Quotes by American Authors - Page 449

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.
Garth Risk Hallberg
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
E.L.Doctorow
It's just like John Mayer says in "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room". When it's this bad, you have to get out or you'll get burned.
Susane Colasanti
I'm tired of being set upon by crazed Christians one minute and unbridled libertines the next. Girls, I'm going camping.
Bailey White
To make a true choice, we must have true knowledge.
Cassandra Clare
Joy, humor, and laughter should be part of everyone's spiritual life. They are gifts from God and help us enjoy creation.
James Martin
If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.
Eula Biss
You will be able to do great things when you know and truly understand that all you really have and can control is your own life. Everything else is second to that.”~ShirLee McGarry~ 06/12/2010
ShirLee McGarry
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.
Orson Scott Card
If pinpointing God's presence were really that simple, then he supposed the beaches would be more crowded in the mornings. They would be filled with people on their own quests, instead of people jogging or walking their dogs or fishing in the surf.
Nicholas Sparks
What a waste.” The woman sighed and moved away. Looking at Victoria, she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together absently. “Burn him. Slowly. From the inside out.
Heather McVea
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
Donna Tartt
They live in human memory, man. That's what keeps them alive.
Rick Riordan
This girl is the rest of my life.
Colleen Hoover
Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
John Crowley
There are no lack of ideas in the Universe… and there is such joy entering into that abundant stream with other connected souls.
Liz Hester
When I near Charlie’s house, I notice she’s standing in the doorway with a spatula in her hand. Despite being on edge, I can’t stop myself from grinning. I feel like such a chick around her sometimes, like I’m seconds away from buying a tiara and starting my period.
Victoria Scott
If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?
Cathleen Schine
Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a “negativity bias” that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we’re feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.
Sharon Salzberg
Peter had spent his whole life in a town where fights were either drunken and friendly, or silent and petty. True war was foreign to him. He thought of how scared and confused he had been when the battle broke out in the Nest; he was in a different world now.
Jonathan Auxier
...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.
Michael Copperman
I remember feeling that pieces of me were scattered around the world; I belonged to her, Mother Earth.
Raquel Cepeda
Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Dreams deny her the freedom she truly seeks. Darkness consumes. Leg muscles burn. She runs away, even while lost in the paradise of sleep. Gravity is a crushing force bearing down on her chest, shattering wings and refusing her flight. A whisper in her mind. You don’t belong here.
Laura Kreitzer
so many thoughts, my kvothe. you know too much to be happy.
Patrick Rothfuss
Most of the time romance isn't even about love, anyway. It's about escape. Fantasy. Salvation from the mundane. Save me from boredom, from exhaustion, from my undersexed body, from microwave dinners and reality TV, from going to bed alone with a vibrator or a cat. Save me from my desperately ordinary life.
Leah Raeder
By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.
Michael Pollan
Growth occurs unabated free of obstacles.
Phil Wohl
THE NAKED HEARTFrom womb to tomb,There came and went -Only you.Poor or rich,You will die withOnly you.All the wealth you harvestIn the living,Will go to others when you are dead.But the true test of a lion of God -Is to keep giving with your own hands,Before you rest in your final bed.
Suzy Kassem
The war for peace can destroy the whole world.
Debasish Mridha
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer
Now, whatever you do, don't say anything, because no one must know that Liberace is gay.""Excuse me?" I said. "I'm eight. I know he's gay.
Alison Arngrim
Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.
Eric Metaxas
Even if you have been having sex for years with many people, you can still become a "secondary virgin." That occurs when you repent of previous sexual sins and then determine not to be intimate with anyone until you are married. It will require discipline to stay in the hallway of doors, but it still bring the sweet benefits of healthiness, greater self-respect, and above all, harmony with the King. He will honor you for doing what is right.
James C. Dobson
To be whole simply requires paying attention to oneself
Gary Hopkins
Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.
Sarah Manguso
It's a big spooky place when you're in it alone. It's like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a church can be creepy when it's empty. You ever been in a church after hours?
Benjamin R. Smith
When opposition presses (OPPRESSION) one has to persevere, press, push back but never allow yourself to be pressed like a grape unless the juice is your victory wine.
Eveth Colley
I can't. You can't rewrite the past.
Jay Asher
They have money and position and Ann has none.It's amazing how often you can be right as long as you have those two things working in your favor.
Libba Bray
Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.
Rachel Hartman
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
Eudora Welty
Living in the past, can only hold those who live there, as its prisoners.
Ellen J. Barrier
Owning less is better than organizing more.
Joshua Becker
It had been along time since I breached the surface of the world above. My parents wouldn’t allow it. So as far as I knew, the survivors that remained were savages. I’d seen a few things before our colony was built and most of the inhabitants left ran wildly through the bare, desert terrain, filth covering them from head to toe, bones protruding their leathery skin, and foam dripping from their mouths in search of one thing…Nourishment.
Lauren Hammond
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
Austin O'Malley
Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?
IRVIN D.YALOM
summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.
Deb Caletti
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.", O Magazine, November 2009]
Junot Díaz
We can say "Peace on Earth." We can sing about it preach about it or pray about it but if we have not internalized the mythology to make it happen inside us then it will not be.
Betty Shabazz
Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.
Wally Lamb
One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.
Paul Theroux
We need to empower every single child no matter who you are, no matter where you come from to have the best education and the best future.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, contstantly under attack and in need of stength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies.
Charles Frazier
The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
Gregory Maguire
Those who fixate on what could have been are bound to miss what already is.
Sara Secora
I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.
Marina Keegan
If there is no love for others, love of country is just a slogan.
T.F. Hodge
The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
Lily King
He has a sellsword's conscience, she realized then. That is to say none at all.
George R.R. Martin