Quotes by American Authors - Page 429

No voting on who gets to be people.
N K Jemisin
And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.
Carl Sagan
A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.
James S.A. Corey
The woman knows from living with the abusive man that there are no simple answers. Friends say: “He’s mean.” But she knows many ways in which he has been good to her. Friends say: “He treats you that way because he can get away with it. I would never let someone treat me that way.” But she knows that the times when she puts her foot down the most firmly, he responds by becoming his angriest and most intimidating. When she stands up to him, he makes her pay for it—sooner or later. Friends say: “Leave him.” But she knows it won’t be that easy. He will promise to change. He’ll get friends and relatives to feel sorry for him and pressure her to give him another chance. He’ll get severely depressed, causing her to worry whether he’ll be all right. And, depending on what style of abuser he is, she may know that he will become dangerous when she tries to leave him. She may even be concerned that he will try to take her children away from her, as some abusers do.
Lundy Bancroft
Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.
Randy Thornhorn
Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.
Aspen Matis
A child's temperament appears to play another significant role in the child's own perceptions and worldview.
Asa Don Brown
The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.
Louise Miller
Today is a new chapter in the story of your life. While you're holding the pen, what will you write? Now, is your time to shine! Will you continue holding the pen? Or, will you express yourself from deep within?
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.
Don DeLillo
I look around and see so much fear, people getting more and more comfortable with their hate, more at ease being mean, more united in their separation. And I think, NO. Not me. I will not get lost in this fearful world. I will not play with bullies. I will continue to be brave and kind. I will speak for real unity. And no matter what, I will never stop loving.
Scott Stabile
Can they love? Or is it a bit of code meant to get a reaction from humans? Can anyone tell real love, in a bot or in a human?
Judd Trichter
He says, "But it is really whatever, you know? You've saved me way more times. And we call ourselves friends."It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, really. "You already saved me," I say."That was nothing.""I'm not talking about the cave."He wrinkles his nose."That first day," I say, "When you got up on the rocks to flirt with a human boy."He smiles big, with all his ground-down teeth shining.
Hannah Moskowitz
No matter how we may rationalize the practice [of homosexuality] . . . Romans 1 makes it clearly the product of a reprobate mind . . .I am not exonerating all heterosexual activity . . . When we come to Christ, we are called upon to repent of our sins and no longer to practice the ungodly patterns of living.
Billy Graham
Our silence about grief serves no one. We can't heal if we can't grieve; we can't forgive if we can't grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
Brené Brown
Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.
Harlan Ellison
I am no theologian, and do not have the answers to these questions, and one of the reasons I enjoy the animals on the farm so much is that they don't think about their pain, or question it, they accept it and endure it, true stoics. I have never heard a donkey or cow whine (although I guess dogs do). I told my friend this: pain, like joy, is a gift. It challenges us, tests, defines us, causes us to grow, empathize, and also, to appreciate its absence. If nothing else, it sharpens the experience of joy. The minute something happens to me that causes pain, I start wondering how I can respond to it, what I can learn from it, what it has taught me or shown me about myself. This doesn't make it hurt any less, but it puts it, for me, on a more manageable level. I don't know if there is a God, or if he causes me or anybody else to hurt, or if he could stop pain. I try to accept it and live beyond it. I think the animals have taught me that. The Problem of Pain is that it exists, and is ubiquitous. The Challenge of Pain is how we respond to it.
Jon Katz
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
Louis L'Amour
Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
Bob Seger
It’s not that. It’s just… never mind. Water under the bridge.” I stand up and head for my room. Two against one. No man ever won this war. It’s why we fight them against other men. At least there is a chance at victory.
Faleena Hopkins
He is the God of all, and His concern is for all.
John Willis Zumwalt
Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which old Pashto songs were sometimes played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.
Khaled Hosseini
If I gave you a pity position it wouldn't be in my office.
Janet Evanovich
On the bank of an ocean, let your mind fly in the cloudless sky while your heart enjoys the love of the sun.
