Quotes by American Authors - Page 636

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.
Cheryl L. Ilov
These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.
Dean Koontz
Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.
Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, and inspiratrice, and intuitive, a maker, a creator, and inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I missed the war and the freedom that came with it. When you are that close to death, you feel free. Every breath you take could be your last. So you inhale and savor each breath, try not to think about your death even though signs of it are all around you. The freedom comes from knowing that if anybody gives you crap, you can eliminate them and the situation. Just shoot and get it over with.
Clint Van Winkle
Fear wears so many clever disguises it is virtually impossible to always recognize it. Fear disguises itself as the need to be somewhere else, doing something else, not knowing how to do something or not needing to do something.
Iyanla Vanzant
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Imagination, abstraction, creativity, and coherence etc are some inherently cognitive and mental elements of architect-wise thinking.
Pearl Zhu
I want to be split open and reminded of shame.
Kris Kidd
Never look back. The past is done. The future is a blank canvas. Work on creating a masterpiece. Only you have the power to make your painting beautiful.
Suzy Kassem
It was the literary equivalent of a brown paper bag.
C. Robert Cargill
Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.
Catherine Lacey
When people don't do what they want, they don't know what to do.
Marty Rubin
In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.
Emily Giffin
People talk about the joy of running--of the endorphins and reaching a Zen-like clarity of mind. This had never happened to me. Mostly, all I thought about when I ran was how much further I had to go before I could stop.
Laura Morrigan
Once a person falls in the fields of love, all the rules are already broken; the lover becomes open and exalted in ways that transcend the local issues as well as the commonly held beliefs. Love, like genuine devotion, will find a way. Where duty becomes replaced with love, a greater and deeper faith will blossom forth. For the deepest meaning of “belief” refers to being loyal to what the heart already loves. As people used to say, “What the heart loves is the cure.” The cure for healing the wounds and conflicts between faiths and systems of belief involves awakening to the unique ways that each heart carries devotion and love. When followed far enough, simple belief can transform into wisdom; raw passions can become a greater compassion that trusts what resides in one’s heart and even in the hearts of others. Until the heart opens and the eyes begin to see there is always the danger of blindness and narrowness and the tendency to hold onto narrow ways of being.
Michael Meade
Dreams, if they're any good, are always a little bit crazy.
Ray Charles
We are following the blacks ... And we will follow, entering, perhaps, the same time as women.
Ann Bausum
I just don't want them to change me, if I'm going to die I still want to be me.
Suzanne Collins
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way.
Mark Strand
But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.
Amor Towles
Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan
If you want to heal or experience more happiness in life, learn to move out of the mental body and be in your heart more. You will know you are "in your head" is when you analyze, control and overthink. When you have run on thoughts, worry, and talk without listening. When you take all the workshops and read all the books, but aren't experiencing it's message in your heart.
Eileen Anglin
Hadrian leapt to his feet. Royce was already up.“Don’t bother,” Esrahaddon told them. “She’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do. The monster cannot be harmed by your weapons. It—”The two were out the door.
Michael J. Sullivan
It was so long ago now that the job felt like part of her soul. Like being a teacher or an artist who made things out of sand. You never really saw the results. You just trusted that you knew what you were doing and that everything would work out okay in the end.
Emma Straub
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.", Summer 1956]
Dorothy Parker
Are women beautiful or aren't we?
Naomi Wolf
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses theinitiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defendmakes them timorous.
Steven Pressfield
Parents’ transmit their attitude towards education to children via soundless, aphonic messages.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.
John Green
Hiram!' Shelton ran to Hi's side. 'Aren't you you bleeding? I thought she shot you!''Red wine. When I saw it running everywhere, I played dead.' He winced as Shelton poked his belly. 'But I'm not leaping off any more shelves. That was pretty stupid.
Kathy Reichs
The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them.
Thomas Jefferson
What few rules appear to be in place are all made up.
Patti Digh
But I've bought a big bat.I'm all ready, you see.Now my troubles are goingTo have troubles with me!
Dr. Seuss
It’s not technically gossip if you start your sentence with “I’m really concerned about __________________ ,” (fill in the name of the person you’re not gossiping about).
Brian P. Cleary
We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens
As you awaken to the new day, put your hands to your heart, breath in and say: I am loved. I am love. I love, I love, I love.
Eileen Anglin
Life is no different than the weather. Not only is it unpredictable, but it shows us a new perspective of the world every day.
Suzy Kassem
It’s your call. You want to go back home, go ahead. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Home is death.
Jeff Abbott
You can't move so fast that you try to change [a situation] faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Good boundaries, created by the use of good intimacy skills, keep a committed or intimate relationship lightly balanced between the needs of the individual and the needs of the relationship.
Anne Katherine
Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas and differences of opinion, all the things we say we want in a free and open society. So keep ‘em, fund ‘em, embrace and cherish ‘em.
David Baldacci
What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.
Stuart Dybek
A steel door clapped open as a guard stepped from the bulletproof viewing station across the hall. "Adams!" "That you?" "I told you, I don't know-" The cop pointed straight at him. "Jeffrey Adams! Front and center!" The black man helped him rise to his feet. "Ain't everybody gets called back from the pit, man. Question is, what are you gonna do when you find out who you are?
Davis Bunn
Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done and it remains the hardest work I have done to date.
Ann Richards
The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
Terence McKenna
Prayer enables you to tap into God’s wisdom anywhere, anytime, no matter what’s going on.
Elizabeth George
Quality of life depends on quality and quantity of happiness.
Debasish Mridha
And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.
James Clavell
Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are a subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who has suffered from insomnia.
Joseph Wood Krutch
You get up, you dress up, you show up. And usually have a pretty good time by the end of it.
Morgan Matson
The answer is that their confidence was actuallh in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were "reading God right." They knew that God was under no obligation to operate according to their limited wisdom.
Timothy J. Keller
...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...
Dave Matthes
He had a ruggedness about him that was appealing. Despite his groomed presentation, his chiseled face was shadowed with an attractive scruff of hair. His beautiful smile burned into me, melting me from the inside out while it exposed perfect white teeth embellished with alluring fangs. For a moment, I allowed myself to indulge in the idea of them sinking into my neck. Would it provoke the ecstasy I imagined or the horror I feared?
J.M. Northup
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread
Charles Bukowski
The literature has only these words of comfort for a patient and her family at this stage. Remember, there is still a living spirit inside this diminished person, the spirit of someone you love.
Dan Gasby
For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.
Hannah Arendt
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Christopher Morley
Hate creates a darkness in your soul. You can't shine until you let it go.
Lorri Faye