Quotes by American Authors - Page 790

Never fear to be wonderful.
Debasish Mridha
When you loose your power to laugh, you loose your power to think straight.
Jerome Lawrence
It just made me realize that I wouldn’t have anything if you left,” he said miserably. Jake gave a pained wince and looked down at the floor. “I wouldn’t have anything if I left, either,” he murmured.
Madeleine Urban
The promises of prayer are extraordinary, but for prayer to work as God promises it to work, it must be purged of self and doubt.
Leslie Ludy
The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she'd been and took away their right to Choose.
Seanan McGuire
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.
John Muir
When people keep telling you that you can’t do a thing, you kind of like to try it.
Margaret Chase Smith
Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it.
Jesse Owens
We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us—and this is remarkable—the Scriptures teach us to be submissive. This is not a popular idea.
Rich Mullins
A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.
Maya Angelou
Be a fountain of peace to find peace everywhere.
Debasish Mridha
Happiness is not a choice, or we’d all be happy. Let’s stop putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to be happy all the time, and to pretend we can choose to be happy whenever we want. That’s not how life works. Sure, we can make choices that reflect a commitment to our well-being, and the more of these choices we make, the more likely we are to find ourselves feeling good more often. Healthy choices are within our power, and are important. But we can’t choose happiness, and we just set ourselves up for failure by believing we can. Life is more than happiness, anyway. It’s okay to feel all the things we feel. It’s human. There’s no shame in wanting to be happy, of course. We all want to be happy. But rather than try to choose happiness, maybe we can choose to being kinder and more loving. That we can do. We can work hard to take better care of ourselves, and better care of each other. If we do these things, and we remember that we are all connected, all brothers and sisters, all worthy of love, maybe then happiness will choose us a little more often.
Scott Stabile
The reason any person yaks excessively is because his communication is not being adequately acknowledged. He just keeps trying to be heard.
Ruth Minshull
Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again.It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
M.F.K. Fisher
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
Sylvia Plath
The only reason I'm friends with any of you is because I outgrew the von Trapps, one annoying Austrian at a time.
Lisa Mantchev
Claire coaxed free another loop of cloth. The slow side of cotton against cotton matched the soft tenor or her voice.'I have lots of talents Mr. Ryland. Listening is only one of them.
Gina Conkle
I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.
John Kennedy Toole
The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.
Sheena Iyengar
When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.
Judith Martin
I. All the distinctive characteristics of personality are ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the Bible.
R.A. Torrey
Love is the fingerprint of the soul.
Jodi Livon
Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason?" he asked Isabelle. "They are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here, or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder like the automaton. Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was made to do." Isabelle picked up the mouse, wound it again, and set it down. "Maybe it's the same with people," Hugo continued. "If you lose your purpose...it's like you're broken.
Brian Selznick
Large families are communities unto their own.
Kilroy J. Oldster
All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Another vampire pushed her way through the crowd to stand at hisside—a pretty blue-haired Asian girl in a silver foil skirt. Clary wondered if there were any ugly vampires, or maybe any fat ones. Maybe they didn't make vampires out of ugly people. Or maybe ugly people just didn't want to live forever.
Cassandra Clare
It’s a funny thing to be the product of a fairy-tale romance. It’s another thing to think you might find one yourself. You can read the stories and watch the movies, and you can think you know how it’s all supposed to unfold.But the truth is, love is as much fate as it is planning, as much a beauty as it is a disaster.Finding a prince might mean kissing a lot of frogs. Or kicking a lot of frogs out of your house. Falling might mean running headfirst into something you always wanted. Or dipping your toe into something you’ve been scared of your whole life. Happily ever after could be waiting in a field a mile wide. Or a window as narrow as seven minutes.
Keira Cass
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
DaShanne Stokes
Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
Robert M. Sapolsky
It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has.
Robert A. Heinlein
You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.
Richard Bach
Let the kindness and the raw, aching beauty of the universe shatter you over and over again. find peace in the knowledge that your whole is composed of the sum of all of your beautifully broken pieces. because breaking is becoming.
Jeanette LeBlanc
In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
What's next? You want to convince me they're making another crap Last Airbender movie?
Cassandra Clare
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester
We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that "I've a Mother there" will give way to the experience that "I've a Mother here." We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness.
Carol Lynn Pearson
We are far from perfect but willing to be different.
Craig Groeschel
It is the theory which decided what can be observed.
Albert Einstein
Lovability — the capacity to earn genuine, heartfelt love and loyalty from customers — is the secret ingredient that propels a select few organizations ahead and leads not only to consistent growth and profitability but sustainable happiness for everyone involved.
Brian de Haaff
I have heard that you should not do bed business after too much hard work, " Snow Flower told me, "but I don't believe that my mother-in-law has heard that." She looked exhausted. I felt the same way after visiting my husband's home-from the nonstop labor, from being polite, and from always being watched."This is the one rule my mother-in-law doesn't respect either," I commiserated. "Haven't they heard an exhausted well yields no water?
Lisa See
I don't wear armor. I don't carry weapons. An emperor needs only his imagination.
