Quotes by American Authors - Page 472

The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them--but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey.
Matthew Woodring Stover
You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.
Rebecca Solnit
I used to have more tolerance for these views, but I am losing patience with what I see. The test of anything is the fruit it bears. I see no good fruit being born.
Charles M. Schulz
Maxim 20: If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
Howard Tayler
Life is too short to spend another moment imprisoned by the will of another.
M.K. Williams
I had a lump in my throat the size of a bundt cake pan.
Jessica Soffer
If you truly want to know a person, talk to their enemies.
Jamie Leanne Gaines
The key to finding happiness in this life is realizing that the only way to overcome is to transcend; to find happiness in the simple pleasures, to master the art of just being.
Brianna Wiest
In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
For a long while. Finally she says, I don't believe in love. Not sure it really exists, but even if it does for some people, it won't for me. She is serious. Then she lightens up. But, hey, if you think you love me, cool.
Ellen Hopkins
Conversions were easy, but making full-time disciples was hard.
Larry Eskridge
There's nothing sexier than confidence, and nothing dumber than over-confidence. Life is all about where you draw the line between the two.
Michael Makai
I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The dream came again—three times in three nights and always at the first of the year.
Jettie Necole
Our way is not soft grass it's a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards forward toward the sun.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
Love is not a maybe thing, you know when you love someone.
Lauren Conrad
Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp.
Laura Hillenbrand
No trade will be made unless they want the thing more than they want their money.
Roy H. Williams
If you think you’re good people, and if you are, how would you know? Is it something you always knew? Or was it something you found? Some people are naturally good at it […]. Is it worth trying to be something you’re not? Just because it’s right?
Jen Wang
But there, in that remarkable room, surrounded by a laughing, rollicking, unseeing collection of London's brightest and wickedest, Pippa's knowledge of anatomy expanded.It seemed there was such a thing as a broken heart.
Sarah MacLean
A thing is only as great as the amount a person is willing to risk for it. If you are not willing to risk anything, then the thing mustn't be so great at all.
Madeline Claire Franklin
Shall I count to ten and then ring a bell before I dive down between your legs?” Dustin teased and sent her a wicked smile.
Kris Cook
Madeline knew how that was. So many people had ideas of what you should and shouldn't do, but in the end you had to decide for yourself.
Ellen Airgood
Sometimes life is unpredictable, as are people.
Julieanne O'Connor
From the moment I could even understand what “respect” was I knew it was not a choice but the ONLY option.
Carlos Wallace
When you consider the many pressures that couples face today, only an iron-clad determination will hold them together for a lifetime. Those who go into marriage with a mushy commitment are likely to wobble and fall apart when the hard times come. And as we all know, hard times will come.
James C. Dobson
All beings desire pleasure, a surcease of need or want, and there is no shame in that.
Sherri L. King
I know about safe sex," Nathan said, interrupting Jack's thoughts. Jack swallowed. "That's good." He smiled at his son, vastly relieved that there would be no hard questions about his own sex life. "What I want to know is..." Nathan stole a quick look back at the tent. "Where is the clitoris exactly?" Jack's smile fell and he opened his mouth. No words came out so he closed it. Nathan had no problem forming his words, though. "And what the heck is a G-spot?
Rachel Gibson
We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.
Sheryl Sandberg
You are my reality, fantasy, daydream, fairytale, music, more than the princess in Cinderella; you are much more than a traditional myth.
Delano Johnson
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Martha Gellhorn
Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
Robert McKee
Is this my purpose?The clouds don't have a lot of answers.
Cynthia Hand
Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?
Carson McCullers
This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don't overdose
Dean Koontz
The youngest one,” she interrupted. “The youngest son, I mean. The one who is unmarried.”“I know who he is.”“Very well, then. What is wrong with him?” At that she cocked her head to the side and waited expectantly.He thought for a moment. “Nothing.”“You—wait.” She blinked. “Nothing?”He shook his head, then shifted his weight a little; his good foot was beginning to fall asleep. “Nothing comes immediately to mind.” It was true. She could do a good deal worse than Gregory Bridgerton.“Really?” she asked suspiciously. “You find nothing at all objectionable about him.”Marcus pretended to think about this a bit longer. Clearly he was supposed to be playing a role here, probably that of the villain. Or if not that, then the grumpy old man. “I suppose he’s a bit young,” he said.
Julia Quinn
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
Susan Sontag
A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
Marisha Pessl
I hope you will simply do what you can do in the best way you know. If you do so, you will witness miracles come to pass.
Gordon B. Hinckley
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely
Christopher J. Nolan
Books ... rarely if ever talk about what children can make of themselves about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child.
John Holt
When you teach them-teach them not to fear. Fear is good in small amounts, but when it is a constant, pounding companion, it cuts away at who you are and makes it hard to do what you know is right.
Christopher Paolini
Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.
Patrick W. Corrigan
Don't waste any of your precious time or energy on negativity. There's no time for that nonsense.
Tanya Masse
My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.
Walter Kirn
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Christopher McCandless
Liz pasted on a smile, trying to appear normal in light of the fact that he had possibly incriminating knowledge on her from the background check. She hoped her application for a marriage license with Craig wasn't in the report. Or her long shopping record for organization systems from The Container Store. Or her many Internet searches for breeds of nonshedding dogs (she was waiting for the house with a yard before getting one). Or her long-time obsession with new cleaning products.
Kylie Gilmore
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. "I never knew a girl to have such gumption," she'd say. "But I'm not too sure it's a good thing.
Jeannette Walls
This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.
Sue Monk Kidd
I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.
Jim Butcher
Many pastors would rather preach God's Word and keep their distance than invest in a personal one-on-one counseling ministry. Most pastors counsel because they have to, not because they want to.
James MacDonald
Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.
Kim Edwards
We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.
Maggie Georgiana Young
Anything you do to overcome or prevent, causes a spotlight on the every thing you are wanting to overcome and prevent. You cannot take enough action to compensate for the Energy that you're flowing.
Abraham-Hicks
The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a single mussel shell, lives a barnacle and a tiny spindle shell occupied by a still smaller hermit crab. And on the shell of the crab? A yet smaller barnacle. And on that barnacle?
Anthony Doerr
Everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.
Sharon Salzberg
I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the longest word in the language, but there’s only one letter between its ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.
George Horace Lorimer
Leo had seen Tia Callida in action; she liked knives, snakes and putting babies in roaring fires. Yeah, definitely let's unleash her rage. Great idea.
Rick Riordan
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
Joseph Campbell
He turned to Harley, the oddly muscular eight-year-old son of Hephaestus. "Want to come with? I might need help with the projector.""A projectile! Yes!" Harley pumped his
Rick Riordan