Quotes by American Authors - Page 738

We all have negative thoughts now and then, but we can choose not to dwell there and not to let them control us.
Roy T. Bennett
...for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.
Vladimir Nabokov
That public men publish falsehoodsIs nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and tum. They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors, This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truthHunts in no pack. You are not CatulIus, you know, To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty Political hatredS. Let boys want pleasure, and menStruggle for power, and women perhaps for fame, And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped. Yours is not theirs.
Robinson Jeffers
I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Richard Feynman
After the bitching I'd done to Abe about going to remote, crappy places, I should have been excited about the prospect of going to Sin City.
Richelle Mead
In order to deserve, we must pay our dues and steadily work for perfection. We must relish in struggle, and relinquish pride. We must dispel fear and seek enlightenment. We must shun division and honor love. We must know our hearts and seek to understand others. We must try, live, create, feel, grow and love.
Bryant McGill
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard
Michael Michalko
My nightmares are usually about losing you. I'm okay once I realize you're here.
Suzanne Collins
You will never let go of the past by ignoring the most painful thing the person you loved has done to you. When you begin to minimize it, second guess yourself and others, ignore it or even pretend it didn't happen you cheat yourself out of healing. Naturally, your mind would rather believe the lies you are telling it, rather than accept the truth. The soul has a way of protecting itself from trauma, but if left in denial there is no growth or change. Healing requires going to that place you avoid and asking yourself why you are so afraid to accept the reality of what happened to you? Why have you minimized it like this person has wanted you to? What is it about your self esteem that allows you to continue being a doormat?
Shannon L. Alder
I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.
Lauren Wolk
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
Will Durant
If our hearts are full of our own wretched 'I ams' we will have no ears to hear His glorious, soul-satisfying 'I am'. We say, 'Alas, I am such a poor week creature,' or 'I am so foolish,' or 'I am so good-for-nothing,' or 'I am so helpless' and we give these pitiful 'I ams' of ours as the reason of the wretchedness and discomfort of our religious lives, and even feel that we are very much to be pitied that things are so hard for us. While all the time we entirely ignore the blank check of God's magnificent 'I am,' which authorizes us to draw upon Him for an abundant supply for every need.
Hannah Whitall Smith
From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.
David Gross
This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing process.
Cheryl Strayed
She was beginning to recognize it as the feeling of anger taken to such a level it was no longer possible to separate it from any other emotion or thought. In a way, it was a liberating sensation.
Martha Wells
Loyalty is what you focus on and won't give up.
Shannon L. Alder
Maybe she’d always wished to be beautiful and didn’t quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn’t say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there’d been a mistake and she was after all.
Mona Simpson
'So what happens next?' 'Everybody dies, and the people who don't get married.' 'Like any other story, then.'
Sarah Monette
Without love even the most radical devotion to God is of no value to Him. Let me make sure that sinks in… You can gain all the spiritual gifts in the world. You can take the most radical steps of obedience. You can share every meal with the homeless in your city. You can memorize the book of Leviticus. You can pray each morning for four hours like Martin Luther. But if what you do does not flow out of a heart of love - a heart that does those things because it genuinely desires to do them - it is ultimately worthless to God.
J.D. Greear
A fortress built long ago,Walls made timeless by historic glory.The small girl in the boat slows,To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
This time of year," she said, "people’s consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the ‘less fortunate.’" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they’re poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the ‘less fortunate’ turn into ‘welfare queens’ and ‘derelicts.’ But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I’d never hear the word ‘derelict.’""So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you’re the electric bill.
Jeri Smith-Ready
In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young—-well, not even the young anymore—-need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning “to listen, or to give ear to.” It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren’t really very good listeners.
Heather Choate Davis
Let your body move. It will give voice to a language that can heal.
Gina Greenlee
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Loving her has become a part of my religion, a gentle mantra with every beating of my heart. I cannot imagine its Ragnarok without wilting.
Thomm Quackenbush
Getting stuck is reactive, getting unstuck is proactive.
Sherene McHenry
Many of your relationship problems are not really relationship problems. They're personal problems that spill over into relationships.
Rick Warren
What's the good of being alive if you don't do anything?
Kirsten Hubbard
Joy explodes throughout the book of Psalms like fireworks, and is the most potent anti-missile defense system there is.
Lynn Austin
Every woman is beautiful. Every woman is amazing because every woman’s heart is filled with the motherly instinct of unconditional love.
