forest. For one desperate moment headlights appear on the lonely access road. Will they be found out? Thus the story of one of state’s strangest criminal cases unfolds. Girl breaks up with boyfriend. He turns violent. She disappears without a trace. Then state police investigators set out on what at first looks like a fool’s journey. The story is colored by a bizarre Ouija board death prophesy and the roles of two psychics, a former practicing witch and a handsome young artist who is suspected of Satanism. The canny and elusive suspect taunts police and seems always to be one step ahead of them. When a key witness is daunted by uncharacteristic injuries, a mysterious medium tells him he is the victim of black magic practiced by the suspect’s grandmother. And when, after eight years, the suspect finally is brought to trial, he is represented by a Roman Catholic priest.
Richard W Carson
My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.
Maggie Stiefvater