Quotes by American Authors - Page 721

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
My life is kinda like a story that if I told you about it, you probably wouldn't believe. It would seem like fiction. That's me.
Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan
We haven't been too bad, have we?""No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble - we haven't been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful things.
Ray Bradbury
Don’t be surprised by your greatness. Be surprised that no one expected it.
Rebecca Maizel
Let go of your grudges. Let the bitterness die tonight. Make a decision today that it’s time to move on. And begin again. New, this time. Never forget that what has passed you by was never meant to befall you. And what has befallen you, was never meant to pass you by. Know that sometimes Allah withholds from you, in order to give you something better. Keep your heart focused on Him, and He will take care of the rest. And remember: you will stumble, but that’s part of the path. Keep going. Keep rising, and refuse to give up.
Yasmin Mogahed
Sadly for you, I think I'm going to live, Simi. You can stop slapping me now. I've already lost enough sense. Can't afford to lose any more brain cells. I really really need my last three before I forget how to spell my name. It's hard enough to pronounce." Nick"well, poo. Not poo that you'll live, 'cause the Simi would probably miss you if you died, but poo that I'll miss all that good old salty boy meat. Though we needs be fatting you up some to make you really good eats. Hmmm." Simi
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Have you ever stopped to think that maybe God isn't trying to save you? Maybe, he is trying to remove all that hurt and anger inside of you so you can save everyone in this situation? Maybe, today you could be that peaceful warrior. Maybe, for once in your life you could not react, but respond. God is waiting for you to be his hero and heal people. When will you love, not hate? When will you show the best part of who you are? You have the power to be someone great. You can show kindness, compassion, mercy and love if you want to. You have been running your entire life thinking peace is found in what you hurt or cut away from your life. Have you ever considered peace is found in what you love, restore, bring kindness to and forgive? Maybe, today is your day to be someone different--someone the world can say was different because they cared about everyone's feelings.
Shannon L. Alder
The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.
First Lady Michelle Obama
And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded watseland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealth with. Trust Daddy on this one.
Tom Bissell
Hereos. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.
Paul Beatty
It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
Augusten Burroughs
No religion is perfect, not after man gets through with it.
Christopher Pike
I made a circular motion with my finger around my temple to indicate I thought this guy was crazy, forgetting that there was no one in the room to see this circular motion except him. He saw it and frowned.
John Swartzwelder
Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.
Harry A. Hopf
Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.
DaShanne Stokes
With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.
Lemony Snicket
(...) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. (...) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence — once they became an option — they mutated . . . into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.
Chip Kidd
People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.
Ashly Lorenzana
It's not the glitter, but the love, that makes things beautiful.
Debasish Mridha
True gratitude can never comeFrom the mind.It has to flow from the heartTo the mind, vital and bodyUntil everything that we have and areIs a sea of gratitude.
Sri Chinmoy
Beasts bounding through time. Van Gogh writing his brother for paintsHemingway testing his shotgunCeline going broke as a doctor of medicinethe impossibility of being humanVillon expelled from Paris for being a thiefFaulkner drunk in the gutters of his townthe impossibility of being humanBurroughs killing his wife with a gunMailer stabbing histhe impossibility of being humanMaupassant going mad in a rowboatDostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shotCrane off the back of a boat into the propellerthe impossibilitySylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potatoHarry Crosby leaping into that Black SunLorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troopsthe impossibilityArtaud sitting on a madhouse benchChatterton drinking rat poisonShakespeare a plagiaristBeethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafnessthe impossibility the impossibilityNietzsche gone totally madthe impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly
Charles Bukowski
The witch's hair was too short and too dark for blond. She wasn't sure if that relieved her or disturbed her.Riley had immediately begun his interrogation, and it had gone something like this:Riley: Where is the meeting between your kind and Aden Stone supposed to take place?Witch: Go suck yourself.Riley: Maybe later. Meeting?Witch: Enjoy death.Riley: I have once already. Now, decide to talk or lose a body part.Witch: May I recommend a finger?Riley: Sure. After I take one of your very necessary hands.
Gena Showalter
rights are honored only in the breach. most people don't get agents or cops assigned to them until they're already raped or dead.
Patricia Cornwell
The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways--when you began writing me dizzy letters about Alexander, I didn't ask if you were in love with him, I asked what his favorite animal was. And your answer told me everything I needed to know about him--how many men would admit that they loved ducks?
Annie Barrows
Sometimes we encourage someone without even being aware of it. Even the example we set by attending church may encourage someone who is searching for God.
Billy Graham
Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.
Johnny Cash
...Studies have found that children who witness abuse are more likely to accept relationships that are abusive.
Asa Don Brown
Freedom is being allowed to think your own thoughts and live your own life.
John F Kennedy
Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.
Stephen King
The Death Mist is not for helping!" Akhlys shrieked. "It shrouds mortals in misery as their souls pass into the Underworld. It is the very breath of Tartarus, of death, of despair!""Awesome," Percy said. "Could we get two orders of that to go?
Rick Riordan
The worst mistake a boss can make is not to say 'Well done'.
John Ashcroft
Whenever you want to marry someone, go have lunch with his ex-wife
Shelley Winters
Sometimes you're going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there's nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human.
Heidi Priebe
One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.
Bret Harte
The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Julia Cameron
The thing about dignity: it can be destroyed, but not taken unless it's given away. It can always be beautified.
Darnell Lamont Walker
In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
Richard Ford
Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.
Jennifer Elisabeth
Just because you painted a house didn't mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people.
Jennifer E. Smith
You tell us about your other friends. You feel guilty speaking about them, but you are annoyed, frustrated. You don't always trust their motives. You feel pressured by their demands on you. You're worn out by the effort it takes to be with them, to feign interest in their stream of never-ending problems.
Aryn Kyle
I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound trivial, so I just nodded.
Maggie Stiefvater
Being kind to someone, only to look kind to others, defeats the purpose of being kind.
Shannon L. Alder
Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.
David Levithan
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?
Richard Powers
But in the earlier hours, or so I have read, they still have got their daylight minds. It takes the midnight mind to do the black deed to the black man.
Elizabeth Spencer
She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.
Eloisa James
The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more imperative that America not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in self-righteous cultural hedonism
Zbigniew Brzeziński
This is what people were looking at all day? How embarrassing! I looked like Quasimodo! My guests were exceptional actors.
Cameo Renae
As it turns out, that persistence is a requirement. Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show the light, so you shouldn't curse darkness. You needed death to define life.
Terry Goodkind
There goes the girl with the wings," they say. "The damned dreamer with her eyes shut to the world.""There goes the misguided soul with her heart buried in the ground."They taunt. They lie. They lie. THEY LIE.I don't pretend to understand life. THEY LIE.
Nadège Richards
I’ll never second guess the things that I have done. I’ve got too much left to say and too much to become.
Alex Gaskarth
The economy blows, or don't you read the papers?""Who reads the fucking papers? News is free on the internet.
Jonathan Maberry
I’m an ass,” the voice on the phone said. “A complete and total ass.
Kathy Bryson
Afterall, trust is greater than love, and to truly trust another humanbeing is rare. Love can exist without trust, but trust cannot exist without love. Antonio; Hidden Mountain
Sammy Sutton
We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -
Terence McKenna
The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
One’s personal life and work are inseparable.
Michael Hyatt
Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process -almost a de-brainwashing- of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole.
Colette Dowling
The office of the president is such a bastardized thing half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
Jimmy Breslin
Deep, contended joy comes from a place of complete security and confidence [in God] - even in the midst of trial.
Charles R. Swindoll