Quotes by American Authors - Page 484

We must be happy with what we got when we are in pursuit of what we want.
Jim Rohn
When you transplant a rose, transplant the reddest one.
Marty Rubin
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in. A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double. And that is life. A crust and a corner that makes love precious, With a smile to warm and tears to refresh us, And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter. And that is life.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Love doesn't mean anything if you're not willing to make a commitment, and you have to think not only about what you want, but about what he wants. Not just now, but in the future.
Nicholas Sparks
I try to avoid stories that end with...and he was never seen again.
Ken Poirot
The goal of becoming a better person is within the reach of us all, at every moment. ... We need only invoke the power of mindful awareness in any action of body, speech, or mind to elevate that action from the unconscious reflex of a trained creature to the awakened choice of a human being who is guided to a higher life by wisdom. ... We may not "complete" the work in this lifetime and root out the very mechanism by which our minds and bodies manifest their hereditary karmic toxins. Yet to whatever extent we can notice them as they arise, understand them for what they are, and gently abandon our grasp of them - if only for this moment - we are gaining ground in the grand scheme of things. And even a modest moment of emancipation from the unwholesome roots of greed, hatred, and delusion is a moment without suffering.
Andrew Olendzki
We don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.
Mark Manson
No one was getting past him.
Katie Reus
He’d pushed it back, where he’d kept the thought for weeks, but it wouldn’t stay. Wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t let him go.
Veronica Rossi
LOVE IS A FLOWERTreat your relationshipAs if you are growingThe most beautiful sacred flower.Keep watering it,Tend to the roots,And always make sureThe petals are full of colorAnd are never curling.Once you neglect your plant,It will die,As will your relationship.
Suzy Kassem
Falling in love is like getting hit by a truck and yet not being mortally wounded. just sick to your stomach, high one minute, low the next. Starving hungry but unable to eat. hot, cold, forever horny, full of hope and enthusiasm, with momentary depressions that wipe you out.It is also not being able to remove the smile from your face, loving life with a mad passionate intensity, and feeling ten years younger.Love does not appear with any warning signs. You fall into it as if pushed from a high diving board. No time to think about what's happening. It's inevitable. An event you can't control. A crazy, heart-stopping, roller-coaster ride that just has to take its course.
Jackie Collins
It is better to lack the semblance of honor but possess it than to possess the semblance and lack the honor.
Lynn Flewelling
These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.
Catherynne M. Valente
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge
We co-create our reality with others in unseen ways.
Doug Dillon
She was tempted to take the elevator instead of the stairs just this once. But that was how it started. Take the elevator tonight because she was tired and her feet hurt from having been trapped in three-inch stilettos all day, and then tomorrow she'd want to take it because she was running late. Then, the next thing she knew she'd be taking elevators all over the place because she got winded climbing stairs.
Melissa F. Miller
We must remember balance and moderation. Patience can be spiritually enriching and virtuous… but when taken in excess, it turns to procrastination, the poison of inaction.
Steve Maraboli
Certainly we struggle as victims of other people’s unkindness. We have been sinned against. But we cannot excuse our sinful responses to others on the grounds of their mistreatment of us. We are responsible for what we do. We are both strugglers and sinners, victims and agents, people who hurt and people who harm.
Larry Crabb
t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars.
Paul Hoffman
In every heart a waterfall of love is primed to shower the world.
Amy Leigh Mercree
We are what we build
Lois Farfel Stark
Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.
Newton Lee
What pillow can one have like a good conscience?
John Steinbeck
When he had promised himself that he wouldn't try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.
Hanya Yanagihara
A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.
Harlan Coben
I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence.
Sonia Sotomayor
I never want to see umbrellas around me." he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.
David I. Kertzer
We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.
Lemony Snicket
I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.
Mike Birbiglia
Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day.
Vera Nazarian
They hate us because we don't even know why they hate us.
John Powers
All this and the wines coming in and out, and by the time the waiters set the espressos down Callan’s about half in the bag. He watches Calabrese take a long sip from an espresso cup. Then the boss says, 'Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.' One motherfuck of an essay question. 
Don Winslow
At this moment, I have nothing to do or ponder except love and wonder.
Debasish Mridha
Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.""So God uses wicked people as his tools?""God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.""So, in the long run, God always wins?""Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.
Orson Scott Card
My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound.My mind, I hope, will soon be found.
Tahereh Mafi
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.
George R.R. Martin
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Rita Mae Brown
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.
Don DeLillo
The key to a better life isn't always a change of scenery. Sometimes it simply requires opening your eyes.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
John Green
Friends and fire didn’t go well together.
Veronica Bane
But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.
Jennifer Egan
Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure just before it chomps down and gets hauled out of water to become someone's lunch.
Neal Shusterman
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It's an absence--a loss of a heartbeat.
Nadège Richards
Humankind’s greatest gift is that we are indeterminate beings. Unlike the tough and leathery seed of an acorn, which will grow into a magnificent oak tree, none of us has a predetermined final configuration of our ultimate essence. Our mental temperament is pliable. We make conscious and subconscious choices that govern who we become.
Kilroy J. Oldster
She thinks of the way angels arrive, when you lease expect them, when the road is dark, when you're bleeding and alone and hopeless, when you're sleeping in a basement, convinced that no one knows you're there.
Alice Hoffman
Just that sons and fathersAre like mirrors and daughters are soft
Richard L. Ratliff
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
Tom Robbins
Grace represents the sublime glamour of human souls, the ability of physically courageous and emotionally brave people to give part of them in order to protect other people regardless of adverse consequence that they might personally endure.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Being crazy isn't enough.
Dr. Seuss
The key to sticking with any diet is learning how to control hunger and manage cravings.
Josh Bezoni
the hinder portion scalding-house good eating Curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of "mold" on the "muff" sense of "talk" on the "surface" konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascalthat's chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said
Donald Barthelme
Self-transformation commences with a period of self-questioning. Questions lead to more questions, bewilderment leads to new discoveries, and growing personal awareness leads to transformation in how a person lives. Purposeful modification of the self only commences with revising our mind’s internal functions. Revamped internal functions eventually alter how we view our external environment.
Kilroy J. Oldster
All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.
Megan Chance
Make your habits your beloved home.
Debasish Mridha
There are two types of visions. Those that will happen no matter what, and those that can be stopped. Now more than ever, I wish I could tell them apart.
Emlyn Chand
What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.
William Styron