Quotes by American Authors - Page 557

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.
Asa Gray
We tend to make adjustments in our lives to get by, to survive. Sometimes we don't actually heal. We make changes. We deny. We mask. We cover up. We hide things. I could not change the fact Shellie committed suicide while I was away no more than I could change the fact she left me the poem. Eventually, I put the poem away to separate Shellie and the thoughts of her from my day-to-day life. I quit carrying a wallet because the wallet reminded me of the poem, and the poem reminded me I was helpless.
Scott Hildreth
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
Jonathan Safran Foer
Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.
Brandon Sanderson
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Family' is not just a biological word, it's an an operative one.
Andrew Vachss
Understand, it’s never been easy to live, when we’re trying to escape ourselves.
Kelli Russell Agodon
The USA government sure do like their propaganda feeds! Unfortunately, too much propaganda does create the scenario where no one believes anything that they say. It's just like Pinocchio.
Steven Magee
Well everybody's got a story to tell And everybody's got a wound to be healed I want to believe there's beauty here So, I guess you're tired of holding on I can't let go, I can't move on I want to believe there's meaning here How many times have you heard me cry out "God please take this"? How many times have you given me strength to Just keep breathing? Oh I need you God, I need you now. Standing on a road I didn't plan Wondering how I got to where I am I'm trying to hear that still small voice I'm trying to hear above the noise Though I walk, though I walk through the shadows And I, I am so afraid Please stay, please stay right beside me With every single step I take How many times have you heard me cry out? And how many times have you given me strength? I need you now I need you now
Plumb
Mina’s mouth dropped open, and he bent his head as if to kiss her. She jammed her gun barrel under his chin. He grinned.
Meljean Brook
Scripture was given to the church, and theology is a necessary work of the church, by the church, in the church, and for the church.
Kenneth S. Kantzer
Just take my hand & let us dance under a chandelier of starlight.
Trevor Driggers
It is the doing of your calling that attracts the support of the God of the Universe. When I stepped into that space, the wind in my life changed direction. The doing rallied the Heavens. It was the voice of my faith. If you don’t do out of your being, you aren’t truly showing up. Maybe that’s what’s meant by faith without works is dead. Without it, there are no smoke signals going up to attract the people, resources or opportunities.
Suzette R. Hinton
Values are like Jell-O. They take time to set.
Karla Brandenburg
Well we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever.
Isaac Marion
I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.
Lester Bangs
I turn even more flustered when I remember that I have actually pistol-whipped him in the face before. Romantic.
Marie Lu
Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species created civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore survived to pass his genes on to the next generation. When the big ape men ended up running off the cliff or getting killed while trying to beat a mastodon into submission with a stick, the dreamer was standing back thinking 'Hey, that might work, but you need to run the mastodon off the cliff.' And, then he'd mate with the women left over after the go-getters got killed.
Christopher Moore
I certainly don’t have any interest in being on a dark veranda with any man except my husband, unlike some women do.” - Esther Norman
Barry Gray
The lonely, wistful revisionism of memories is as gratingly repetitive as snow and ice in Canada. I avoid them both at all costs - memories and Canada.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person’s unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person’s exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Michelle, I think it's time you came back to New York with me.
Faith Sullivan
You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
Robert Jordan
He didn't laugh when he thought something was funny--he laughed when he was happy.
Rainbow Rowell
It's kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith.
Neal Shusterman
The stock market is almost magical because it always leads the economy. It goes down long before the economy drops and then heads higher long before the economy rebounds. It always has.
Kenneth L. Fisher
Many things as we have constructed them can be redefined and are neither correct nor incorrect. I love making love to a woman. I love her every quiver, her every movement, her every moan, her every breath. I love the journey my hands make over her every soft curve, the smell of her skin, and I revel in the feminine beauty, unmatched by anything else on this earth. But the core connection is what matters most and, while I don’t know what draws me to the essence of women rather than men or both, I wanted to be swallowed up by exactly that – the mystery of why we don’t want to be without each other.
Jackie Haze
Despite everything - your lies, your wounds, I cannot help but love you. I'm helpless against it.
Jessica Cluess
Paco, we are all so much more than our faults, aren’t we?
R. Elizabeth Carpenter
Undoubtedly, our weariness is not based on the fact that we’re running. Rather, our weariness is all too frequently based on the fact that many of the things that we’re running from are the very things we should be running to.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Always re-invent yourself. Always try new things; new food, new hobbies, meet new people. That will keep your life from becoming stagnant and boring. And you will have a lot more fun!
Lisa Bedrick
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?
Connie Willis
I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once. "Elvii?" Marcone inquired."The plural would be Elvises, I guess," I said. "But if I say that too often, I start muttering to myself and calling things 'my precious,' so I usually go with the Latin plural.
Jim Butcher
Our hearts have already been broken. Maybe I can help to heal hers, even if it means ripping mine to shreds when she leaves and I have to say good-bye.
Debra Doxer
If you're reading this, I hope God opens incredible doors for your life this year. Greatness is upon you. You must believe it though.
Germany Kent
_For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?
Namsoon Kang
[W]hen all else fails, kill it with fire.
Larry Correia
If you become the light of peace there will be no darkness of hatred.
Debasish Mridha
So many people confuse attachment with love. Attachment to someone implies control; loving someone assumes unconditional acceptance. Attachment leads to grief and loneliness when the person is no longernear—or even sometimes when he or she is in the very same room. Love is the realization that there is no distance between you and the other—whether they are across the room, around the world, or beyond the veil of death.
Darren Main
All humans are sentient and sapient beings so they have the ability to perceive, think, and act using their knowledge, experience, insight, and conscience.
Debasish Mridha
It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.
Barack Obama
People want the here and now, rather than the there and after; as most are living in the where and what.
Anthony Liccione
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.
Timothy J. Keller
Everything they've said is tainted now. Every day was a lie.
Lindsey Leavitt
We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.
Gloria Steinem
To love me, my family does not need to understand me.
Julia Glass
We only came close to dying six or seven times which I thought was pretty good. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately that something was my face.
Rick Riordan
Your relationship or lack of relationship with God through Jesus Christ continues after your last breath on this earth.
Alisa Hope Wagner
Life becomes easier and more beautiful when we can see the good in other people.
Roy T. Bennett
Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.
Erin Morgenstern
You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.
Margaret Heffernan
Winston and his sister walked for a time in silence, each in an invisible, vibrating pocket of excitement.
Eric Berlin
They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.
Anaïs Nin
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
Mark Twain
While learning others, respect demands that one never takes issue with another's freedom to choose their 'get down' - their way of living... and don't be mad. But carefully listen, observe, and compare mental notes before you open your heart's desire -- to make a clear determination what's in your best interest. If you already know how the story ends, and it doesn't fit you, keep [the] proper distance in perspective, in any form(s) of relationship, for the love of self. It may be disappointing, but you'll eventually discover the right one deserving of your full attention. Or, you may be surprised by their sudden awakening to your worthiness. Walk slowly, especially, when it comes to matters of the heart.
T.F. Hodge
Ah men do not know how much strength is in poise that he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
James Russell Lowell
Sometimes I just want to burn down all the rules and start over.
Libba Bray
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.
Kristin Hannah
If anything in nature was as beautiful as it was deadly, it was she.
Randy C. Dockens