Quotes by American Authors - Page 593

Kindness is the magical beauty of a person.
Debasish Mridha
It is not easy but you have to be willing to make mistakes. And the earlier you make those mistakes the better.
Jane Cahill Pfeiffer
all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.
Billy Collins
If it helps you. I forgive you. But i have learned in recent weekd that seeking forgiveness from others is meaningless unless you can forgive yourself.
Maya Banks
It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.
Ashton Applewhite
The Bloodsucker Queen has lived for what, a millennium? She can wait on her decaying ass a little while longer.
Heather Heffner
A wise man will desire no more than what he may get justly use soberly distribute cheerfully and leave con-tently.
Benjamin Franklin
We equate choice with freedom, but they are not the same.
Wayne Muller
Page 15, paperback version by Virago Press 1997: ... Let me ask you this, Mr Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?” ‘No’, I said, shaken by the force of the intese personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. ‘I don´t think I do. If by patriotism you don´t mean the love of one`s homeland, for that I do know.’ ‘No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far. And you, who hardly know what I’m talking about, who show us the new road –‘ He broke off. After a while he went on, in control again, cool and polite: ‘It’s because of fear that I refuse to urge your cause with the king, now. But not fear for myself, Mr. Ai. I’m not acting patriotically. There are, after all, other nations on Gethen.
Ursula K Le Guin
If there are not mothers, where will men come from and who will feed them?
Debasish Mridha
Looking at the glass half full seems to help others do the same and help fill their glasses too.
Emilyann Girdner
In the end, bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren't divisible.
S. Kelley Harrell
He rested a hand over hers. “Ever since I met you, keeping it professional has been practically impossible.”“So it’s true.”“Which part?”“You could get in trouble for seeing me.”He raised her hand to his lips, brushing a kiss to her knuckles. “I can handle a little trouble. How about you?”Scars and a thrill seeker. Gods help her…
Lisa Kessler
It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.
Deb Caletti
Right now in this space, I feel a brand new pull to him. I’ve always been drawn to his features, his brilliance, his laughter, his passion. But right now I’m attracted to his pain. It makes him human. It makes him real. It makes him something he hardly ever is to me: accessible.
Sarah Noffke
Leaders who do not help the people must be replaced by the people.
DaShanne Stokes
They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.
Ray Bradbury
I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.
Dean Koontz
Friendship and sex were really all she wanted from men these days.
Jack Ketchum
If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold.
Ursula K Le Guin
Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.
Geraldine Brooks
And somewhereout there,in the river ofaddicts, alcoholics,wife beaters,doormats,overeducated legalized thieves,fascist police,and bitter rivalries—someone told meit’s a good city,and I don’t knowwhat’s more frightening
Phil Volatile
Destroy yourself. Be on the edge of it all, and right before that weird place tells you to let it go completely; let the energy go in all directions. Falling on your face will never be fun, or purposeful. You don't own energy; you own the inertia!
James Emlund
Of course people are afraid. But honestly facing that fear seeing it for what it is is the only way of putting it to rest.
Harvey Fierstein
I had fallen in love, even if she was still finding her way.
Randy Pausch
I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.p112-13
Brian Doyle
You want to be free. You also want to be mine. You can't be both.
Nenia Campbell
I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them.We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.
Kameron Hurley
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong
Derek Thompson
This I would wish, that there was no time or sleep. No more past, or future, and everything we did was good the first time, for the day. Without the need of looking back to learn from the past, and no future to hope for the better. No more tiredness, or having a need to dream, and no nightmares to fear. If there was a second time, this is how I would like to start over.
Anthony Liccione
What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?…If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or…is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
Donna Tartt
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
Jacob A. Riis
It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.
Marilyn Frye
Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.
Neal Stephenson
The men who followed Jesus were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up.
Billy Graham
Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring fight one more round.
James J. Corbett
She couldn't ignore the disjointed sensation that they were now two different pieces of two puzzles, and nothing in the world could make them fit together again.
Jennifer E. Smith
Some things never change. Not the ABC’s, not the multiplication tables, not God!
Billy Graham
When he stood before her naked, he couldn't believe this beautiful woman, with the pale skin, flaming auburn hair, and eyes the color of spring hay, lay waiting for him.tPhoebe's cheeks flushed a pretty pink. "You look like you're hungry and ready to eat the proffered offering."t"I am, and I will.
Elle James
You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
Lev Grossman
It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.
Reginald Rose
I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.
Jesse Jackson
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
George Plimpton
…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.
Mary Roach
If you are reading this, be sure to count this on your blessings list.
Anthony Liccione
Trees down south have a difference to them, a subtle, slinking movement, mile by mile- a gracefulness, a swagger. Lanky trees stretching out their wiry thin, Spanish moss-covered branches, moss that sways and beckons ... come here, come here, it says.
Suzanne Palmieri
Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
We don't practice hospitality to point other people to ourselves, our church, or even our beliefs. We practice hospitality to point people toward the ultimate welcome that God gives every person through Christ.
Holly Sprink
A dangerous glint came into his eyes. "Gabi, if I ever show up in your bedroom in the middle of the nigh, believe me, it won't be to give you a morality lesson."tShe felt the promise of that through her body down to her toes. But she said, "If anyone showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, I'm likely to shoot them."tHe laughed as he shook his head at her. "Of course, you would.
Dana Marton
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington
So what do you do when you are stuck?The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I’m not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday’s a comin’ prayer. When I get stuck I get up from my desk to head for my closet. Literally. If I‘m at the office I go over to a corner that I have deemed my closet away from home. I get on my knees and remind God that this was not my idea, it was His…None of this is new information to God…Then I ask God to show me if there is something He wants to say to prepare me for what He wants me to communicate to our congregation. I surrender my ideas, my outline and my topic. Then I just stay in that quiet place until God quiets my heart…Many times I will have a breakthrough thought or idea that brings clarity to my message. . .Like you, I am simply a mouthpiece. Getting stuck is one way God keeps me ever conscious of that fact.
Andy Stanley
I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.
Truman Capote
I sort of liked the sound of bones breaking. It was like home.
Amy Tintera
I left this conversation hours ago, but somehow my mouth is still moving, words are still forming, and none have seemed to offend. Amazing, the mind. My mind, I mean. Not hers.
Peter Hedges
The ultimate altruism is nothing but the sacrifice of one’s self for the benefit of others. Love yourself but never forget to be altruistic to others in need.
Debasish Mridha
If it sells, it's art.
Frank Lloyd Wright
I am convinced if the church went back to the main task of proclaiming the Gospel it would see people being converted to Christ, and it would have a far greater impact on the social, moral, and psychological needs of people than anything else it could possibly do.
Billy Graham
Since he couldn't give in to what he really wanted from Kady Dresco, he picked on her and snarked at her and generally gave her grief. And she gave it right back. Sometimes he thought they were engaged in one long round of mental foreplay.
Laura Kaye
I can't answer you in a nutshell. We wouldn't fit unless we saw the same shrink.
Brian Spellman
Love is nourishment. Everything gets better with love.
Debasish Mridha