Quotes by American Authors - Page 55

Ah, jeez... She really is a cheerleader.' And it seemed suddenly that this was true- not because she was an airhead or a hottie or a nonjock, but because she could throw herself so wholeheartedly into someone else's cause, because she could care so much and try so hard from the sidelines.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do: to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land in which men were contented, uncontradicted, and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world, except credit for having intelligence.Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill. The difference between the two girls lay in the fact that Melanie spoke kind and flattering words from a desire to make people happy, if only temporarily, and Scarlett never did it except to further her own aims.
Margaret Mitchell
I find blow jobs to be highly respectable. In fact, I can’t think of many things I respect more than your lips around my cock.
Heather M. Orgeron
I enjoy working for my heat. I don't just press a button or twist a thermostat dial. I use the big crosscut saw and the axe, and while I'm getting my heat supply I'm working up an appetite that makes simple food just as appealing as anything a French chef could create.
Richard Proenneke
‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I pressed my hand against her hair, holding her to me, filled with the certainty that she was going to hurt me again and that I didn't have the strength to push her away before she did.
Maggie Stiefvater
I laugh, and it's laughter, not light, that casts out the darkness building within me, that reminds me I am still alive, even in this strange place where everything I've ever known is coming apart.
Veronica Roth
I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck’s cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.
Jennifer S. Alderson
When asking for advice, search not for what is on the surface, Dig deeper, questioning what does this person believe in?
J.R. Rim
Dear young woman, do not place your sense of beauty and self worth, upon the plastic pedestal called "what other people say to you", "what other people think about your photo", "how many 'likes' your pictures get", "how many guys tell you that you look sexy", "how skinny can you be?". A plastic pedestal that is but the dismal shadow of the real one. Dear young woman, place your sense of self worth and beauty upon the Roman marble pedestal that will exist even when all other people are no longer there. If you were the very last person on this planet, you should still be able to know within your heart that you are worthy, you are beautiful, you are wanted. Even if you become the very last person on Earth, you should be fully wanted. Want yourself. Know yourself. See yourself as beautiful, see yourself as worthy.
C. JoyBell C.
In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live.The wall is immovable.You can’t go anywhere until you learn to move the wall.You are just stuck in the same place, forever.You can tug and tug all you want, there are days that the wall will not move.And there are days that it moves ever so slightly.Over time I have realized that in order to move forward, knowing that I must bring this wall with me, that the best way to do so is to metaphorically flood the soil near the wall with water, and have the wall float with me, instead of me having to carry it.Every act of love and kindness turns to water.Water and love can penetrate and move anything.It just takes time. I need to turn my wall into a raft.
JohnA Passaro
No matter what gifts you have, practice is the only way to get better at anything."If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery it would not seem so wonderful at all” - Michael Angelo
Jonathan Harnum
Snake's LullabyBrother, sister, flick your tongueand taste the flakes of autumn sun.Use these last few hours of goldto travel, travel toward the cold.Before your coils grow stiff and dull,your heartbeat slows to winter's lull,seek the sink of sheltered stonesthat safely cradle sleeping bones.Brother, sister, find the waysback to the deep and tranquil bays,and 'round each other twist and foldto weave a heavy cloak of cold.
Joyce Sidman
What would people think?'Jesus said that people think all sorts of things. The human mind is like a cloud of gnats. Constant motion. That's why you have to look at the heart.'Oh,' said Grandpa.
Garrison Keillor
Well,” Tessa said, sighting along the line of the knife, “you behave as if you dislike me. In fact, you behave as if you dislike us all.”“I don’t,” Gabriel said. “I just dislike him.” He pointed at Will.“Dear me,” said Will, and he took another bite of his apple. “Is it because I’m better-looking than you?
Cassandra Clare
A Christian’s hope is not a possibility but a promise in Jesus.
Jim George
People can cry much easier than they can change.
James Baldwin
While you may be able to keep your son Jimmy from owning [a gun], if you try to talk him out of wanting one, you are up against a pretty strong argument: You mean I shouldn't want a device that grants me power and identity, makes me feel dangerous and safe at the same time, instantly makes me the dominant male, and connects me to my evolutionary essence? Come on, Mom, get real!
Gavin de Becker
She thought about this. She had analyzed it in depth. When you live alone, travel alone, exist solely on the outskirts of other people's lives, you do have time to wonder why what you want most in life is out of reach. You also have the time to tell yourself that you don't want it at all, though whether you can ever be completely convinced is something else.
Barbara Delinsky
The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
John Updike
Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind women in attending college, and have fallen farther in the current economic depression than women, which you'd think would make them interesting subjects of inquiry.
Rebecca Solnit
Love, when spelled backwards and read phonetically, reads evil
Eminem
When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.
