Quotes by American Authors - Page 715

In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
Lionel Trilling
I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city--and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.
Philip Gourevitch
Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, IShall keep perpetual summer here; I shallRefuse to let one startled swallow die,Or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall.
Stanley Kunitz
Quick, think of a marvelous excuse he’ll totally swallow. Aha!“To practice. Unlike you guys, I haven’t tried my particular talent since Granny May signed me up for belly-dancing classes when I was fifteen.”And, by the way, why the hell did I consent to that? Or decide I loved it? Never mind, he’s buying it. In fact, he seems to be hot on the idea. Are his eyes glowing? And is Cole’s tongue hanging out? This is why I didn’t want to dance in the first place! “Anyway,” I rushed on. “I’m going to find a private place where nobody can see to laugh at me while you beat this tent”—or, more likely, these two idiots—“into submission.
Jennifer Rardin
In one moment I was feeling everything and I was feeling nothing.
Kami Garcia
Maybe there is some Abnegation in everyone. Well in everyone but Peter."-Tris Prior
Veronica Roth
Handshakes, Hugs & Other Touching. Learning how to touch appropriately can elevate your presentation, demonstrate respect, and convey confidence.
Susan C.Young
We don't treat Jesus like a puppy, soaking in his excitement over our coming home and then leading him back to stay in the laundry room when we go out to begin another day.
Holly Sprink
We are what comes to us and by what we choose to fulfill. We learn love by experiencing other people loving us and by cultivating compassion for all humankind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again.
Seanan McGuire
We seek in one another the assurance that there is just one correct interpretation of the world, that everything is so simple that anybody can see it unless they're malicious or stupid or willfully ignorant; and we punish one another for proving with our differing conclusions that the truth is not that easy. We think we must suppress dissension to present the unified front we need to gain power over our enemies. But there are pro-life Democrats, pro-choice Christians, feminists who love their families, and conservatives who care about poor people.
Alisa Harris
As the ocean tugged me at my feet, i realized that Early Auden, that strangest of boys, had saved me from being swept away.
Clare Vanderpool
If you look for God in your relationships, you will always find things to be thankful for. When God reigns in our hearts, peace reigns in our relationships. This work will only be complete in heaven but there is much we can enjoy now.
Timothy S. Lane
if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi's series -- but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality.
Marie Brennan
I love it with all of its villains and pretty liars and self-righteous pompers
N.D. Wilson
You must look through an opportunity and not at it
Mayur Ramgir
To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
If being ugly was a crime, they'd be hunting that woman down with helicopters and bloodhounds.
Judith McNaught
Because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
Sarah Kay
Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.
Dennis Lehane
Thought leadership is by nature evolutionary, in that it must always be part of an ever-evolving flow.
Pearl Zhu
She lifted her chin and returned his unyielding gaze. "Do what you will."His blue eyes darkened to the color of a moonlit sky. "You should be careful, milady, about issuing such an invitation.
Shelly Thacker
Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken.
T. Scott McLeod
The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
Siri Hustvedt
Where did the bonds of maternity end? All children grew up, changed, became somebody else. Parents who trembled that they might lose a gap-toothed toddler to some terrible accident ended up losing him anyway, always, to time. The toddlers died, after all, and what was left was a bond with another adult, who had once been the beloved child.
Nancy Kress
Every rose has poetry in her heart and is eager to tell you when you are in love.
Debasish Mridha
Man wants to be the king o’ the rabbits, he best wear a pair o’ floppy ears.
George R.R. Martin
Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
Gloria Steinem
The truth,” Mrs. Hodgkins says, standing back up and turning to her cold marble pupils, “is imagination without boundaries is like a gun, it can be dangerous and kill.” She turns slightly and points to the back of her head to demonstrate. Her brains spill over the left crevice of her skull, clinging like hardened jelly. “Or imagination can save lives.
Mav Skye
My hair is not the shiniest of bobsMy eyes are not the brightest in the roomMy figure will not get me modeling jobsMy smile will not bring young boys to their doom.But do I cry and mourn my average face?Or wish that I had boyfriends at the ready?Do I not sleep because I lose the race,Or spurn my food because I don't go steady?My mind is on a more important thingThat lifts my heart and makes my spirit soarI want to make the souls of people singAnd quiet down the mean and bullying roar.To help the wounded girls replace the scarWith the right to be exactly who they are.
Nancy N. Rue
There are more important things in life than chasing after this myth of perfection.
Alison G. Bailey
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.
Laurie R. King
Fulfillment comes from striving to succeed, to survive by your own wits and strength. Such things make each of us who we are. You lose that in captivity, lose yourself, and that loss saps your capacity for joy.
Michael J. Sullivan
The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.
John Updike
Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love themAnd to know that they are the wounds that make love real.His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.I do not splash in the blood of his sonnor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.I am a boy again--I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,I, too--and together the bread and I embrace,Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality.
James Kavanaugh
You must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bed
Tom Waits
He who whets his steel, whets his courage
Steven Pressfield
Gratitude takes less energy than anger.
Kristin Cashore
Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.
Jodi Picoult
The only one who's got enough of me to break my heart.
Taylor Swift
I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.
Cassandra Clare
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.
Camille Paglia
For a moment I was distracted. Books always did that to me... I liked the creamy pages, the smell of ink, all the secrets locked inside.
Elizabeth C. Bunce
Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.
Frederica Mathewes-Green
I love being a wizard. Every day is like Disneyland.
Jim Butcher
Respect earned through fear instead of deeds, was not truly respect.
Tamara Rose Blodgett
When humanity stops confusing the construct with the Kingdom - we'll begin to recognize the Truth.
Dana Gore
Ode to Douglas AdamsIn the solar system we inhabit, we live on a small planet we all call Earth. Okay, when I say small, I mean it’s small compared to say, oh, Jupiter. Earth is something like a dime compared to Jupiter’s beach ball. On this Earth is a fairly large country we all call The United States of America. Of course, when I say fairly large, it’s like the U.S. is a piece of broccoli next to China’s really large cauliflower. Now that I think of it, that may not be a good comparison as it depends on the restaurant you go to. At the place I was at last night it would be a good comparison as the cauliflower was larger than the broccoli. Not that I’d touch either. I had a hamburger with fries and somebody at the next table had those ghastly vegetables.From the Preface to "Sex and the American Male." I was saddened by the passing of Douglas Adams and wrote the preface to sound a little like his "Hitchhiker's..." books and to honor him. I hope he's smiling.
Jay Williams
An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who’s the better writer?
Jason Lutes
I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?
George Carlin
Go within and release yesterday’s sorrow so you may embrace today’s joy.
Liz Hester
I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?
John Green
But inevitably, when I can't harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn't actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it. In the end, if we're not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
From a personality point of view, you develop judgment, but from the sou's point of view, you develop appreciation.
Ram Dass
Be educated. Only true education and wisdom can lighten the burdens of your life and fill it with joy and happiness.
Debasish Mridha
To those of you with your years of service still ahead, the challenge is yours. Stop doubting yourselves. Have the courage to make up your minds and hold your decisions. Refuse to be BOUGHT for a nickel, or a million dollars, or a job!
Mary McLeod Bethune
I welcome you to my home as my son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala and Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan's happiness. you both have our blessings.
Khaled Hosseini
A black dog, tall and wide as a full grown man, took a couple of steps toward them. It bared sharp, yellow fangs big as Bowie knifes. Drool dripped from them to the dried grass below. Unable to help it, Lee wet his pants when he saw the animal’s eyes. It had four glowing orbs that burned with a smoldering red light like the fires of Hell.
Pamela K. Kinney