Quotes by American Authors - Page 513

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.
Ken Liu
I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Every sea to scare the sailor, I have sailed.
Patrick Stump
In part. She sat down and pulled her necklace out of her shirt. "I read about it in my mother's journal. The Witches believe we are all parts of a whole. Like the phases of the moon. Together, we complete the circle and bring balance.
Amber Argyle
....you can overcome sadness, loneliness, even terrible loss. But guilt goes with you the grave.
Jodee Blanco
Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though he or she may be unaware of the fact. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. But out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society.
Rollo May
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
T.S Eliot
When life hands you lemons, why stop at lemonade? Create an entire product line.
Gina Greenlee
We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.
Lawrence M. Krauss
A yummy mummy is a dedicated and loving mom who embodies a healthy lifestyle while retaining a sense of the person she was before having kids.
Marina Delio
Gauguin was a stockbroker in Paris, married, had five kids. One day he came home from work and told his wife he was leaving, that he was through supporting the family, that he had had enough. Just like that he fucking took off. He said he had always felt that he was a painter, so he moved to a rat-infested shithole and started painting. His wife begged him to come back, his bosses told him he was insane, he didn't care, he was following his heart. He left Paris, moved to Rouen, went from Rouen to Arles, from Arles to Tahiti. He was searching for peace, contentment, trying to fill that fucking hole he felt inside, and he believed he could fill it. He died in Tahiti, blind and crazy from syphilis, but he did it. He filled his fucking hole, made beautiful work, made beautiful, beautiful work... It takes a brave man to walk away, to care so much that he doesn't care about anything else, to be willing to obey what he feels inside, to be willing to suffer the consequences of living for himself. Every time I stand before his work it makes me cry, and I cry because I'm proud of him, and happy for him, and because I admire him.
James Frey
I pray for my sister. That she be allowed to discover grace and find peace without drugs. That her hair grows. That some of her pain be driven from her and given to me because I think I can handle it. I pray for her kids. That they find they have a chance to grow up knowing they were loved.
Terry McMillan
Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.
Timothy J. Keller
The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.
Michael Adzema
So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.
Thomas Jefferson
Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.
Maureen Dowd
I want to see you shoot the way you shout.
Theodore Roosevelt
What are we going to do, Ayden?" she whispered, glaring up at me."I don't know," I confessed. "But how about we burn that bridge when we get there?""I thought it was 'cross' that bridge?"I lightly poked her in the eye and she laughed. "No. We're burning bridges. Crossing is so overrated." I smiled and touched the corner of her eyes, captivated by the iridescent blues."I think I like the sound of that," she whispered."Yeah?""Yeah.
Nadège Richards
There is not a day that we do not have a chance to choose between the devil’s clever promises and God’s sure Word.
Billy Graham
Most great artists define a new and unique region of hell.
Scott Miller
The evolution of the universe is both mirrored by and incumbent upon your own.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.
William Howard Taft
No more creepy online alter egos in the name of love.
Elizabeth Rudnick
Doesn't the expansiveness of this make you think of the good Lord? Except we know the ocean ends while He goes on forever.
Mindy Starns Clark
Because [the Holy Spirit] is a spirit, [He] isn’t limited by time or space. He can be everywhere at once. He is in the midst of the largest galaxy—and the smallest atom.
Billy Graham
Why do so many today want to wander off to South Africa or Kenya or India or Russia or Honduras or Costa Rica or Peru to help with justice issues but not spend the same effort in their own neighborhood or community or state? Why do young suburbanites, say in Chicago, want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee to help people but not want to spend that same time to go to the inner city in their own area to help with justice issues? I asked this question to a mature student in my office one day, and he thought he had a partial explanation: 'Because my generation is searching for experiences, and the more exotic and extreme the better. Going down the street to help at a food shelter is good and it is just and some of us are doing that, but it's not an experience. We want experiences.