Terence McKenna
Nobody gives you respect in this life. You must take it, you must earn it, and then you must hold it sacred, because no matter how hard respect is to attain, it can be lost in an instant." I nodded my head toward the garrison. "Go get it, Roden. People won't follow a leader who doesn't know where he's going. Show them what you do.
Jennifer A. Nielsen
There is nothing to find, only to realize. There is nothing to become, only to be. There is nothing to fear, only to love.
Marianne Williamson
We stand not as victims, but rather to bear witness to the gender injustices present in our lives and in our world as a whole.
William Keepin
You can either feed negative thoughts or you can starve the suckers.
Fawn Weaver
I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
Stephen Levine
Among the responsibilities of any writer is that, no matter what else, they know what they mean. So, even if no one else knows what you're talking about, you do. The listener can sense that, even if they don't get the literal meaning. The faith that they place in the clues and the connections and the secrets of the lyrics is of the utmost importance.
Joanna Newsom
Carolyn – I need you to go back into America. We need an innocent heart. We will offer it to Nobununga when he arrives. Do you think you can handle that?”“An innocent heart? In America?” She hesitated.
Scott Hawkins
Nearly all problems of human behavior stem from our failure to ensure that people live in environments that nurture their well-being.
Anthony Biglan
This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.
Karin Slaughter
There is no need to corrupt people's morals. Their morals have been corrupting them for years.
Marty Rubin
Hell yeah, Alex Cortez wanted to be the best man at his sister's destination wedding. A party in Jamaica or maybe Bora Bora. Bring it on, baby.tThen Luciana had hit him with the real destination: the dilapidated farm in Iowa where they'd grown up.tHell. No.tExcept he couldn't decline, not after she'd waited a full year while he completed his last tour with the Marines so he could attend.
Sara Daniel
There was something distinctly American about it all, a fundamental difference in perspective and place–in how they saw themselves in the world. And this was what made it so American–not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, workers they had never seen or known, whose world they could not begin to understand, not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no,no not that either, but that they felt the need to do something. That they felt they had to power to do something about it. That was what made it so American. That they felt they had the power to do something–they assumed they had that power. They had been born with it–the ability to change the world–and had never questioned its existence, an assumption so massive as to remain unseen. The power and the responsibility to protect the people they imagined as powerless. The poor defenseless people of the Third World. He felts a sudden queasy sadness. What if they knew what a real revolutionary was? How bloody a real revolution. He looked around, suddenly feeling the need to sit, and saw nothing but their faces, their round wet faces staring back at him. What a violence of spirit not to know the world.
Sunil Yapa
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
T.S Eliot
My brother William is a fisherman, and he tells me that when he is in the middle of a fogboundsea the water is a color for which there is no name.
Patricia MacLachlan
When a turbulent mind and wounded heart surrenders to grace, breathing is easy.
T.F. Hodge
To see the true beauty of a person, see through the mirror of your love.
Debasish Mridha
All of life is a trust fall, and I'm awakening to the thrill, rather than the fear, of being suspended midair.
Leigh Ann Henion
Don't tell your friends their social faults they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Logan Pearsall Smith
To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives. - Denis Waitley.
Denis Waitley
Self-knowledge is the foundation stone of every principled person, and any changes of a person’s mutable character commences with an extensive course of self-evaluation. Personal evolution is a product of the independent choices we make. Progress in the development of oneself depends upon how honestly a person judges oneself, and what corrections a person makes to align their character with an ideal version of a self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I mostly drink clear booze because the rest of it looks it's already been through a gentleman.
Christopher Buehlman
The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
Edward I. Koch
Anticipating God's blessings is a great way to begin a new week! When we look for the things that could go wrong, we just may find what we had been looking for.
Diane K. Chamberlain
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom
George S. Patton Jr.
The true call of liberation of women is not in taking off their clothes, but taking off their prejudices.
Shannon L. Alder
Your past is like a bag of bricks; set it down and walk away. Quit collecting every painful word, memory and mistake. Collect hope.
Bryant McGill
The longer you pause to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to learn from it.
Susan Cain
A little hard work, never hurt anyone.
Mary Sage Nguyen
Never forget the nine most important words of any family-I love you.You are beautiful.Please forgive me.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)
David Levien
Her unusual dark hair and sultry eyes made her stand out--- Anne Boleyn was Tudor England's Angelina Jolie amid a sea of Reese Witherspoons.
Kris Waldherr
There’s nothing wrong with fighting when you have no choice. As a matter of fact, it’s what you should do, but when you fight, fight to win.
Dan Groat
you cannot replace negative beliefs with positive ones you can't believe- positive ones that are too ambitious. you must find and choose a thought that allows you to feel relief.
Frederick Dodson
she thought that 9Am was in the middle of the night
Patrick Dennis
Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
I find the best way to love someone is not to change them, but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves.
Steve Maraboli