Quotes by American Authors - Page 599

They never opened the door which leads to the soul.
Henry Miller
Where you come from, what you look like, and what your past holds do not define you as an individual--you are what you make yourself to be.
Kat Von D.
God’s decision to reach out in such dramatic fashion as to lay all rightful privilege aside and be born into abject destitution tells us that His passion for us exceeds our desire for Him. And maybe we should commit to evening that up a bit.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Cross.”His head popped up a few shelves over. “What?”“Check out the magic crap.”He shot me a look. “Oh, is that what we’re supposed to be doing? Because I’ve just been drawing hearts and our initials in the dirt.”t Sophie + Archer
Rachel Hawkins
Make peace your purpose in the garden of life.
Debasish Mridha
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin
The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family.
Bryant McGill
As the nation divided into Federalists and Republicans, each group called the other the worst name possible: "party". Most Americans feared the idea of party; believing that a society should unite to achieve the public good, they denounced parties as groups of ambitious men selfishly competing for power. Worse, parties were danger signals for a republic; if parties dominated a republic's politics, its days were numbered.
R.B. Bernstein
She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.
Catherynne M. Valente
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
Ben Lerner
It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as 'separateness' and the nearest approach to that selfish state which the laws of life permit is in the intent or motive.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fial to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
A voice is a product of the writer’s own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers’ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer’s voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer’s pitch from other wordsmiths’ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.
Aspen Matis
The only place men want depth in their women is in their décolletage
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Percival pinched his lips, sending his laugh to his eyes.
Rachel Hauck
In your handsThe dog, the donkey, surely they knowtThey are alive.Who would argue otherwise?But now, after years of consideration,tI am getting beyond that.What about the sunflowers? What abouttThe tulips, and the pines?Listen, all you have to do is start andtThere’ll be no stopping.What about mountains? What about watertSlipping over rocks?And speaking of stones, what abouttThe little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeatstSo secret, so hidden it may take yearsBefore, finally, you hear them?
Mary Oliver
The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.
Brian Herbert
But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.
Kathryn Stockett
You fear you will fail at the very thing you were born for. And your fear torments you...instead of shunning your fear, you must let it speak and listen carefully to what it's trying to tell you. It will give you good counsel.
Jennifer Donnelly
He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore.
Peter Benchley
We always desire peace yet we prepare to go to war.
Debasish Mridha
The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado.
Tom Piazza
You are not in love. Love is inside you longing for expression.
Debasish Mridha
The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When we give words to what we are living, these words need to be received and responded to. A speaker needs a listener. A writer needs a reader.When the flesh – the lived human experience – becomes word, communitycan develop. When we say, 'Let me tell you what we saw. Come and listento what we did. Sit down and let me explain to you what happened to us.Wait until you hear whom we met,' we call people together and make ourlives into lives for others. The word brings us together and calls usinto community. When the flesh becomes word, our bodies become part ofa body of people.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
Ralph Ellison
I remember watching it all and getting the tickling in my chest and thinking to myself: This is what happiness feels like.
Gayle Forman
Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.
Sharon Salzberg
Reason is powerless when we express love with empathy and kindness.
Debasish Mridha
I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.
Davey Havok
My name is Winter Kim. Today I killed a man. Soon I hope to kill another.
Paula Stokes
How did I end up in this situation? I'm the district sales manager of a napkin factor. Why is my daughter in space?
Andy Weir
We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
Charles Bukowski
It is dark and there are bad creatures in these woods.""Yes, there are...
Katlyn Charlesworth
Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Roger Zelazny
Tomorrow’s workforce is flopping the relationship lens: They see companies as vehicles to achieve their goals and dreams — vehicles that can amplify their passions, achievements and community relationships beyond what they could have done on their own or elsewhere. Companies that they will join are seen as communities that explore and resource and fund making a difference in the world in ways that align with their personal approach and values.