Scot McKnight
We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is notthe same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb.Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say thateverything is equal. It isn’t.It’s easier to see when we take it out of the intensely personal: stubbing your toe hurts. It totally hurts. For a moment, the pain can be all-consuming. You might even hobble for a while. Having your foot ripped off by a passingfreight train hurts, too. Differently. The pain lasts longer. The injury needs recovery time, which may be uncertain or complicated. It affects and impacts your life moving forward. You can’t go back to the life you had before you became aone-footed person. No one would say these two injuries are exactly the same.
Megan Devine
You don't understand the power of loss when it first hits you like a baseball coming fast from an out-of-control pitcher....It's the third day after an injury when the pain really starts to throb.
Joan Bauer
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
Face the fear with face up,and fear will melt away.
Debasish Mridha
In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.
Susannah Cahalan
Your life is unlimited because you are blessed with infinite power of love and kindness.
Debasish Mridha
Too many of us now allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood and direct every ounce of our energy into our children. This sounds noble on the surface but in fact it's doing no one-- not ourselves, or our children -- any good. Because when we lose ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this loss as depression. When we disempower ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this weakness as anxiety. When we desexualize ourselves in our mommy selves, it leads us to feel dead in our skin. All this places an undue burden upon our children. By making them the be-all-and-end-all of our lives, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and them so thoroughly, by giving them so much power within the family when they're very small, we risk overwhelming them psychologically and ill-preparing them, socially, for the world of other children and, eventually, other adults. Nursery school and kindergarten teachers are already complaining that our children are so indulged, made so royal at home, that they come to school lacking compassion for others and with real problems functioning socially.
Judith Warner
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
Susan Sontag
Life is a journey without destination but it unfolds our conscious and subconscious expectations.
Debasish Mridha
Love is such a deep gratitude. When you are truly in love with life, every breath you take is gratitude.
Bryant McGill
Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.
Ian Tattersall
The only existence I know now is the one I was given. An echo of what used to be.
Tahereh Mafi
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.
Cynthia Ozick
Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
Betty Friedan
stay hungry stay foolish
Steve Jobs
Ain’t nobody gonna separate from theircold hard cash unless they have an unresolved problem, so ifyou want to make money, you have to be incredibly clearabout what problem(s) you solve.
Amber Hurdle
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
When we will learn to see, not you and me, but only we, then there will be peace in this world.
Debasish Mridha
Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.
Lynda Barry
I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.
Evan Mandery
A man may have ‘his moment,’ and that moment endure for decades, or only for the few seconds it takes for a bullet to travel across a courtyard to the balcony upon which he stands as he exhorts his people to follow him.
Ralph E. Vaughan
There was no singles problem until singles got so single-minded that they stopped wasting time with anyone ineligible. Before that, it was understood that one of society's main tasks was matchmaking. People with lifelong friendships and ties to local nonprofessional organizations did not have to fear that isolation would accompany retirement, old age, or losing a spouse. Overburdened householders could count on the assistance not only of their own extended families, but of the American tradition of neighborliness.
Judith Martin
Things began happening with odd synchronicity, as if the universe itself was conspiring on behalf of their love story.
John Mark Green
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.
Chuck Palahniuk
You’ve got choices, like any other creature. You can stumble down that road, pretending you can’t help it. You can curl up and die of regret and sorrow for what you’ve done. Or you can get up and fight, even though the battle might be lost.-Finn
Kersten Hamilton
In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses.At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home.And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness.
Ellen Hopkins
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.
Sharon Salzberg
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
Jacob M. Braude
Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.
Deb Caletti
People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
Dean Koontz
Suddenly this defeat.This rain.The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy with treesToo long.Too familiar with mountains.Joy has been a habit.NowSuddenlyThis rain.
Jack Gilbert
We are always growing up. I'm growing up as I type this. An eighty-seven-year-old woman is still technically growing up. So be as immature as you want. Right now, you are the youngest you you're ever going to be.
Mamrie Hart