Quotes by American Authors - Page 686

Knowledge is the most essential ingredient of life, and it comes from curiosity.
Debasish Mridha
The best defense is a good offense.
Jack Dempsey
Dimple didn’t want to admit how much what he was saying resonated with her. Loneliness. That’s what he was describing. And she’d felt it so much it had become like a constant presence in her life, curled up against her like a sleeping cat. “I know what you mean,” she said softly. “Unfortunately.
Sandhya Menon
Inside each one of us is a rebel just waiting to be freed. That rebel is the real “You.
Margaret Aranda
A man who tells you to follow him will turn his followers into his company, while a true leader who does not tell you to follow him, will sit in the company of his followers.
Suzy Kassem
I never gossip but I can give you the names of certain people who do.
Judy Hampton
Max, if you survive your final test, can you steal me one of those magic outfits for me?" I'll try to get one for each of us. Hey! 'If'?
James Patterson
Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The big thinking gives us vision, power and direction, but it is the small steps that are the action of the process.
John Patrick Hickey
Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
Hope is what keeps us hanging on when we feel our rope wearing out. A positive attitude is often the natural result of maintaining that hope.
Lindsey Rietzsch
I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
Shelby Foote
Faith is one of the forces by which men live the total absence of it means collapse.
William James
The appreciation of birds, indeed the appreciation of all the phenomena of spring, cannot be dissociated from the accumulations of memory. The appearance of a familiar bird immediately awakens a train of forgotten associations, and this makes each spring transcend its predecessor. The interest accumulates and is compounded. The first yellow-throated warbler next year will be the more meaningful to me as it brings back that moment in the woods opposite Dyke. For one remembers clearly enough the fact of such a moment, but only an evocative sight or sound or smell can bring back the full emotion. The person who sees the bird for the first time cannot know what moves me.
Louis J Halle
He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that's what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up.
Angie Thomas
A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.
Robert Fanney
In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.
Peter Hedges
However, in part for reasons of organizationalconvenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period.
Carl Sagan
We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives
Brian L. Weiss
Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.
Julianne Davidow
I could stand alone because I knew I was not alone.
Emma Raveling
Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.
Michael Chabon
There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.
H.L. Mencken
Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.
Howard Zinn
today my heart was ripped in twoone half for me, one half for you take a half and keep it neari have mine and will always be here crossing paths before the endonce a lover, forever a friend
Connor Franta
I wish everyone had someone who never popped their balloons.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Why, Reshi?"The words poured out of Bast in a sudden gush. "Why did you stay there when it was so awful?"Kvothe nodded to himself, as if he had been expecting the question. "Where else was there for me to go, Bast? Everyone I knew was dead.""Not everyone," Bast insisted. "There was Abenthy. You could have gone to him.""Hallowfell was hundreds of miles away, Bast," Kvothe said wearily as he wandered to the other side of the room and moved behind the bar. Hundreds of miles without my father's maps to guide me. Hundredsof miles without wagons to ride or sleep in. Without help of any sort, or money, or shoes. Not an impossible journey, I suppose. But for a young child, still numb with the shock of losing his parents. . . ."Kvothe shook his head. "No. In Tarbean at least I could beg or steal. I'd managed to survive in the forest for a summer, barely. But over the winter?" He shook his head. "I would have starved or frozen todeath."Standing at the bar, Kvothe filled his mug and began to add pinches of spice from several small containers, then walked toward the great stone fireplace, a thoughtful expression on his face. "You're right, of course. Anywhere would have been better than Tarbean."He shrugged, facing the fire. "But we are all creatures of habit. It is far too easy to stay in the familiar ruts we dig for ourselves. Perhaps I even viewed it as fair. My punishment for not being there to help when the Chandrian came. My punishment for not dying when I should have, with the rest of my family."Bast opened his mouth, then closed it and looked down at the tabletop, frowning.Kvothe looked over his shoulder and gave a gentle smile. "I'm not saying it's rational, Bast. Emotions by their very nature are not reasonable things. I don't feel that way now, but back then I did. I remember."He turned back to the fire. "Ben's training has given me a memory so clean and sharp I have to be careful not to cut myself sometimes."Kvothe took a mulling stone from the fire and dropped it into his wooden mug. It sank with a sharp hiss.The smell of searing clove and nutmeg filled the room.Kvothe stirred his cider with a long-handled spoon as he made his way back to the table. "You must also remember that I was not in my right mind. Much of me was still in shock, sleeping if you will. I needed something, or someone, to wake me up."He nodded to Chronicler, who casually shook his writing hand to loosen it, then unstoppered his inkwell.Kvothe leaned back in his seat. "I needed to be reminded of things I had forgotten. I needed a reason to leave. It was years before I met someone who could do those things." He smiled at Chronicler. "Before I met Skarpi.
