Quotes by American Authors - Page 434

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.
Judith Guest
...it's really more intelligent to be able to simplify things than to complicate them. Even if some people think it makes you look stupid.
Eugenia Cheng
If you would take one step forward, darling, you could cry in my arms. And while you do, I'll tell you how sorry I am for everything I've done -" Unable to wait, Ian caught her, pulling her tightly against him. "And when I'm finished," he whispered hoarsely as she wrapped her arms around him and wept brokenly, "you can help me find a way to forgive myself."Tortured by her tears, he clasped her tighter and rubbed his jaw against her temple, his voice a ravaged whisper: "I'm sorry," he told her. He cupped her face between his palms, tipping it up and gazing into her eyes, his thumbs moving over her wet cheeks. "I'm sorry." Slowly, he bent his head, covering her mouth with his. "I'm so damned sorry.
Judith McNaught
There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Elizabeth Warren
He takes no pleasure in human tears. He came and wept that He might stop forever the fountain of human tears. He came and bereaved His mother that He might heal all bereavement. He came and lost everything that He might heal the wounds that we have from losing things. And He wants us to take pleasure in Him. Let us put away our doubts and trust Him.
A.W. Tozer
You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules. That an evil man can shed the trappings of wickedness because you want him to. Men do not Change... Learn the lesson now, so you don't have to learn it with a knife in your back later... Reputations exist for a reason.
Pierce Brown
When you’ve tired of me,” she said softly, precisely, “Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me.”“I’ll never tire of you,” he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth.“Then prove it.”He knew what she asked with such an open and vulnerable face. Something within him shriveled and died... he’d been on the rack too long for a penance he wasn’t sure he could ever entirely pay. “You know…” His voice was hoarse, the croaking of a dying man. He licked his lips. “You know why I cannot.
Elizabeth Hoyt
I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face—which will lead to expectations of competence—I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as "The Future" in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions.
Amy Leach
He was the kind of guy who made Sadie a lit­tle un­com­fort­able. The kind who wore leather and drank beer and crushed emp­ties on their fore­heads. The kind who made her stand a lit­tle straighter. The kind she avoided like a hot fudge brownie be­cause both were bad news for her thighs.
Rachel Gibson
I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The meaning of life is simply the meaning we give to it.
Bryant McGill
If her enemies were Brigan's friends and her friends were Brigan's enemies, then the two of them could walk through the world arm in arm and never be hit by arrows again.
Kristin Cashore
Well-adjusted means you can make the same mistakes over and over again and keep smiling.
George Bergman
Say it with flowers.
Patrick F. O'Keefe
There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English government in the East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as the history itself shews, had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women and children; that they left not a soul to breathe; expressions that are repeated over and over again in those books, and that too with exulting ferocity; are we sure these things are facts? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned those things to be done? Are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority?
Thomas Paine
It ain't what people call you. It's what you answer to.
Tyler Perry
What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.
William Faulkner
...men are poor soldiers in love's war. And it is a war-one that never ends.
Andrea Cremer
The greatest thing in the world is not in dying rich but leaving the richness behind for the world to treasure.
Mayur Ramgir
If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.
Dave Eggers
Modern society is a biological disaster masquerading as progress.
Steven Magee
Useless and precious objects. Taking up space. Taking up time.
Maira Kalman
This is the terrible thing girls like us have in common" she explained. "Parents, upbringings,lifestyles, that are painfully normal. Middle class."It was almost amoral, being raised this way, she told me fiercely. We'd never really understand pain. And wasn't that the human condition? By shielding us from the real world, pressing their palms over our eyes during all the bad parts. our parents -our parents-were keeping us separate from humanity. We were something else entirely
Meg Haston
When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you.
Walter Payton
Never do something for just one reason.
Jeff VanderMeer
I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don’t need to be a biblical literalist to love my God.
Thomm Quackenbush
He looked like a Greek god. Jade’s thoughts snapped from togas to white sheets to sex in the span of two seconds.
Alyssa Goodnight
There was nothing else in the entire universe, nothing but the two of them together. Her curves, his angles. Her light, his darkness. Her softness, his exquisitely aching hardness.tMale. Female.
Thea Harrison
Thirst is a language even the grass understands.
Marty Rubin
They're saying that you and Sean Kendrick were burning up the cliffs." Tommy spins me again and grins at me. "And when I say you and Sean Kendrick, I mean you and Sean Kendrick. And by burning, I mean burning.
Maggie Stiefvater
- Be thou not technical with me,/Or else thine input valve may swift receive/a hearty helping of my golden foot.
Ian Doescher
Viagra isn't the only drug being prescribed off-label for women with arousal problems. Los Angeles urologist Jennifer Berman told me some doctors are prescribing low doses of Ritalin. Drugs like Ritalin improve a person's focus, so it stands to reason that it would make it easier to stay attuned to subtle changes taking place in one's body. 'It enables a woman to focus o the task at hand,' said Berman, managing, though surely not intending, to make sex sound like homework.
Mary Roach
In our adventures, we have only seen our monsters more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways - ways that reveal a cancer cell to be. like Grendel, a distorted version of ourselves." -1989 Nobel Prize Speech, Cited in Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies
Harold Varmus
I wish I could stop time and keep you out of danger.She turned and placed a kiss on the palm of his hand.Without the danger, we never would have met.
Lisa Kessler
There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.
Isaac Marion
Fear is a kind of bell or gong which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying.
Henry Ward Beecher
73. ...There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.
Theodore J. Kaczynski
When we truly care, we mix love, compassion, and kindness together in our hearts.
Debasish Mridha
Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.
Victor LaValle
I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.
Tom Perrotta
They are not kidding when they say that mothers are strong women. We need to be strong in more ways than our children will ever know.
M. B Antevasin
Modern Western culture has become a mixture of paganism and Christianity. We are a blend of both. We talk of God, but we often act as though we are atheists.
Billy Graham
In life, every moment and everything, is miraculous because life itself is a dance of a miracle.
Debasish Mridha
Gansey knew enough people with secrets not to be dazzled into easily using them as currency.
Maggie Stiefvater
A human hires a hit man to kill his cousin for money, boring. That same hit man botches the job twice, funny. Then the desperate hit man sends a ghoul after the girl to finish things up, my curiosity's piqued. That same ghoul ends up with his head cut off by a mysterious redhead . . . Ah. Now I'm interested.
Jeaniene Frost
Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.
Frans de Waal
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.
Jim Harrison
[There is a] quiet glory [in] merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations.
Elizabeth Gilbert
For mem'ry has painted this perfect day. With colors that never fade And we find at the end of a perfect day The soul of a friend we've made
Carrie Jacobs Bond
We cook, we fight, we win. That simple.
Brian Wood
What did she care what became of this world when her loved ones were dead and gone?
Allie Burke
When you find something you genuinely enjoy, don't let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don't feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them.
Austin Kleon
I believe I've come to understand something. Love isn't always big and dramatic. It's big, it's deep, but it's also quiet and calm.
Ashlyn Macnamara
Miguel came to my restless mind, as he always did when I slept. Old memories never left me alone.
Kenya Wright
Bullies don't like to fight, son. They like to win. Being afraid is normal. The only fight you really have to win is the one against the fear.
Kwame Alexander
You can obsess and obsess over how things ended—what you did wrong or could have done differently—but there's not much of a point. It's not like it'll change anything. So really, why worry?
Jess Rothenberg
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly everybody will side with you when you are in the right.
Mark Twain
Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called 'going with the flow.
Daniel Quinn
Limitations can be reasonably expanded. We are constantly challenging our limitations. But a hobbled mind is not going anywhere.
Bryant McGill