Quotes by American Authors - Page 433

So often in the church, being a pastor or a "spiritual leader" means being the example of  "godly living." A pastor is supposed to be the person who is really good at this Christianity stuff — the person others can look to as an example of righteousness. But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who "follows Jesus" the most closely can feel a little seductive, it's simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be. I'm not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down. Yeah, I am a leader, but I'm leading them onto the street to get hit by the speeding bus of confession and absolution, sin and sainthood, death and resurrection — that is, the gospel of  Jesus Christ. I'm a leader, but only by saying, "Oh, screw it. I'll go first.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Molly was arrested. Possession.” I blinked at him. “She was possessed?
Jim Butcher
When the anesthesia of love wears off,you suffer the pain of consequence.
Amy Tan
What separates people who made their dreams come true is not setting goals to achieve a life the way they expect it to be, but how they expect to be, in order to achieve it.
Shannon L. Alder
We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)
Thomas Newkirk
Give freely, love fully, and play with fervor! Don’t put so many conditioned rules on your happiness. Life can be a beautiful experience if we allow it.
Steve Maraboli
How could you carry the inside of a person with you and not call them a friend, no matter what the rules said?
Barbara Samuel
Darling," he said distractedly,"about the moon...""Yes?""I don't think it matters whether you want it or not.""What are you talking about?" "The moon. I think it's yours."Victoria yawned, not bothering to open her eyes. "Fine. i'm glad to have it.""But--" Robert shook his head. He was growing fanciful. the moon didn't belong to his wife. It didn't follow her, protect her. It certainly didn't wink at anybody.But he stared out the window the rest of the way home, just in case
Julia Quinn
It is the way of women to keep us humble, is it not?
Katie MacAlister
Most people wait until tragedy strikes before thinking about how to incorporate tragedy into their life.
Dennis Prager
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
Chuck Palahniuk
To bring people closer to God, competency and clarity are important, but they are not enough. Of themselves they do not touch hearts deeply. Personal sanctity and goodness do. It is the saints who light fires. There is a direct correlation between the beauty of holiness and the fruitfulness of our work and interpersonal relationships.
Fr Thomas Dubay
When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I am coming home again. Liturgy is written into my flesh, sinking into my skin and my spirit.
Angela Doll Carlson
When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.
Joan Rivers
Brave? Or stupid?"Roger shrugged. "I've never been quite sure where brave stopped and stupid began, myself.
Gerald Morris
I like the sky. It’s rational to me in a way that life isn’t. Looking at it doesn’t suck the way you might think it would, given all the dying-girl-stares-at-heaven possibilities. I don’t think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire
Maria Dahvana Headley
I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.
Rivka Galchen
One of them confessed to Paul that his tribe had heard stories about the fiercely cannibalistic ways of white men. Paul's first instinct was to laugh him off as a simpleminded fool. But the legend hadn't been conjured from thin air. When Paul tried to assure him that white men didn't eat black men, the man confronted him with a direct challenge: explain why they bought and sold Africans as if they were cattle, not human beings."Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children?" the man asked Paul. "Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them?
Monte Reel
But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is not enough to be busy so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
When you feel good about the value you offer the organization, communicating and demonstrating your value to others is much easier.
Bonnie Marcus
If the cherry trees had to wait for understanding they'd never blossom.
Marty Rubin
The first lesson in constructing viral content is having the strength, courage, and self-confidence to get in touch with your own feelings, thinking about what profoundly affects you.
Ken Poirot
It's so stupid because all I wanted was space and now that I have it, there's this part of me that's achingly lonely I could die.
Hannah Harrington
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused dedicated disciplined.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.
Sylvia Plath
Fuck the past. This was the present.
Maggie Stiefvater
You want power-either because you've already had a taste of it and want more, or because you've been made to feel powerless for too long.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
Henry Miller
I thought you were the loveliest, most enchanting creature God ever created.
Judith McNaught
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sometimes your whole life could hinge on a fraction of an inch. Or the beat of nanosecond. Or the knock on a door.Kind of made a male believe in the divine. It really did.
J.R. Ward
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
Rebecca Solnit
Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.
Edmund Wilson
[In reference to vaginas] Someone saying you're "too loose"? Maybe that person's previous experience has been with women who weren't aroused (which, in the case of young adults, ins't that unusual)...Since many people think that penetration is supposed to be painful at first, a lot of them don't know how to wait for full arousal or make penetration comfortable. So, if a partner is saying you're "too loose," either they're simply experiencing a relaxed, aroused partner for the first time, or they're blowing smoke - either because they think it's the thing to say, or they were expecting to feel trapped in a vise, which is not how penetration should feel for either partner.
Heather Corinna
No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.
Jill McCorkle
The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.
Dan Simmons
Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again.
Robin Black
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
Pat Conroy
Being under stress is like being stranded in a body of water. If you panic, it will cause you to flail around so that the water rushes into your lungs and creates further distress. Yet, by calmly collecting yourself and using controlled breathing you remain afloat with ease.
Alaric Hutchinson
It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing.
David Lovelace
Didn't you read the owner's ma
Jim Butcher
All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.
Sam Kean
The point is, there is no point." Philip spoke up surprisingly. "No one here gets out alive. And over a sufficient period of time, all choices tend to normalize on a curve of random distribution.""You mean if you wait long enough, nothing happens?
Rosemary Edghill
I’m barely human. I’m more like a creature; to me, everything gives off a scent! Thoughts, moments, feelings, movements, words left unsaid, words barely spoken; they all have a distinct sense, distinct fragrances! Both a smell and a touch! To inhale is to capture, to experience! I can perceive and I can “touch” in so many odd ways! And so I am made up of all these scents, all these feelings! An illumination of nerve endings!
C. JoyBell C.
Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You are the sculptor of your success. Chisel yourself into excellence.
Mark F. LaMoure
As an adult, most of my friends are women . . . they, too, had that moment when they realized they were all the “other girls,” and that every girl in the world is, too.
Mara Wilson
I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?
Adam Minter
I love the gray area between right and wrong.
Dan Brown
Eleanore," he whispered again, tilting his head to mine, his lips skimming past my cheek, his breath in my ear. "I'd wait forever for you, you know. If it mattered. If you'd care.""I do care," I whispered back, miserable.His fingers tightened, warm and firm. "No, you don't. Not the way I mean. Not yet.
Shana Abe
In MoonlightNoSoft sweet paw on my cheekNoFur curled under my chinJustA sad space left behind - Gray cat gone away. [Ellie's poem]
Patricia MacLachlan
In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of ‘victim thinking.’ Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me.
Jenni Schaefer
A Guardian is only as strong as its Muse.
Susie M. Hanley
The revelation is this: don't wait for some revelation. We make our own luck.
Carl Safina
Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppyyour mathematics is.
Leslie Lamport
Pain is holy ground in a person's life.
Jason Gray