Quotes by American Authors - Page 626

Happiness is a fantasy that real people know doesn't exist.
Angel M.B. Chadwick
What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.tAnd so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter: He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.tHer eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.
Elizabeth Strout
Yours in demigodishness, and all that. Peace out!
Rick Riordan
I know I should look away, let him grieve in private, but I cannot. The sweet girl that I knew only briefly is the key to this gentle beast who has captured my heart.
Robin LaFevers
The earth provides us a brand new beginning every twenty-four hours. It is a repeated invitation to breathe in the cool morning air and start afresh; to mimic the sunrise and brighten up while reaching once more for the sky; to carry a glad song in our heart like the early birds; and, as faithfully as the morning dew, to wash off the dust from yesterday.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Living is art.Breathing and heart beating is music.Seeing is painting the world with our eyes.Touching is sculpting the shape of everything.Life is the most intense art of all.
Jacob Nordby
I skipped between the dancers, twirling my skirts. The seated, masked musicians didn’t look up at me as I leaped before them, dancing in place. No chains, no boundaries—just me and the music, dancing and dancing. I wasn’t faerie, but I was a part of this earth, and the earth was a part of me, and I would be content to dance upon it for the rest of my life.One of the musicians looked up from his fiddling, and I halted.Sweat gleamed on the strong column of his neck as he rested his chin upon the dark wood of the fiddle. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the cords of muscle along his forearms. He had once mentioned that he would have liked to be a traveling minstrel if not a warrior or a High Lord—now, hearing him play, I knew he could have made a fortune from it.“I’m sorry, Tam,” Lucien panted, appearing from nowhere. “I left her alone for a little at one of the food tables, and when I caught up to her, she was drinking the wine, and—”Tamlin didn’t pause in his playing. His golden hair damp with sweat, he looked marvelously handsome—even though I couldn’t see most of his face. He gave me a feral smile as I began to dance in place before him. “I’ll look after her,” Tamlin murmured above the music, and I glowed, my dancing becoming faster. “Go enjoy yourself.” Lucien fled.I shouted over the music, “I don’t need a keeper!” I wanted to spin and spin and spin.“No, you don’t,” Tamlin said, never once stumbling over his playing. How his bow did dance upon the strings, his fingers sturdy and strong, no signs of those claws that I had come to stop fearing … “Dance, Feyre,” he whispered.So I did.I was loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn’t know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.Through it all, Tamlin and his musicians played such joyous music that I didn’t think the world could contain it all. I sashayed over to him, my faerie lord, my protector and warrior, my friend, and danced before him. He grinned at me, and I didn’t break my dancing as he rose from his seat and knelt before me in the grass, offering up a solo on his fiddle to me.
Sarah J Maas
Don’t try to smell the flowers without planting them.
Debasish Mridha
Survival requires a dose of madness—what cynics call “hoping against hope”—just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. “Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us,” observed one Holocaust expert. “Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst.
Mark Matousek
He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
Gregory Maguire
Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.
Michael Finkel
What anger wants, it buys at the price of soul.
Dana Marton
We all have flaws and mine is being wicked.
James Thurber
In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.
John Quincy Adams
The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.
William Carlos Williams
We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.
Walt Stanchfield
I'd made my choice, though, and I couldn't take it back.
Sarah Dessen
A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—​and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?
Leslie Jamison
I take my hand back, like a leaf letting go. It hurts too much to hang on. So why does it hurt so much to let go?
Emily Murdoch
Today's miseries could be tomorrow's loveful memories.
Debasish Mridha
Never Let The Roosters Wake You!
Latif Mercado
Thank your customer for complaining and mean it. Most will never bother to complain. They'll just walk away.
Marilyn Suttle
America is a young dumb country and it needs all kinds of help. America is a dumb puppy with big teeth that bite and hurt. And we take care of America. We hold America to our bosom; we feed America, we make love to America. There wouldn't be an America if it wasn't for black people. So you have some dedicated black Americans who will die a million deaths to save America. And this is home for us. We don't know really about Africa. We talk it in a romantic sense, but America is it. And so, America is always going to be okay as long as black people don't totally lose their mind, cause we'll pick up the pieces and turn it into a new dance.
Abiodun Oyewole
It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.
Arthur Vandenberg
Nearly half of all associational memberships are church-religious context. Religious worshipers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organization; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.
Robert Putnam
That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
Steven Johnson
Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
Andy Rooney
Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover Himself to each one
A.W. Tozer
But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.” Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations.
Erik Larson
Men like you preach change, but I wonder. Is this a battle we can really fight?”“You’re fighting it already, Goodman Mennis. You’re just losing horribly.
Brandon Sanderson
If you understand this basic concept, it becomes clear that every spending decision is a spiritual decision. Waste, for example, is not a squandering of our resources. It is a poor use of His.
James C. Dobson
Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.” Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, then what value does that place on love?
Marilyn Manson
In our day when a pitcher got into trouble in a game instead of taking him out our manager would leave him in and tell him to pitch his way out of trouble.
Cy Young
You really should stay away from me.
Stephenie Meyer
Curiosity, boldness, and persistence help you to be a success.
Debasish Mridha M.D.
We cry the same tears. We feel the same pain, of hurt, of hunger, of thirst. When we bleed, our blood is one color. The color of the price of freedom.
Michelle Muriel
While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it.While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Eugene V. Debs
Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.
Patrick Rothfuss
How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
Sylvia Plath
From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
- Why you?- (...) I’m the best.- Modest of you.- I am the best. Modesty has nothing to say about it.
Paul Hoffman
silence can sometimes save you. everything doesn’t warrant words.
Alexandra Elle
Some people will try to talk you out of chasing your goals; not because they think you’ll fail, but because they are scared you’ll succeed.
Steve Maraboli
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl vigilant in darkness and blind to light mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
Henry Ward Beecher
Oh the long and dreary Winter! Oh the cold and cruel Winter!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.
A.W. Tozer
Never scheme with a conniving dragon!
Becca Mann
Don’t go to sleep to dream. Wake up and dream.
Debasish Mridha
Don’t believe what you hear about those penguins. A species of lazy waddlers. Their extinction is immanent.
Benson Bruno
What is the nature of life?Life is lines of dominoes falling.One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.
John Dewey
I am selfish. I am brave.
Veronica Roth
The hopeful man sees success where others see failure sunshine where others see shadows and storm.
Orison Swett Marden
The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care…Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.
Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt
Have you ever noticed that fear affects your physical mind and body?
Asa Don Brown
Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
I didn't answer, but, please—nothing is obvious with boys. For such simple creatures, they are quite baffling.
Rick Riordan
When we feel too drained to move forward, God is right there with us, ready to tenderly revive and restore us.
Teresa Santoski