Lionel Suggs
Cade thought about this. “Let me get this straight—you secretly pretend to like poetry to impress the smart girl in your English class, while she’s secretly pretending to like football to impress you.” He paused. “That’s gotta be the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”“I guess her subconscious finds my subconscious pretty irresistible,” Zach said, all teenage confidence right then.“You were lucky to pull that line off once, Garrity. I wouldn’t push it.
Julie James
If you feed a man a meal you only feed him for a day-but if you teach a man to grow food you feed him for a lifetime.
Peace Pilgrim
A fine young man and a fine young felly he always was, except that in the old days, before you began coming in here, Mr. Witherwax, he maybe had too much money and spent too much of it on girls. Take them alone, either one; the money without the women, or a good girl without the money that can be a help to a young felly, and he's fixed for life. But put them together; and often as not, the young felly goes on the booze. ("The Better Mousetrap")
Fletcher Pratt
Always go as far as you can see, then let faith take you the rest of the way.
Seth Adam Smith
Ugly people kill people all the time. But when pretty people did, it got attention.
Chelsea Cain
Entwining his hands in her hair, he kissed her with all the passion and love he'd kept hidden in his heart for thirty-sex years. Waiting for her. Only for her. As he felt her kiss him back the frozen wall inside him finally broke, allowing life and sun inside his soul. He pulled away, stroking her cheeks as he looked down into her eyes. "I love you, Carrie," he whispered. "I love you.
Jennie Lucas
We arrived from New York after a daylong slog through airports and planes and traffic. It was 10: 00 p.m. local time, but my body had no idea if it was night or day. Krishna was hungry, so I found some leftover dosa batter in the kitchen and started making one for her. Next thing I knew, my grandmother was by my side, commandeering the griddle. “Let me do it,” she said. “You don’t know where anything is.” I insisted, but she won, even though by then she cooked with only one arm, the other still paralyzed from the stroke. Then my aunt Papu came in and yelped, “You’re making your grandma cook?” She was appalled. “It’s ten at night!” Papu took over, my grandmother wouldn’t leave, and my uncle Ravi entered the fray. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re supposed to be this famous food person and you’re making these women cook at ten o’clock!” I quickly remembered how it felt to live with so many people. Every move you make is scrutinized. You get up and it’s “Where are you going?” You come back and it’s “Why are you wearing that blouse? I like the other one better.” You walk outside and someone calls from the veranda, “Don’t go that way, there’s too much sun!” It was exasperating and suffocating and God, I had missed it.
Padma Lakshmi
The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.
Gregory Maguire
Having harvested all the knowledge and wisdom we can from our mistakes and failures we should put them behind us and go ahead.
Edith Johnson
Now, as they pressured perfect footprints into the snow that had been accumulating all day, his father took Harry's hand."Heshele, how are you?""OK, I guess.""Are you very sad?""I don't know. I know I should be. But what does it mean to be sad?"His father stopped. He cupped his free hand to let the snow gather. It quickly turned from an inviting white coating to black-specked gray water."Sadness is in my hand. In a second, a thing of beauty becomes dirty water; innocence leaves a child's eyes; he who strived for immortality lies forgotten under weeds. Sad is missing the love that death has sealed in the ground or that life has denied life to.""Then I'm sad. When you took my hand, I remembered how he took my hand when we went to the pier to fish. And I thought: That will never happen again. And then I thought: Up until now I never understood the word never, and there was a lump in my throat.
Amram Ducovny
Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.
Stephen R. Covey
If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way
Eve Ensler
I believed it had been long enough that Kresimir would never return. I believed it was time for change. I thought all of Rozalia’s concerns were foolish, and that Julene was living in the past. I believed we were alone.”“My people have never been alone,” Mihali said. “The others may have left. I did not.
Brian McClellan
I like the bumper sticker that reads, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” But that does not give us license to live below God’s standard.
Billy Graham
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Life isn't about having, it's about being. You could surround yourself with all that money can buy, and you'd still be as miserable as a human can be. I know people with perfect bodies who don't have half the happiness I've found. On my journeys I've seen more joy in the slums of Mumbai and the orphanages of Africa than in wealthy gated communities and on sprawling estates worth millions. Why is that? You'll find contentment when your talents and passion are completely engaged, in full force. Recognise instant self-gratification for what it is. Resist the temptation to grab for material objects like the perfect house, the coolest clothes or the hottest car. The if I just had X, I would be happy syndrome is a mass delusion. When you look for happiness in mere objects, they are never enough. Look around. Look within.
Nick Vujicic
I don’t like the idea of something where you have to depend upon the integrity of the man and not the integrity of the institution.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
That is why my first and most pressing question seems like such an outright act of mutiny. What I want to know is, since when does making art require participation in any community, beyond the intense participation that the art itself is undertaking? Since when am I not contributing to the community if all I want to do is make the art itself? Isn’t the art itself my intimate communication with others, with the world, with the unfolding spectacle of the human struggle as we live and coexist on this earth?
Meghan Tifft