Quotes by American Authors - Page 479

There was no helping her tears. For they would leave Po behind… She cried into his shoulder like a child. Ashamed of herself, for it was only a parting, and Bitterblue had not wept like this even over a death. ‘Don’t be ashamed,' Po whispered. ‘Your sadness is dear to me. Don’t be frightened. I won’t die, Katsa. I won’t die, and we’ll meet again.
Kristin Cashore
We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.
Neal Stephenson
Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.
Jack Kerouac
Sometimes you know when someone is telling you the truth.
Todd Strasser
Let kindness be the flower of your heart and fragrance of your mind. Let it fill the world with peace, joy and the fragrance of kindness.
Debasish Mridha
Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
Jodi Picoult
We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.
Eric Hansen
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
J.D. Salinger
I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First let her think she's having her way. And second let her have it.
Lyndon Johnson
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Carl Sagan
Adventure, yeah. I guess that's what you call it when everybody comes back alive.
Mercedes Lackey
A purposeful act or extension of kindness to another is never wasted, for it always resides in the hearts of all involved in a chain of love.
Molly Friedenfeld
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle but to make them long for it.
Louis Simpson
I asked "What do you even do with a chimera?""What wouldn't you do with a chimera?" Jeff asked. "They're like the Swiss Army knife of animals.
Chloe Neill
I perceived quite early that I was a reader, and most of the people I came into contact with were not. It made a barrier. What they wanted to talk about were things they had eaten, touched, or done. What I wanted to talk about was what I had read.
Frederik Pohl
A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge and it ain't worth it.
Louis L'Amour
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
The Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.
Mark Galli
If life didn't end,' he said, 'there would be no need for me. To choose love in the face if death is the ultimate act of courage. I am the joy, but you are the meaning. Together, we make humanity more that it otherwise might have been.
Martha Brockenbrough
Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental position of choice in modern life. “I have chosen you,” Jesus said, “you have not chosen me.” We are not our own; we have been bought with a price. We have no rights, only responsibilities. Following Christ is not our initiative, merely our response, in obedience. Nothing works better to debunk the pretensions of choice than a conviction of calling. Once we have been called, we literally “have no choice.
Os Guinness
The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence.
Michael Meade
There is no way to tell if we are the pioneers of a visionary new age, whisking humanity into the high vibrations of an interdimensional love party, or post-modern Don Quixotes attacking techno-industrial windmills with our flimsy, rolled-up yoga mats.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
I thought about being a teacher for three thousand years. It wouldn’t have made my Top Ten Things to Wish For list.
Rick Riordan
All manners are not created equal and can conjure different interpretations based on the environment in which they are being displayed.
Susan C.Young
I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.
Howard Zinn
It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Nathanael West
Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.
Mary McCarthy
Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I've substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
Victor Borge
Dance comes naturally to us when we're little but fades when we get older. Too many people let the stresses of life get them wound up. I think there's something to be said for cutting loose and having a good time. And hey, people even danced in Bible days.
Janice Thompson
It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?
Eric Foner
...some people become hypercritical when stressed.Then again, he hadn't been stressed last week. She giggled, remembering how he'd instructed her on the proper way to fold hand towels. Talk about nitpicky. Perhaps this would be a good time to call it quits.
Cherise Sinclair
It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.
Emma Cline
They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.
Darnell Lamont Walker
When they’re together, the world could fall apart around them and they’d never notice or care as long as they have each other.
Simone Elkeles
...by the end of my first week as an intern, I am just about ready to throw my pager out the window. A high window. Overlooking a trash compactor. Filled with highly corrosive acid.
Michelle Au
Father, I can’t take this,” I said. “Why not?” “Because you’re a priest, Father.” “And my money’s no good because of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?” “Naw, Father,” I said. “I just feel guilty taking money from you.” “Well, you’re Irish and Jewish. You have to feel guilty over somethin’, don’t ya? Take the money and be happy ye have it.
John William Tuohy
You know, sometimes it's nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.
Lois Lowry
In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry
Krista Tippett
Ally turnedher attention back to Brian Byrne. "So what do you do for a living when you're not searching outyour roots?""Have sex with thousands of women." He slanted her a grin that would've knocked her offher feet if she wasn't already laid out flat by his comment. "Professionally, of course.""Well, that makes it okay then." A porn star? Her instinct said no. But her instinct had alsothought Dave was a great guy when she first met him. How wrong was that? Hmm. What elsecould Brian be? How about crazy? Sounded logical to her. She was alone with a crazy man. Asexy crazy man, but crazy was still crazy.
Nina Bangs
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Tennessee Williams
Actually, Jake said, isn't life what we make it, wherever we are, whenever we may be - wherever it is that we are?
Heather Graham
The echo of a platitude.
Ambrose Bierce
How we love others is affected by how we love ourselves, and for the first time in a long time, I was whole.
Richelle Mead
It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We've all lost something along the way.
Po Bronson
I want to be like Jesus in my heart.
Reverend Ada Slaton Bonds
Love the peace not the war,love the humanity and take care.
Debasish Mridha
Friendship is a give and take. You have to have a strong relationship with your friend and I think you have to offer them something and they have to offer you something and that’s to always learn from it.
Raven Symone
So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it.""There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice."That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry.""For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries.""And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland.""So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.
L. Frank Baum
A crossbow?” Pigeon asked.I left my battle-ax in my other jeans,” the man said.
Brandon Mull
You want to know why I am giving you a choice, Gabriel? I’ll tell you why. There is a core inside of you that has never been touched, not by me, not by Michael, not by Mademoiselle Childers. I want to see what it will take to break into that core. I want to see it now.
Robin Schone
My ultimate authority would be the school librarian Mrs. Greenbacher.
Shawn Stewart Ruff
Diplomacy was a long game.
H.W. Brands
Some of the most healing words in any language are, “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” How much more we need that confession to our Father in heaven.
Billy Graham
The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.
Geraldine Brooks
Own your growth and your schedule!
John Di Lemme
Only in America can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines, and still call yourself 'pro-life.
John Fugelsang
Syn tightened his seat belt as God drove like a damn lunatic through the city. He was now on the interstate doing over a hundred miles an hour.“If the person’s already dead, what’s the damn rush, Cash?” Day grumbled, obviously not liking God’s driving either.God ignored his passengers and swerved over four lanes, cutting off an eighteen-wheeler and just missing the barrier as he took the exit ramp at seventy.“Got a real heavy foot there, don’t you Lieutenant?” Syn gritted through clenched teeth.God let out a grunt as sharp green eyes caught Syn’s reflection in the rearview mirror.Please just watch the fucking road.
A.E. Via