Debasish Mridha
A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
Michael Chabon
When the tragedy begins and the boat begins to sink I will do anything in my power to help save my mates if they reuse my help I have no choice but to jump ship to help myself
Ms. Bonnie Zackson Koury
Contrary to what a lot of people believe (or hope), comfort doesn’t take the pain away. Comfort slides in beside the pain, pulling up a chair so that we have something more than sorrow in our hearts. Comfort gently expands our spirits so that we can breathe again. Comfort opens our eyes so that we can see possibility again. And on those days, whether it is the next day or five years removed, on that day when grief rears its dark head again, comfort helps us remember that pain is not all there is
Peggy Haymes
Words, Kaden. Only lost unsaid words that added up to good-bye.
Mary E. Pearson
The river asked me who I was to be gazing so longingly into her curving body of cascading dreams and shifting beauty.
Todd Crawshaw
A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain
The energy everything is made of is conscious. It's alive.
Chris Prentiss
...Though drowned was just as dead as any other way of dying.
Mercedes Lackey
In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.
Elizabeth Hardwick
As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.
Mark Galli
Little WordsWhen you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf,Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds;And I can only stare, and shape my griefIn little words.I cannot conjure loveliness, to drownThe bitter woe that racks my cords apart.The weary pen that sets my sorrow downFeeds at my heart.There is no mercy in the shifting year,No beauty wraps me tenderly about.I turn to little words- so you, my dear,Can spell them out.
Dorothy Parker
Everyone over 50 in America feels like a refugee. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because parenting is hard. Inadequate parents could say, 'Go outside and play in the culture,' and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Grown ups now know that you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.
Peggy Noonan
You who have never “been there” in the throes of grief, have no idea what is going on inside the head of the grieving spouse: the scatteredthoughts, the constant worry that we will forget something or someone in our fog-induced state, that strange feeling of not quite “being all there” when out in social situations, the pall that covers everything, like a cloak of sadness that never lifts.
Mary Potter Kenyon
A Wise Mind Makes a Wise Heart
Sara Niles
The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Robert Benchley
The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts.” I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. “There’s a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this,” he tells me. “It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.” He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. “Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows,” Wiesel says. “But there is no way out of what we’ve seen.” “And how do we live with what we know?” I ask “How can we live with not knowing?
Mark Matousek
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Walter Isaacson
...it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.
Richard Wright
There's got to be more to life than just living," Foyle said to the robot."Then find it for yourself, sir. Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.""Why can't we all move forward together?""Because you're all different. You're not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.""Who leads?""The men who must...driven men, compelled men.""Freak men.""You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.""Thank you very much.""My pleasure, sir.""You've saved the day.""Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot beamed. Then it fizzed, jangled, and collapsed.
Alfred Bester
The study of doctrine and the teaching of doctrine will change behavior more than the study of behavior will change behavior.
Boyd K. Packer
There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.
Don DeLillo
The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs.
Judith Warner
Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.
Anne Lamott
Don’t fear challenges. They often give us the opportunity to strengthen our courage, faith, and inner strength.
Debasish Mridha
Be bold. But not bold, be fucking bold.
James Frey
God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage.
Ronald J. Sider
Faith is only as good as the one in whom it's invested.
Lee Strobel
Gilly Gilleshpee
Victoria Laurie
A man thinks all dust stays outdoors.
Ernest Vincent Wright
When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
A.W. Tozer
Each of us, along with our ancestors, inhabits the same cosmos. When we tell stories, we enter the stream of human consciousness; we take with us into the Ring of Time the people whom we crossed paths with in our earthly sojourn.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Helping professionals, therapists, life coaches, healers can greatly assist you in changing your life for the better, but they pale in comparison to the power thats gained from developing a relationship with yourself. It's you that holds the power for change
Renae A.Sauter
It's kind of spooky when you are caught talking to God everybody thinks you're nuts. They used to call you a prophet.
Paul Zindel
I like to read books one after another. Immerse myself in a book, and then immerse myself in the next book, and just keep going until there aren't any more books left to swim in. That's why I hate when authors die. I cannot stand it. There will be no more books forthcoming from that person. Their future books died with them. In the past I have found a series of books and loved it so much that all I wanted to do was read and read and read those books for the rest of my life. Then I would find out that the author was dead. Had in fact been dead for many a year. This has happened to me several times.
Alison McGhee