Quotes by American Authors - Page 51

Good literature boils down to two things: How interesting is the story you are telling, and how interesting is your telling.
Hillel F. Damron
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James
See that's where you're wrong baby. When you find your man, it's almost too easy. Gettin' married and havin' a mortgage, kids and a business to run and findin' a way to stay in love day in day out, that's the tougher part. But the beginning'… that parts easy as pie. That's why they call it fallin' because it happens before you have time to stop yourself.
Rachel Hollis
Kyle's throat caught. His boastful expression turned to panic. He made the universal sign of choking at her, and stamped his feet like a child having a temper tantrum in the candy aisle. Chloe did not move.
Christa Carmen
Accept that you will not always deal with situations with polished sophistication but trust that you have the power and exercise the will to improve how you cope.
Carlos Wallace
Into this world, this demented innin which there is absolutely no room for him at all,Christ comes uninvited.
Thomas Merton
Olive was way beyond hearing anything, but her chin was set and she was determined to help the pilot so that he would not be too afraid before they hit the earth. She smiled and nodded again. At the end of each stunt he looked back, and each time she encouraged him. Afterward he said over and over, "She's the goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!
John Steinbeck
the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.
Cormac McCarthy
We might miss the days of being unreachable.
Melanie Gideon
She’s adorable .” “How would you know?” “I’m gay, not blind. Her hair’s all poofy and she’s got a great nose. I mean, a great nose. And, what? What do you people like? Boobs? She seems to have boobs. They seem to be of approximately normal boob size. What else do you want?
John Green
Just because you may not feel confident about doing something now does not mean you will not master it later with ease.
Susan C.Young
Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time.
Robert Duchnik
For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.
Ron Suskind
The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence.
Nicole Krauss
When we do good—even when others are doing wrong—God will bless us.
Billy Graham
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. LeGuin
I had two cups of coffee, put Eric's jeans in the washer, read a romance for awhile, and studied my brand-new Word of the Day calendar, a Christmas gift from Arlene. My first word of the New Year was 'exsanguinate.' This was probably not a good omen.
Charlaine Harris
I trail my fingers across his cheek. He stays perfectly still for me. "Please stop apologizing, Etienne.""Say my name again," he whispers.I close my eyes and lean forward. "Etienne."He takes my hands into his. Those perfect hands, that fit mine just so. "Anna?"Our foreheads touch. "Yes?""Will you please tell me you love me? I'm dying here."And then we're laughing. And then I'm in his arms, and we're kissing, at first quickly - to make up for lost time - and then slowly, because we have all the time in the world. And his lips are soft and honey sweet, and the careful, passionate way he moves them against my own says that he savors the way I taste, too.And in between kisses, I tell him I love him.Again and again and again.
Stephanie Perkins
You can't build a wall round a village.The sun and the windwill always find their way in.
Igor Goldkind
Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.
A.E. Samaan
This was not the perfect work that had existed in her mind. It was only the imperfect rendering that was the best her skill could manage. Yet Giulia was not dismayed. For she knew that she would try again – and again, and again, for as long as it took to gain the experience, the judgment, the understanding to get it right. And perhaps she never would get it right. Perhaps she would never attain that flawless blue, never create that perfect image, never find the ultimate point of balance between what she could accomplish an what she could dream. Yet wasn’t that the point? To be drawn onward, ever onward, in pursuit of your deepest passion? To look back at the end fo the race and knew that you had never done less than the most you could do?
Victoria Strauss
There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.
Frederick Buechner
...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.
Edith Wharton
Courage and fear were one thing too.
John Steinbeck
Life's most important lessons are not found in the lesson plans.
Tamara L. Chilver
My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.
Brandon Sanderson
This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?
Suzy Kassem
That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them.
Justin Halpern
Lara Jean, why do you have to remember every little thing? It's not healthy.
Jenny Han
Just as a woman's eyes are the mirrors of her soul, her shapely bottom is her seat of learning.
Russ Michael
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan W. Watts
If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.
Larry McMurtry
If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?"Make them stay."And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?"Ellie shrugged. "I don't know."Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first," Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away.
Jodi Picoult
As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.
John Dewey
Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom
Michael Cunningham
One of the bridges between sexes, to be sure, is sex. But men, too often feeling deficient in discourse, place too much emphasis on intercourse.
James Hollis
The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)
Tara Leigh Cobble
No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; paper lanterns among the dark trees.
Carole Borges
People talk about how fast life can go from good to bad. How on day you're happy, everything is going fine, and then something happens. Someone dies or someone leaves. There's an illness or an accident. Life as you know it slips away. But it can got the other way too. You can go from god-awful to pretty OK in a single day. That's what happened to us, and it was just as jarring.
Laura M. Flynn
The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.
Rick Yancey
Fear says that what God has called me to is blatantly impossible. Selfishness says that the cost is unacceptably prohibitive. My humanity harbors other lesser agendas that seduce me to my own death. And I would be wise to believe none of it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Someday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
Paul Hawken
The tears are falling freely now, and I don't care if he sees them. They're tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure I earned them.
Teresa R. Funke
To have abundance, appreciate what you have with great love and share your possessions with joy.
Debasish Mridha
No" she jerked back, stared up at him.Her eyes were like thunderclouds. He'd never seen them like that. Shock and fear filled them. Her face was paper white. Her body shuddering."Don't you leave me!" She gripped his shirt and tried to shake him, tears falling from her eyes. "Don't you leave Noah."His head lowered. He touched her lips with his and knew this woman held the best part of him. The memories of the husband he had been, the man he had been. He couldn't destroy that. He refuse to.He pushed her to Jordan slowly, loath to let her go. To release her. Knowing that releasing her was the only way to save the memories she held."Don't you leave!" She screamed the order, eyes blazing, her lips trembling as tears fell and hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. "If you leave me, Noah Blake, if you don't come back when this is over, don't bother coming back at all. He touched her cheek. Ran his thumb over her lips. "You are the best part of me," he whispered. "Always remember that, Sabella. The best part of me."Before she could grab him, hold him to her, he pulled away, grabbed one of the rifles Mike had set on the table across the room. And left.
Lora Leigh
The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Happiness can only bloom in the garden of peace.
Debasish Mridha
I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn't involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.
Dan Chaon
Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.
Mario Puzo
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Noble souls through dust and heat rise from disaster and defeat the stronger.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The point wasn't always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well.
Matthew Thomas
The more fucked up you are, the more I like you. As long as you've managed to hold onto your identity through all the shit, then it won't matter how twisted you are. I will love you more for it.
Ashly Lorenzana
I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]
James A. Michener
Honesty must sometimes be taken in small measure, like a bitter medicine.
Jan Cox Speas
It made you happy...
Richelle Mead