Quotes by American Authors - Page 435

Genius is neither learned nor acquired. It is knowing without experience. It is risking without fear of failure. It is perception without touch. It is understanding without research. It is certainty without proof. It is ability without practice. It is invention without limitations. It is imagination without boundaries. It is creativity without constraints. It is...extraordinary intelligence!
Patricia Polacco
We may believe that anxiety and fear don't concern us because we avoid experiencing them. We may keep the scope of our lives narrow and familiar, opting for sameness and safety. We may not even know that we are scared of success, failure, rejection, criticism, conflict, competition, intimacy, or adventure, because we rarely test the limits of our competence and creativity. We avoid anxiety by avoiding risk and change. Our challenge: To be willing to become more anxious, via embracing new situations and stepping more fully into our lives.
Harriet Lerner
Of valid economics pre-dating the Power Age (steam and electricity), there remains not a vestige. Of valid economics pre-dating the intensive and extensive use of electricity there will soon exist only rags and tatters. We still have to thank Adam Smith for insisting 'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production;' but the old form of the law of demand and supply is outmoded, since supply has become practically inexhaustible.
Harriet Boyd Hawes
I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.
Lindsay Buroker
I am old. I should have left before. Any fool can ride the chariots of victory. It takes judgement to get off at the right time.
Richard Sapir
I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the "Believe it or Not" song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the "Should have been somebody eeeeeelse" part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now.But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, "Let's play the fucking Misfits." Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, "Fuck yeah!" And you're feel cool by association."Let's play the fucking Misfits," I said.John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. "Fuck yeah."Told you.
Eric Spitznagel
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.
Charles Bukowski
At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
W.E.B. Du Bois
We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don't want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren't equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap - if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.
Hanya Yanagihara
I like attics. They're as peaceful as God's church. Alone and apart, but a body can hear everything. The past stacked up like forgotten memories, but with a small effort, brought down and enjoyed again.
Kim Harrison
Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.
Junot Díaz
The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way.
Kathleen Tessaro
Music has infinite power to reach the gap between the heart and the soul to create infinite and ineffable joy.
Debasish Mridha
You are more than the choices that you make, You are more than the sum of your past mistakes, You are more than the problems you create.
Tenth Avenue North
While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.
Newton Lee
The things that matter most to me are eternal. The bonds of love shared within a family I believe to be eternal.
Mike Ericksen
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
John Updike
that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.
Henry David Thoreau
You are absolutely beautiful," Anne said. "But if you see yourself, you'll want to pin your hair back like a shepherdess in a bad play."(Eleanor) "Are you saying that I normally look as if I'm tending sheep? With straw in my hair? As if I might yodel?
Eloisa James
Our knowledge of life is limited to death
Erich Maria Remarque
My sister said Mary Elizabeth is suffering from low self-esteem, but I told her that she said the same thing about Sam back in November when she started dating Craig, and Sam is completely different. Everything can't be low self-esteem, can it? My sister tried to clarify things. She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a "superior position" that she wouldn't need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.
Stephen Chbosky
[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
Bart D. Ehrman
She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"I said I thought the description fairly apt.
Susan Hubbard
There's no book that absolutely everyone loves.
Carolyn Parkhurst
Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be.
Robert M. Drake
Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know.
Laurie Nadel
With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly back from Mexico, pulling up finally at an outlying bar-ex-saloon (they had covered the old adobe face with knotty pine, substituted big stone matades for the cuspidors) and having brought her wrecklessly this far did not park her in the little parking lot but in front of the church next door. They had lifted that face too and neonized, but it did no good, they seemed to know they had no chance against an older god, their doors were closed. Thus one could join the pagan worshipers with a self-righteous shrug, through latticed doors.
Douglas Woolf
We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.
Steven C. Rockefeller
A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.
Stephen Crane
No men can save himself, that's why Jesus was nailed on the cross.
Evans Biya
Fast forgiveness is a part of Christian culture I want to help change and transform. I ache for a journey of Jesus-like forgiveness. The kind demanding time and suffering in the process.
Natalie Brenner
It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I urge new converts to take plenty of time in Bible study and prayer before getting on a public platform to testify.
Billy Graham
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean.
Henry David Thoreau
not responding verbally isn't necessarily being passive. we are communicating on many levels simultaneously
waking life
Let today be the day you finally release yourself from the imprisonment of past grudges and anger. Simplify your life. Let go of the poisonous past and live the abundantly beautiful present... today.
Steve Maraboli
Did you look up 'incubus'?" Ren asked, in her ear. She heard a smile in his voice."Yes. Let's see, 'a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep,' if I remember right.""There. And you thought it wasn't possible. It's common enough they actually had to make up a word for it.""Well, if you've been doing that, then you must have been discreet, because I sure haven't noticed.""It's not my preferred method," he said. "I always wake them up first.
Molly Ringle
Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.
Doug Larson
Conservatism -- hard work -- saving one's money -- looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that.
Theodore Dreiser
Azerowut, I must tend to an urgently urgent business and a business that is urgent most urgently. Watch over my tent with extreme care and care that is caring in the extreme, and do not, under any circumstantial circumstances, allow anyone and his brother to be within an uncomfortably uncomfortable distance of her door. --Master Kwadile
Michael Joseph Murano
He pried Clara's arms loose and stood up, smoothing his wrinkled coat. Clara looked straight into his face. Her eyelids were red, but her gaze was like a lance. Dr. Wintermute had a sudden, uncomfortable conviction that she had seen into his soul. It was a look he was to remember often in the weeks to come.
Laura Amy Schlitz
Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
Willa Cather
Give yourself permission to enjoy this present moment. Resist the urge to fill it with I need to's, I shoulds, I coulds. Trying to fill all your present moments is impeding the natural flow of life.
Nanette Mathews
Today I will exercise to build the power of my love.
Debasish Mridha
Someday is not a day of the week.
Janet Dailey
You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to his with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of the getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.
Michael Crichton
What makes you think I ever got married? Married women work themselves to death, all their money goes to husbands who gamble it away. Why would I ever do that to myself?
Kim van Alkemade
Your fear comes not from what you're afraid will happen. Your fear comes from thinking what may happen. You cannot predict your future. You can however, create your future. What happened yesterday is over. What happens today is up to you….
James A. Murphy
[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.
Dan Simmons
Regardless of gender, one has to be willing to take what belongs and what has been promised, by not backing down and by not giving up. Never be willing to throw in the towel and accept defeat!
Ellen J. Barrier
Being denied their original birth certificates isn't just a problem for adoptees. It's a social problem, requiring social change.
DaShanne Stokes
It is vitally important for local church leaders to keep in touch with the spiritual state of their members, to discuss their level of biblical knowledge, and to teach them how to study God’s Word and pray.
Billy Graham
Wisdom of the Ages: "Brian Williams Week" Just like me in 2003, it looks like Brian Williams ended up "Between Iraq and a Hard Place.
Matthew Heines
his had disappeared. “Did you know they have mystical powers?”  
Desiree Holt
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Walter Dean Myers
I've never written a quote I feel would be suitable for my gravestone. Wouldn't it be ironic if it were this one? Oh, and could you pull a few weeds while you're here?
Ryan Lilly
People should be more careful about what they read to their kids,” Park said. “Some of this stuff sounds dangerous.
Jennifer Crusie
90% of all failures in life are those who have the habit of making excuses.
George Washington Carver
Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?
Margaret Titzel