Bill Jensen
People at any stage will profit by taking the wheel and getting pointed in the right direction.
Michael Hyatt
Valiant warriors of Ha-Ran-Fel–and brave and noble allies who have joined us–our hour has come! We stand at the threshold: For some, the threshold of eternity; for others, the threshold of a new era. The malignancy spawned in the east now snakes its tendrils across our land to bind us. . .to choke and extinguish us. . .and to replace our young with its own. It comes not with the conventional weapons of warfare, but with magic and devilry. It comes without honorable rules of engagement, for this is not a fair fight. We know nothing of witchcraft or conjuring demons. We cannot hope to defeat such evil with what we know. But some among us will find the way with what lives in their hearts. They will effect the enemy’s destruction. From them will victory spring! For those who fall, the light of heaven will shatter the darkness of death! Those who live will see the dawning of a new day, a glad day, a day of peace and freedom! They will multiply and grow mightier than any who ever lived before!”“WE FIGHT!!” King Ruelon’s final speech.
Sandra Kopp
I think I like wildflowers best," I explain. "They just grow wherever they want. No one has to plant them. And then their seeds blow in the wind and they find a new place to grow." (Richelle)
Rebecca Donovan
There was, I think, a prevailingimpression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune wasthe result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger.
Bret Harte
The future only gets brighter if we don’t forget to enlighten the present moment.
Debasish Mridha
Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.
Lauren Groff
I wish I’d paid better attention. I didn’t yet think of time as finite. I didn’t fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind.
Jessica Maria Tuccelli
How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?
Jim Beaver
The back is one of my favorite parts of a woman’s body. I love to trace and lick the shallow line of her spine, from the top and all the way down to the twin dimples at the base of her lower back.
Gina L Maxwell
Wisdom of the Ages: "Rainier" A beer and a mountain. You drink enough of one and the next day you feel like you fell off the other.All next week Wisdom of the Ages will be featuring the Seattle Seahawks and Super Bowl Topics. Tomorrow's Topic: "Tom Brady's Balls.
Matthew Heines
What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies.
Ashley Null
Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do.
Orison Swett Marden
You aren't meant to be a prisoner. You're powerful and incredible." "You've no' seen me in dragon form.""I don't have to. I see the man before me now.
Donna Grant
Both life and work were a great more reewarding when you didn't take them quite so seriously
Kirsten Beyer
It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things." "Like what?" I asked. My mouth was dry. "I don't know. Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date. Or tell people what you need. Or what you want.
Stephen Chbosky
All great works start with mistake. Ain’t no exception in this fact.
Sandra Newman
Guys don't let other guys keep calling other guys. Okay that came out wrong.
Cassandra Clare
Can you still want something you already have? Absolutely. Everyday.
Crystal Woods
Just keep it simple, Alice Faye. Remember how you taught yourself. Nothing’s different just because you’re on a yacht, or wearing a fancy dress. Or because you appear to have dropped acid and are now in the mirror room at the fun house.
Elle Lothlorien
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
Will Durant
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
Mary Karr
I laughed to myself as I headed for Finley's car. She had no idea what kind of harrassment she was in for, and I was going to enjoy every minute of it. Secretly, she would, too. I knew it. I could smell it on her, kind of like how a dog smells fear. But I'm better than any dog. I had a full half hour to tease and torture her, and I was gonna take full advantage of it. And if I played my cards right, she'd be putty in my hands. She just didn't know it yet." - Jake
D.C. Grace
And I get it, okay? I mean, look at him. I’d bang that drum, too. All I’m saying is, if you don’t want your overprotective sister meddling in your business, find someone else to massage your lady bits.”“I’m partial to massaging my own lady bits, actually. I have no problem getting my own kinks out.”“Yes, well, more power to you then. But I, for one, am getting carpal tunnel syndrome with all the self-massaging I’ve been doing as of late.
Mia Sosa
Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.
Jessica Valenti