Quotes by American Authors - Page 794

Ah, life, you make us suffer to love you more.
Debasish Mridha
...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.
Calvin Coolidge
When a man is asked to make a speech the first thing he has to decide is what to say.
Gerald Ford
‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.
Dean Young
The most obvious, most absurdly recognizable phenomena in day-to-day life often become the hardest to remain consciously aware of.
Chris Matakas
...this place, this life, the one we were building together, even with all its cracks and bumps and imperfections, this life was the one I needed, the one I wanted, and that best of all, it was home.
Kimberly Stuart
A tech-savvy Board sets a right tone for shaping the culture of innovation.
Pearl Zhu
It was the damnedest thing, life. Once you decide exactly how things are going to go, something or someone comes along and messes it all up.
Jenny Trout
Are you a female dog?""What?" Massie asked.
Lisi Harrison
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successfull personality and duplicate it.
Bruce Lee
Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.
Nicola Griffith
From self alone expect applause.
Marion L. Burton
But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.
Monica Hesse
There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam's taming presence. It was also Ronan's favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia. But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn't show up in other versions. Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla's orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they'd returned to? Ronan didn't really care. All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning.
Maggie Stiefvater
When the power of LOVE is more important than the love of money, religion and power, and people realize that the most important things in this life are NOT things,the world will finally know peace.
Tanya Masse
The world exists because your mind exists. If your mind didn’t exist, there would be no world. As you look at these words, you see them in what appears to be a reality outside of you. What you are really seeing is the image that your mind is creating from the electrical signals being sent to your brain. While they may appear to be outside of you, this is an illusion, they exist within your own mind, and are being projected to appear as if they are outside of you. This apparent reality that is projected by our minds, is maya, and to believe that maya is the ultimate reality is a result of ignorance, or avidya in Sanskrit.
Joseph P. Kauffman
Suddenly, she burst out, "I want to punch her evil, lying face."Liam caught a flash of hot gold as Dad looked at them, narrow-eyed, in the rearview mirror. Dad said, completely seriously, "I can make that happen.
Thea Harrison
If the clicker became useless in grown men's hands, no games to watch, no highlights shown, ESPN left with only test patterns and re-runs of Rudy, wouldn't the indignation level be a whole lot higher? If sports, all sports, all levels, were shut down, wouldn't the big clock be ticking a lot louder? Wouldn't John Boehner be calling the President and vice versa? Wouldn't Ted Cruz have to shut up in a hurry?
Leigh Montville
You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor.
Melissa de la Cruz
In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness
Bill Moyers
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
David Guterson
No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.
Jon Meacham
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
Henry David Thoreau
Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside that you didn't dare let them escape, in case they blew you wide open?
Ellen Hopkins
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, "We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings." What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.
Jessica Valenti
stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,’ and he understood why! ‘The process, however, can be reversed,’ the voice continued, ‘at any time.
Samuel R. Delany
No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!
Norman Lock
You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.
Joel Osteen
He loved her when she was angry. And he was convinced it was because she was her most honest in those moments. ~Ruin
Lucian Bane
To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn't take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness.
Criss Jami
If only I could change the world around me, perhaps my truth won’t one day be the end of me.
Dan Pearce
I'll get it if you need it,I'll search if you don't see it,You're thirsty, I'll be rain,You get hurt, I'll take your pain.I know you don't believe it,But I said it and I still mean it,When you heard what I told you,When you get worried I'll be your soldier.
Gavin DeGraw
Start deep within yourself and slowly build outward toward your goal.
Bryant McGill
Things around here function on lies because if people knew the truth, it wouldn't work.
Kayla Krantz
Cruelty is a language that the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and the heart feels forever.
Shannon L. Alder
It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.
Tina Fey
I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment in your life, and think, "Soon this will be over". But I understand more now. About the way life works.
Nina LaCour
Marrying a woman who was reckless must have been the ultimate reckless act, requiring a lifetime of balancing to keep both of them safe
Ursula Hegi
He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.And when he passed away his insurance was denied,Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.
Ted Gup
You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and fizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it’s exactly right.
Robin Benway
Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.
B.F. Skinner
Does he treat you with respect at all times? That's the first question. The second question is, if he is the exact same person twenty years from now that he is today, would you still want to marry him? And finally, does he inspire to be a better person? You find someone you can answer yes to all three, then you've found a good man.
Colleen Hoover
It was the freedom to experiment that made this experiment called Freedom possible.
Justin Sirois
I was too old for my father to (be protective), too young to be flattered.
Catherine Marshall
Christ, she was like his own personal drug, and he’d been jonesing for more of her since November. And now that he’d had her again, he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to quit her. Yeah. He was in trouble.
Tonya Burrows
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him--Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
Henry David Thoreau
A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:1. Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.2. Never trouble another with what you can do yourself.3. Never spend your money before you have it.4. Never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap, it will be dear to you.5. Take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves.6. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.7. We never repent of having eat too little.8. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.9. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.10. Take things always by their smooth handle.11. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes.12. When angry, count 10. before you speak; if very angry, 100.
Thomas Jefferson
...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be.
Ben Fountain
Time is the one thing that patients need most from their doctors--time to be heard, time to have things explained, time to reassured, time to be introduced by the doctor personally to specialists or other attendants whose very existence seems to reflect something new and threatening. yet the one thing that too many doctors find most difficult to command or manage is time.
Norman Cousins
Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Am I an old man who changed into a butterfly, or a butterfly who thinks he was once an old man?
Dennis Vickers
As Mary Grannon, the beloved Mary of The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Just Mary’ hour says:So many parents are clinging to some favorite story in their own youth and measuring all children's material by it—forgetting what the last minstrel found out in his travels, that 'old times are changed, old manners gone, a stranger fills the Stuart's throne.' Let's not be like the bigots of the iron time; let's be rooters for the modern.
Judith C. Waller
It all began with a bucket of eggs.
H.L. Stephens
Sex is a sacred act which sadly, over the past few decades, has been demeaned and demoralized until it means almost nothing to most people. Veray few still appreciate the emotional and spiritual connection that can and should take place when two bodies and souls are joined together.
Karen Amanda Hooper
I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing." - Mary Warren
Arthur Miller
Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions.
Norman Cousins
I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn't a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.
Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.
National Academy of Sciences