Patrick Rothfuss
Well,' she said, adjusting a pot lid, 'I have my family of origin, which is you and Mom. And then Jaime's family, my family of marriage. And hopefully, I'll have another family, as well. Our family, that we make. Me and Jaimie.'Now I felt bad, bringing this up so soon after Jamie's gaffe. 'You will,' I said.She turned around, crossing her arms over her chest. 'I hope so. But that's just the thing, right? Family isn't something that's supposed to be static or set. People marry in, divorce out. They're born, they die. It's always evolving, turning into something else. even that picture of Jamie's family was only the true representation for that one day. But the next , someone had probably changed. It had to.'...Later, when the kitchen had filled up with people looking for more wine, and children chasing Roscoe, I looked across all the chaos at Cora, thinking that of course you would assume our definitions would be similar, since we had come from the same place. But this wasn't actually true. We all have one idea of what the color blue is, but pressed to describe it specifically, there are so many ways: the ocean, lapis lazuli, the sky, someone's eyes. Our definitions were as different as we were ourselves.
Sarah Dessen
Whatever role you play, play it to the hilt.
Lynn Flewelling
You do right by me, I'll show you a life most suckers can't even dream of.
Sara Gruen
Doesn’t it feel great when someone does something nice for you? Especially when you’re not expecting it? The irony is that they are getting as much joy by giving as you are by receiving.
Susan C.Young
The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.
Susan Wise Bauer
When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.
T.S Eliot
In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.
Nataly Kelly
There were three people in my home and I was the only one showing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and reactivity to the radio frequency transmitting utility meters. For these reasons I did not shield my home and took the route of adapting my body to the toxic electromagnetic environment.
Steven Magee
In 30 years Christians will have baptized their picture of Christ. He won't be a nice, banal, meek, and bearded man with softly permed hair. Instead, he will fill our imaginations more solidly, more invasively , more unexpectedly. Christ will become That Man who changes people, someone who jumps off a bumper sticker and mediocre praise songs and into lives.
Jonalyn Fincher
That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?
Ariel Gore
It was summer here and he wondered if there existed a different season for every corner of this world in this moment and the moments to come. Whether if you traveled fast and far enough you could witness a year passing in a single journey.
Paul Yoon
In the movie business, the ones we call Lucky are usually those idiots who are just too damn stubborn to take no for an answer. Come to think of it, the movie business is kind of like life.
Lois Greiman
Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.
H.W. Brands
When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough.
Criss Jami
Thank you for this precious day,These gifts you give to me,My heart so full of love for you,Sings praise for all I see,Oh, sing, for every mother's love,For every childhood tear,Oh, sing, for all the stars above,The peace beyond all fear
John Denver
They said the shape-shifters fucked with the enthusiasm of animals—if they didn't devour you with the enthusiasm of one first.
Nenia Campbell
Poverty may be a privilege and even a way of life for the monk in the desert,for he has only himself to sustain and none but his god to please, but I consider poverty to be the mark of lack of ability or lack of ambition.I am not deficient in either of these qualities!
Og Mandino
Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Most people throughout the world, not just inNewport Beach, care more about their faces, their boobs, their bellies, their butts, andtheir abs than they do their brains. But it is your brain that is the key to having the face,the breasts, the belly, the butt, the abs, and the overall health you have always wanted;and it is brain dysfunction, in large part, that ruins our bodies and causes prematureaging.
Daniel G. Amen
New Maxi-Pad Pets. Accessories for your period.Brought to you by The Corporation: In your homes andin your pants.
Libba Bray
Sorrow's children were raised on books.
Marty Rubin
I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them.
Mark Lawrence
May we live impossibly,” Sebby said when he opened his eyes. “Against all odds. May people look at us and wonder how such jewels can sparkle in the sad desert of the world. May we live the impossible life.
Kate Scelsa
Faith is the flame that eliminates fear, and faith is the emperor of dreams.
Suzy Kassem
I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity
Brian Kiteley
Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another’s pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.
Ann Rule
Ebola then turns the insides of its host into jelly: you begin to vomit black junk which is basically your dissolved liver and internal organs.
Andrew Cormier
Sitting at the old patio table she’d cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She’d come here with too many expectations.
Sarah Addison Allen
Her eyes popped open in time to see flames shoot up behind the first-floor windows of Angie's Books. Angie! Where was Angie? Where were her children? The bookstore owner lived in the apartment above her shop with sixteen-year-old Beth and twelve-year-old Bradley.The Moosetookalook Fire Department was located right next door, housed in part of the town's redbrick municipal building. The overhead door had already been raised. As Liss watched, unable to move, unable to look away, the truck pulled out, maneuvering so that it could get closer to the burning building.
Kaitlyn Dunnett
Many people are trying to steady themselves by taking tranquilizers. Jesus is the greatest tranquilizer of all. He can straighten out your life and put you back on center.
Billy Graham
If you make a hiring mistake, make the change quickly. Don’t ignore problems. Don’t assume it will get better.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.
Megan Chance
The Heart of Fairyland is a story," she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
Catherynne M. Valente