Quotes by American Authors - Page 487

Kindness always works with the most important person — YOU. Be kind for you, not others.
Bryant McGill
Today—be the white clouds full of dreams and hopes in someone’s sky.
Debasish Mridha
They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.
Charles Frazier
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
Coretta Scott King
Veganism is not a "sacrifice." It is a joy.
Gary L. Francione
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.
Albert Einstein
What you are is God’s gift to you. What you can become is your gift to Him.
Henrietta C. Mears
You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?
C. Robert Cargill
It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
Lev Grossman
Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry and what we perceive is how we live.
Laurie Buchanan
THE THINGS POETS & WRITERS DO THAT I LOVEListen to the AncestorsAcknowledge their influences Trust their gut-feelings and act on themMaintain openness. Play Dance with languagesBe bold Refuse servilityAvoid arroganceEmbrace the unknownLove the journey Respect one’s fellow journeyers
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
This is a world where the educated get richer and the uneducated get poorer.
Harry H Harrison
Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.
Seth Grahame-Smith
What you don’t know fills the infinite universe. What you do know only fills your mind.
Linda Deir
Sophronia felt bound to object. "I, for one, should prefer not to shoot at someone I like.""Admirable scruples, Miss Temminnick. Get over them. For you will do it anyway.
Gail Carriger
Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but hte future will come as it ocmes and will not be hurried.
Dean Koontz
Maybe, because all these good people loved me enough to help me, maybe I wasn't quite as bad as I felt. Maybe there was a part of me that was worthy of their love.
Piper Kerman
I do benefits for all religions. ... I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope
Sometimes the grandest of all events are described in the poverty of a few simple words.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. 
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. 
The world will not have it. 
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. 
It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. 
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. 
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. 
Keep the channel open.
Martha Graham
It’s a . . . transcendental act. Making life. . . . ‘By this act, I bring one death into the world.’ One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between. . . . Our children change us . . . whether they live or not.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Each of us will have our own Fridays—those days when the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays. But I testify to you in the name of the One who conquered death—Sunday will come. In the darkness of our sorrow, Sunday will come. No matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come. In this life or the next, Sunday will come.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia
I have yet to see Satan overcome a truly joyful Christian.
Billy Graham
The man and husband of the household is responsible for the way your family’s income is managed.
Jim George
It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.
Steven L. Peck
Death is only a translation of life into another language.
Francis Marion Crawford
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
James Broughton
The monster was still submerged deep inside of me.
Nely Cab
I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a "bad girl." Mariah was a good girl, supposedly Christian, turning very bad, in the late 90's. So then, all the other little girls and teens and women across America thought it would be ok for them to "come out" too essentially, or flaunt whatever they had. Modesty went completely out the window for many women, starting in the late 90's.
Lisa Bedrick
Popular culture has made it okay to yell "I want a man!" from the rooftops, so why are we still embarrassed to say, "I want a best friend"?
Rachel Bertsche
Every human being has divinity encased within its spirit and it is the task of its creator as well as itself to set it free. No human being is an end product, every being still breathing is a creation still under creation.
Toni Sorenson
Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation
Angela Y. Davis
I believe in the goodness of imagination.
Sue Monk Kidd
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
Bell Hooks
Poetry will die when love and pain cease to exist.
Kellie Elmore
Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
Something tells me there’s more than one shaman in Vegas who performs weddings. I think we’re better off intercepting them at the fight.”“But they could be getting married right now!” Ivy protested, falling into a double-time step to keep up with his pace.“Lucky we’re in Vegas, then. They have quickie divorces to go with their quickie weddings.
Linda Morris
Jace turned to look over his shoulder, the wind whipping his hair into tangles. "What are you thinking?" he called back to her."Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.""Everything down there is exactly the same," he said. "You're the one that's different.
Cassandra Clare
This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Emily Dickinson
The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.
Henry David Thoreau
Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.
Margaret George
If you have to fall in love, fall in love with the magnificent beauty of a sunset. That love will beautify yourself and your world.
Debasish Mridha
When I look closely at dairy, I see the hurtful exploitation of specifically female bodies so that some people can enjoy sensual pleasures of consumption while others enjoy the psychological pleasure of collecting profits from the exertions of somebody else's body. Cows are forcibly impregnated, dispossessed of their children, and then painfully robbed of the milk produced by their bodies for those children. No wonder I didn't want to see my complicity! Most women don't consciously perceive the everyday violence against girls and women that permeates and structures our society. How much harder it is, then, to see the gendered violence against nonhuman animals behind the everyday items on the grocery store shelf. When we, as women, partake of that violence, we participate in sexism even as we enjoy the illusory benefits of speciesism. No wonder a glimpse of the sexist violence behind my breakfast cereal left me dizzy.
pattrice jones
There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations
Jodi Picoult
A message from God... If You Accept It... I Would Give You the Glorious Gift of Seeing Yourself Exactly as I see You... And I See You as Perfection and of Immeasurable Importance.
Raymond D. Longoria Jr.
Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts
Sherman Alexie
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times it's the only time we've got.
Art Buchwald
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.
N K Jemisin
No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
[Piper] rushed to get dressed. By the time she got up on deck, the others had already gathered—all hastily dressed except for Coach Hedge, who had pulled the night watch. Frank’s Vancouver Winter Olympics shirt was inside out. Percy wore pajama pants and a bronze breastplate, which was an interesting fashion statement. Hazel’s hair was all blown to one side as though she’d walked through a cyclone; and Leo had accidentally set himself on fire. His T-shirt was in charred tatters. His arms were smoking.
Rick Riordan
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
Herbert Hoover
America, I know we have our problems. I realize that the scale and our waistlineare foremost among them. I’m willing to make concessions, I really am. I drink, and prefer, skim milk. I’ll take water packed tuna over oil packed tuna any day. I can stomach low-fat ranch or I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Anything. I’ll even look the other way on sugar free ice cream (believe me that one hurts), but I’ll be darned if I’m gonna let somebody take my delicious delicious pig fat from me. I’d rather die.
Aaron Blaylock
There are people who eat only organic food, and then there are people who don’t have tons of money to waste.
Jim Gaffigan
God hears no more than the heart speaks and if the heart be dumb God will certainly be dumb.
Thomas B. Brooks
There are ultimate truths you cannot hide from no matter how high you climb or how long you sit alone. Everything is on its way somewhere, even if that place feels like nowhere.
LeighLa Graham
I am not a snob, because I know opulence doesn't stamp out ignorance and unhappiness.
Sarina Bowen
People don’t realize, he said, how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart.” J. Krishnamurti. “The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices.
Deepak Chopra
The world's supply of heartache is secure. There's love and hate and mayhem everywhere.
Thomas Lynch