Quotes by American Authors - Page 752

It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
Louise Glück
Tis a sad day when ye ha' t' pinch yerself t' see if ye're awake or in th' midst o' a night terror. 'Tis a really sad day when ye have t' pinch yerself twice."Old woman Nora to her three wee granddaughters on a cold winter's night
Karen Hawkins
If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.
Daniel C. Dennett
Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?""I don't know any other way.""Let me show you."And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.
Lauren Oliver
Do you remember the time, Mike,” Jeremy laughed, “that you put a banana down your pants and walked up to the Palma-nator. It looked like you had one hell of a hard-on.
Buffy Andrews
Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
Dorianne Laux
... for fog was merely a cloud that wasn't too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.
Jan Karon
You're a Scott," the Dark said, his lips peeled back in displeasure, as if just saying the word was revolting."And you're Irish. I'm so glad we got that settled.
Donna Grant
Before defining what you want, know who you are.
Diana Dentinger
What are you doing?”“What does it look like? I’m getting down on my knees.”His head butted against her stomach. Her muscles clenched, shocked at the touch, even through the layer of cotton.“I’ve never begged a woman for anything before. Enjoy this.”She tried to think of something sufficiently sassy. “Enjoy it? I can’t even see it.”“It’s symbolic.
Alisha Rai
Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.
Jill Lepore
We are a biological species arising from Earth’s biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.
Edward O. Wilson
The most sexually active women need marriage the most to validate themselves. Why not do an orgy to see who proposes?
Kent Lamarc
Make life easier for those around you, not harder.Every person you know is fighting their own great battle. Few of us ever know what those battles entail, and so often we say and do things that push others deeper and harder into the front lines of those battles. I know such has been the relentless lifelong reality for me.Love a person for the person that they are.Or dislike them for the person that they are.But don’t love or dislike them for the sole reason that they see people differently than you do. Don’t love or dislike them because they experience the world differently than you do.And please don’t eternally and wholly define them with sexual labels just because they were among those who finally found the courage to acknowledge their truth.
Dan Pearce
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He deserves better than this. But "deserves" doesn't have a lot to do with falling in love.
Claudia Gray
Mary praise the rosary for my broken mind.
Lana Del Rey
Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.
Lemony Snicket
Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.
Brandon Sanderson
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure.
Ogden Nash
...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192
Jeff VanderMeer
Tell me what you want," he demanded. "Say the words." Because he needed to hear them. Some primal part of him wanted her to spell it out.tHer cheeks were flushed, her eyes heavy-lidded. "Kiss me."t"Where?
Katie Reus
In the early days of marriage, joy precedes the act. Tragically, as the years go by joy can be severed from the act until finally, the act itself is no more. This ought not to be. Over time it is the companionship that brings joy, and service is the natural outworking of the joy of commitment. Failure to act kills it.
Ravi Zacharias
Something happens to people when they're masked. They become too free, uncivilized. They may do anything.
Alexandra Ripley
Without asking, he moved behind her and brushed her hair over her shoulder. Drawing the necklace around her neck, he fastened the clasp. The amber felt cool against her sweltering skin. Lifting it, she rotated the pendant, watching as it caught the light. "It's lovely." Before she could change her mind, she dug into her pocket and shoved the rest of the coins into his hand.
Amber Argyle
It starts with my mother….Boys get fucked up by their fathers, right? That’s why so many tales are really Daddy Issue stories at their core, because men run the world, and men get to tell their stories first. If women told most of the stories, though, then all the best stories would be about Mommy Problems.
Chuck Wendig
Leaders don't correct people to success as much as believe them to it.
Orrin Woodward
Whose idea was it that we should all get jobs, work faster, work better, race from place to place with our brains stewing on tweets, blogs, and sound bites, on must-see movies, must-do experiences, must-have gadgets, when in the end, all any of us will have is our simple beating heart, reaching up for the connection to whoever might be in the room or leaning into our mattress as we draw our last breath?
Dee-Williams
Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.
Anne Fadiman
She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.
Marie Rutkoski
You don’t like what you see out your window, you put up a wall.
Michael Connelly
Nothing can squelch your fire except turning your back on the thing that fuels it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird-- that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.
Charles Mingus
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
Now If diversity were inherently good, inherently valuable, inherently wonderful, why would we have to have the highly-paid profession know as 'diversity consultant' to manage it? Things that are inherently good, to enjoy them, or to make the most of them, you don't need a consultant. You don't need a consultant to make the most out of good-tasting food, beautiful weather, the affection of your friends. Those are inherently good things. Diversity required consultants because diversity is hard. Diversity is difficult. It's because it's difficult for people to try to work, to act, and live together with people who are unlike themselves.
Jared Taylor
Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
for meobedience to another is the decay of self.for though every being is similareach being is differentand to herd our differencesunder one lawdegrades each self.
Charles Bukowski
The key difference between captain and coach? The latter’s opportunities for influence come at moments when play isn't happening,
Carolyn Taylor
...Ethan, but I'm certainly not the type of woman to just go home with two men whether I know them or not. It would be highly inappropriate, not to mention stupid.""And you're not stupid.""Not as far as I can tell"...
M.K. McClintock
Your faith may be just a little thread. It may be small and weak, but act on that faith. It does not matter how big your faith is, but rather, where your faith is.
Billy Graham
Laughing, she stood and held out a hand, “You need any first aid?”“Nah. Your kisses did the trick.
Katie Reus
I don't know yet. I might be. Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.
T.M. Goeglein
I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women and children. There will be no survivors." The shock I've been feeling begins to give way to fury. "I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do." My hands go out automatically, as if to indicate the whole horror around me. "This is what they do and we must fight back!""President Snow says he's sending a message. Well I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?" One of the cameras follows where I point to the planes burning on the roof of a warehouse across from us. "Fire is catching!" I am shouting now, determined he will not miss a word of it, "And if we burn, you burn with us!
Suzanne Collins
As for whether the magic in The Crown’s Game is real, well . . . that depends. Do you believe in what you cannot see?
Evelyn Skye
In this life we get only those things for which we hunt for which we strive and for which we are willing to sacrifice.
George Matthew Adams
But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
Gloria Steinem
Very little effort is needed to create a prosperous life. Focus on positivity, prosperity, and love.
Debasish Mridha
It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers but for powers equal to our tasks to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel towards our distant goal.
Helen Keller
The best don’t stick around when you treat them poorly, only the desperate do.
Shannon L. Alder
Consciously or not, we feel and internalize what the space tells us about how to work. When you walk into most offices, the space tells you that it's meant for a group of people to work alone. Closed-off desks sprout off of lonely hallways, and in a few obligatory conference rooms a huge table ensures that people are safely separated from one another.
David Kelley
Hard work is much more important than talent
Carlo Rotella
There’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!
Sinclair Lewis
The Bible is to your soul what bread is to your body. You need it daily. One good meal does not suffice for a lifetime.
Billy Graham
A tried and true way to get your children interested in books and reading is to read to them when they are young.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
You will find the key to success under the alarm clock.
Benjamin Franklin
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.
Stephen King
This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.
Lorrie Moore
You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly whether they'll be okay. And the idea that I'll be worried forever about them and what they do...I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I'm worried, and I'm worried about having to worry so goddamn much.
Drew Magary
Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don't. When you're up here, you realize how distant they really are—how impossible to reach.
Ally Condie