Quotes by American Authors - Page 457

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
Edith Wharton
There are a lot of conventions, a vocabulary and a set of practices and assumptions that underlie most professional book design. Since design is important to the eventual success of your book whether you attempt to do it yourself or hire it out, it pays to know something about those conventions and assumptions. After all, we don’t want anything getting in the way of your communication with your readers. You’ve got a message for them, a story to tell, or ideas to spread. That’s what’s important.
Joel Friedlander
People can always say I don't look impressive enough, but they can't argue over how strong I am once I punch them in the face.
F.C. Yee
Faith is an assent of the mind and a consent of the heart consisting mainly of belief and trust.
E. T. Hiscox
We are all born to love people and use things. Unfortunately, we grow to love things and use people...
T. Rafael Cimino
Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit
Kate Karyus Quinn
There is more stupidity around than hydrogen and it has longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
Seconds later, the female security officer grabbed a pair of my father's shorts from the top of the duffel bag, and emptied out the contents of his pockets. A lighter, three nail files, a pocket wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a nectarine fell onto the folding table. I looked at the woman, looked at my father, and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching. "What's the problem?" my father asked the woman. "Sir, I'm going to have to take this lighter away from you," she said. "The lighter?" I asked her. "What about the bomb kit he's carrying around? He could do a lot more damage to a person with that wrench." "I need the wrench!" he shrieked. "For what?" "What if something goes wrong with the plane?
Chelsea Handler
I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up.("New York Blues")
Cornell Woolrich
Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.
R. H. Dana
I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room.Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.
Bob Dylan
Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages, Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sagesBeat through these bindings; and my quick hand slipsOld books from dusty shelves, in eager seekingFor truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;For the words of wisdom that they still are speakingAs clearly as an echoing silver bell.Here is the melody that lies foreverAt the deep heart of living; here we keepThe accurate recorded discs that neverCan be quite silenced, though their makers sleepThe still deep sleep, so long as a seeker findsThe indelible imprint of their moving minds.
Grace Noll Crowell
Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.
Aberjhani
I roamed alone;O, barren dreams.My echoed voice,what lonely comfort.Here is my salvation:I hear the triumph drum;the rhythm of the rising,the long-awaited sun.
Craig Froman
This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.
Elizabeth Strout
Claims have been made that I've been on a strict workout routine regulated by co-stars, whipped into shape by trainers I've never met, eating sprouted grains I can't pronounce and ultimately losing 14 pounds off my 5'3" frame. Losing 14 pounds out of necessity in order to live a healthier life is a huge victory. I'm a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I'd have to part with both arms. And a foot.
Scarlett Johansson
As we open our hearts, what we notice is that information starts opening up for us in an unfolding process, as if life were being revealed layer by layer.
Catherine Carrigan
The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something
Richard Saul Wurman
Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.
John Steinbeck
(...) I'm not much of anything, (...) besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are ...?
Chip Kidd
I came all prepared for a lapis show-and-tell, but you know more about it than I do."...tLindsey gave him a pleading look and brushed her fingertips over the back of his hand, sending tingles up his arm. "Show me."...t"When it's cut and polished like this, it practically glows. Golden specks of pyrite dance across the blue, like stars in a denim sky.
Tracy March
He paused and looked up at her with the gleam of a predator in his gaze. She shivered at the intensity, more than happy to be his prey.
Katie Reus
It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.
Larry McMurtry
I don't damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.
James Patterson
Not knowing who you are is a certain kind of hell.
Kelly Thompson
Discover how wonderful you are. Love who you are, with all your faults. Focus on the unique gifts you bring to the people around you, to the world. Making this a daily practice will shift your life.
Eileen Anglin
Pride that dines on vanity sups on contempt.
Benjamin Franklin
Most women beg me to lick them, and I give it to you for free and you push me away,” he said with a fake pout on his face.“You’re crazy.” I giggled“I’m the good kind of crazy, though.
Abbi Glines
Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.
Richelle E. Goodrich
In the sense of Lewis, I am a moderately 'good man'".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul.
José N Harris
Then the angels, the demon, and the Nephilim flew to distant corners of the sky, leaving a moment's brilliant flash of light behind them, as below, Luce and Daniel fell in love for the first-and the last- time
Lauren Kate
Somehow, even outside the library and our clearing in the woods, we were still in our own world. Everything else could fade away, and he and I would remain, tied together by something I couldn't quite expline. In its simplest term, love.
Rachel Schieffelbein
Do ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Gregg Harris
Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.
Ray Bradbury
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime and should be taken in small doses.
Russell Baker
Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.
Anthea Carson
The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.
Wendell Berry
One day a week I seek to rest from earthly toil and sorrow.Revitalized, I find the strength to battle new tomorrows.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.
Barry López
Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.
E B White
Wrong way to think about it. Don't try to figure it out all at once.
Jed Rubenfeld
And the Earth Becomes my ThroneI adapt to the UnknownUnder Wandering Stars I've grownI ask no one.
Metallica
...our loves ones truly are ever-present. We may bury their bodies or scatter their ashes, but their spirits are boundless and do not accompany them to the grave. The terms 'letting go' and 'closure' are just empty words. They mean nothing to someone who has suffered through the death of a loved one. Instead of insisting on figuratively burying our dead, why not keep them close to us? Love doesn't die when we do.
April Slaughter
See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.
J.P. Donleavy
Your friendship is like a kiss that makes my heart young again and wipes out the years of darkness and destruction sure does remind me of Joel 2:25
John M Sheehan
We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.
Madeline Miller
The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’tFor more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.
Michelle Alexander
I feel like I’ve been split open and stuffed with sunshine.
Tahereh Mafi
The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.
Marcus J. Borg
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.
Stephenie Meyer
Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,and let my obedience align itself with such iron      conditionsthat the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shakethe deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
Mark Eisner
The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.
Louisa May Alcott
The folly and the glory of the world... the wild, the wise and the wicked... the hero, the madman, the wanderer and the fool... the earth, the seas, the wild heavens... are all part of an endless, unfolding tapestry, woven by time and hemmed by memory.
Brian Holguin
God condemns those who oppress and take advantage of others.
Jim George
People are always telling women to lose weight, and then when they do, other women attack them for it.
Candace Bushnell
@mink: Well, you’re in luck, if you pick another movie. My hair is clean, I usually eat dinner around eight, and I’m currently single. Not that it matters.
Jenn Bennett
It is the possibility that keeps me going, and though you may call me a dreamer or a fool or any other thing, I believe that anything is possible.
Nicholas Sparks
You don't become the best if you aren't willing to stick your hand in the fire.
Rachel E. Carter