Debasish Mridha
A poor man needs the escape far more than a wealthy man does.""Escape," Amanda repeated, having never heard a book described in such a way."Yes, something to transport your mind from where and who and what you are. Everyone needs that. A time or two in my past, it seemed that a book was the only thing that stood between me and near insanity. I-"He stopped suddenly, and Amanda realized that he had not meant to make such a confession. The room became uncomfortably quiet, with only the jaunty snap of the fire to intrude on the silence. Amanda felt as if the air were throbbing with some unexpressed emotion. She wanted to tell him that she understood exactly what he meant, that she, too, had experienced the utter deliverance that words on a page could provide. There had been times of desolation in her own life, and books had been her only pleasure.
Lisa Kleypas
Yes, men are pigs. Except your brother, of course. He's actually a decent human being. Almost a woman.-Jillian's mother
Gena Showalter
Jessica, you are a pain in the arse, do you know that? If I were not so immensely fond of you, I should throw you out the window."She wrapped her arms about his waist and laid her head against his chest. "Not merely 'fond,' but 'immensely fond.' Oh Dain, I do believe I shall swoon.""Not now," he said crossly. "I haven't time to pick you up.
Loretta Chase
To be creative you must set aside both certainty and doubt.
Pearl Zhu
The 3 most powerful resources you have available to you : love, prayer and forgiveness.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
You are the answer to every prayer I've offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don't know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have.
Nicholas Sparks
For every guy who loves being a dad, there’s another who realizes too late that he’s created something his wife loves more than him.
Mark R. Brand
So in the sweltering heat of a July night, I sang a Christmas carol to a room full of fae, who had been driven out of their homelands by Christians and their cold-iron swords.
Patricia Briggs
My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.
Robert M. Price
Every goal first started as something in our mind. You have it all within you!
Deborah Day
The disease of intolerance is not communicated only in religious groups. I’ve seen it infect racial groups, economic groups and even whole nations (where it is often cleverly disguised as patriotism). Intolerance always fences people out. It creates one group we call US. And the rest we call THEM.
Steve Goodier
It is better to exist unknow to the law.--Irish Proverb
Dorien Kelly
If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's good will.
Dale Carnegie
This is what happened when one left one's home - pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.
Tatjana Soli
Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering?And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn?
Kahlil Gibran
The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind. But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. meditation may give us a fresher view of things but cannot uncover them as they are in themselves.
John Gray
Why weren't we born in the same era?" he lamented. She eased past him neither here nor there, looked over her shoulder and whispered, "How mundane and cliche would that be?
Donna Lynn Hope
Hatred is prevalent on this earth because it requires no real effort, unlike the investment it takes to genuinely understand a person.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Truth: Rape does indeed happen between girlfriend and boyfriend, husband and wife. Men who force their girlfriends or wives into having sex are committing rape, period. The laws are blurry, and in some countries marital rape is legal. But it still is rape.
Patti Feuereisen
Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.
Hal Borland
Disappear Here.The syringe fills with blood.You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.Wonder if he's for sale.People are afraid to merge. To merge.
Bret Easton Ellis
He said they've literally set up a camp across the street from the hotel and they have signs and bullhorns and the kind of Christian attitude that makes God puke.
Robyn Peterman
To be your companion.""Companion?" He said the word as if he were spitting a bad taste from his mouth. "I am a killer. A monster! Can you not see that?
Jettie Necole
The institution of marriage would be damaged. Ideologically, marital morality must be kept intact, in spite of the contradictory facts of sexual life, because marriage is the backbone of the authoritarian family, which in turn is the breeding ground for authoritarian ideologies and character structure.
Wilhelm Reich
He was changed, burned, branded, destroyed and rebuilt. And he loved it.
Jess Michaels
No amount of saying ‘I love you’ and ‘I trust you’ makes it true when it isn’t.
Maya Banks
Therm-bombs! Drop ’em right on us! I been roasted before—it’s nothing!
Henry V. O'Neil
Spoken words are like seeds that we plant which will eventually grow into something sweet or bitter. Our actions in this life are seeds we're planning for the other life promised by Allah.
Shems Friedlander
Once in Persia reigned a king Who upon his signet ring Graved a maxim true and wise Which if held before the eyes Gave him counsel at a glance Fit for every change and chance. Solemn words and these are they: "Even this shall pass away."
Theodore Tilton
... I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one.
Megan Whalen Turner