Quotes by American Authors - Page 711

You have to humor them you know." Lucile sighed lightly as the door closed. "Men can be boring, but they are necessary. One needs to learn to work around them. Don't you think so?
Kate Alcott
Why should insurance companies continue to get away with limiting the skills that a health profession has always previously required of its members if they were to be considered fully trained?
Ina May Gaskin
How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.
Henry Rollins
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
David Foster Wallace
He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Scientists are human—they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
Cyril Ponnamperuma
No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott
I am no king, and I am no lord,And I am no soldier at-arms," said he."I'm none but a harper, and a very poor harper,That am come hither to wed with ye.""If you were a lord, you should be my lord,And the same if you were a thief," said she."And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,For it makes no matter to me, to me,For it makes no matter to me.""But what if it prove that I am no harper?That I lied for your love most monstrously?""Why, then I'll teach you to play and sing,For I dearly love a good harp," said she.
Peter S Beagle
Everywhere I look I see people doing their best to make sense of this overwhelming reality, and to be kind, authentic human beings despite the many invitations we all receive to be phony, unkind assholes. Sometimes their best doesn’t look like much to me, and I remind myself that my best doesn’t look like much a lot of the time, too. I empathize. We’re all human, and we’re all struggling. Every single one of us, every single day. It’s not my job to police the paths of others, not when it takes so much effort to light my own.
Scott Stabile
The terror takes you. The cage is locked and the curtain drawn. Fingers dance along as blades, carving memories into your flesh that will leave scars long past being healed.
Amanda Steele
Why are you walking through the wood alone?
Lisa Carlisle
The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving.
James Frey
So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.
Brad Warner
I want to hear you cry out in pleasure again."t"All you have to do is touch me.
Donna Grant
It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.
Ashly Lorenzana
I can't tell if wanting you is selfish or stupid.
Alex Rosa
Complete honesty is not the same thing as full disclosure.
Ron Brackin
Escapism seems to be the order of the day . . .Escape with drugs or alcohol, and the bitterness of living will be blurred . . .We can’t escape from God.
Billy Graham
Politics is not leadership. It never has been. It never will be.
Richie Norton
There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
Raymond Carver
If you decide to war with us, you will fail and suffer an eternity of misery,” he informed, his tone steady and cold. “Is that explicit enough?”“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” I said cheerfully, getting in touch with my inner smartass.
Laura Kreitzer
Ultimately, it’s about determining what matters most to you; what’s important; what it will take to achieve your intended goal. And once you’ve identified these key components to growth, shed the excess; do away with the unnecessary.
Carlos Wallace
You’re different, and I know that’s probably the most cliché response ever given, but it’s the truth. When I look at you, it’s as if I’m reading a novel. No matter how much time I spend studying your pages, there will always be more for me to learn, deeper layers of complexity to baffle me, and plot twists that’ll leave me speechless.
Caroline George
Love isn't about holding on. It's about letting go.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?
Jodi Picoult
The world doesn’t really have much respect for Christians who adopt its fashions and ideas. It is inclined to regard them with contempt—to write them off either as cowards who are ashamed of their faith or as frauds whose profession is not sincere.
Billy Graham
Those with an abundant mindset will have abundant wealth.
Debasish Mridha
My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off of it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.
Jenny Offill
,It must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white.
John A. Williams
Simplify and focus on the good. The beauty of the journey ahead will flourish on its own.
Erik Tomblin
103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.
Charlotte Joko Beck
He buys Playboy magazines and looks through them once, then gives them to me. That’s what it’s like to be rich.Here’s what it’s like to be poor. Your wife leaves you because you can’t find a job because there aren’t any jobs to find. You empty the jar of pennies on the mantel to buy cigarettes. You hate to answer the phone; it can’t possibly be good news. When your friends invite you out, you don’t go. After a while, they stop inviting. You owe them money, and sometimes they ask for it. You tell them you’ll see what you can scrape up.Which is this: nothing.
Tom Franklin
Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some quality time. In sharp contrast to such a weak view, God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God's behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
Tedd Tripp
What's the advantage of fear or the benefit of regret or the bonus of granting misery a foothold even if death is embracing you? My old abbot used to say, "Life is only precious if you wish it to be." I look at it like the last bite of a wonderful meal. Do you enjoy it, or does the knowledge that there is no more to follow make it so bitter that you would ruin the experience? - Myron on facing death
Michael J. Sullivan
Smiles are a funny thingand laughter is hilarious.I smile sometimeswhen I am delirious.
Casey Renee Kiser
He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.
Don DeLillo
I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.
Elizabeth Berg
If Porter crawled into bed with me, I wouldn’t flee the scene right away. I probably wouldn’t even kick him out. I might kick him in the gonads and then rub my cheek against his chest because that’s the kind of girl I am. Beat them and then treat them.
Meghan Quinn
To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.
Leon Eisenberg
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.
Peter S Beagle
Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act.
Chris Campanioni
How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.
Donna Tartt
There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble desires listless efforts lazy attitudes all must be strenuous urgent ardent. Flamed desires impassioned unwearied insistence delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls. Our whole being must be in our praying.
E.M.Bounds
Life's journey is peppered with many bumps and pitfalls. If we make mountains out of each one, we will get nowhere.
Charles F. Glassman
People who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were. She'd said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.
William Gibson
Everything with a beginning has an ending. Any magic that can be done, can be undone. Anything you can make, can be unmade.
Brandon Mull
The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century. Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology.
Gerald Holton
Attitudes are contagious. Mine might kill you.
Despair Inc.
Finding your purpose isn't enough. the challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.
Mark Zuckerberg
I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s okay to be a blank canvas. Maybe it’s okay that my future is unknown. And maybe,” I say with another smile, “it’s okay to be inspired by the people who do know their future.
Stephanie Perkins
Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.
Amos Bronson Alcott
Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching – a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn’t sure whether I liked her, and doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us.
John Green
Arrogance can be deadly.” The corners of his mouth crept up. “But you didn’t hear me say that.
Becca Fitzpatrick
You can only be free if I am free.
Clarence Darrow
It' like he has the ability to take on some of my pain. I feel so much better around him. Stronger. And he is willing to take my pain. He wants to bear it with me. I can see it shining in his eyes. I'm more than a duty to him. I'm more than his literal dream girl. I'm so much more.
Cynthia Hand
Yeah, and so Max and Dylan are supposed to, like, go to Germany and have kids together," I heard Gazzy say. My eyes popped open and I bolted upright."What?" Fang said, his voice icy."Gazzy!" I yelled.Wide blue eyes looked at me in surprise, then back at Fang's stoic face. "Oh. Was I not supposed to say anything?" Gazzy asked.
James Patterson
Charlotte wondered if she would have recognized the crazy much earlier if he looked more like Steve Buscemi then Mr. Medieval Hotness.
Shannon Hale
To make the fastest progress,Be an absolutely cheerfulHero-warriorAnd take both victory and failureAs parallel experience riversLeading to the sea Of progress-delight.
Sri Chinmoy
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiviness is bitter or sweet.
Pema Chödrön