Quotes by American Authors - Page 811

Family are people who never earn your respect or love but demand it nevertheless.
Greg Keyes
I want to leave all my friends and the sunlight for a small, rainy town.
The Harvard Lampoon
I'm not obliged to defend your dignity. Provided you have any.
Rachel Caine
A worthy life means showing up when showing up is the only thing to do. Goodness bears itself out in millions of ordinary ways across the globe, for the rich and poor, the famous and unknown, in enormous measures and tiny, holy moments. It may involve a career and it may not. It may include traditional components and it may not.
Jen Hatmaker
There are just some kind of men who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
Harper Lee
Always carry a book on a date so that when you get bored you can slip into the Ladies for a read.
Sharon Stone
God’s holiness demands that sin be punished—but God’s love has provided the way of redemption through Christ.
Billy Graham
A country road, a gravel road, is a sign of civilization, sure, but it’s just a farm, an easy conquest. Iron means a stronghold, people who can defend what’s theirs.
Kathy Bryson
Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.
Anne Rice
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
We live in an upside-down world, in which people hate what they should love and love what they should hate.
Billy Graham
I have no other possessions of value but my soul.
Allen Ginsberg
I hope you find true meaning, contentment, and passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find whatever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you - yes, you - have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.
Sheryl Sandberg
The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.
Beth Bagley
It's true, look at Erik Johnson on the dance floor. Seriously-look at him. Six feet tall, one hundred eighty pounds, all of which can be converted by the right clothes and the right song into a mass of headless joy. (the right hair helps, too). He treats his body like it's made of fireworks, each one timed to the beat. Is he dancing alone or dancing with everyone? here is the secret: it doesn't matter. he travelled for two hours to get to the city, and when it's all over, it will take him over two hours to get home. But it's worth it. Freedom isn't just about voting and marrying and kissing on the street, although all of these things are important. Freedom is also about what you will allow yourself to do.
David Levithan
His arm slid around my shoulders and drew me to him. It was odd, sitting there under the veil of darkness, watching the neighborhood settle down. Lamps burned in windows. TVs flickered. A few houses down, the rhythmic thud of a basketball on concrete and muffled laughter alerted us to the only other people outside on this glorious fall night.“This is a perfect date,” I said.He tensed. “You’d call it a date?”“Sure. You wouldn’t?”He looked down at me, his eyes glittering in the faint light. “I thought American girls liked more formality in a date.”“More money is what you mean.” I smiled. “It’s a date. Don’t argue with me.”“I never do.
Elizabeth Langston
I am loving and joyful because I think I am.
Debasish Mridha
Love could be a last hope and a star to steer by.
Cassandra Clare
Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.
Michael Pollan
If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.
Nel Noddings
When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Now listen, we need to be quiet as mice. No, quieter than that. As quiet as . . . as . . .” “Dead mice?” Reynie suggested. “Perfect,” said Kate with an approving nod. “As quiet as dead mice.
Trenton Lee Stewart
Pain was as much a part of this life as the summer and the winter and the rain, and there was no greater asshole than the one who believed you can cure it.
Brian McGreevy
I have to hurt other people in order to get what I want, I don’t have a choice but to. In life, you gotta do the right things for the wrong reasons. Or the wrong things for the right reasons.
Khali Raymond
Life is joyful; life is wonderful.Life is love's shrine.When you're my moon, I am your star. Oh my eternal valentine.
Debasish Mridha
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
Jennifer Egan
You can't look back. Nothing you can do to change it. Only forward.
Jen Calonita
He who dies with the most toys...dies a child.
James Rozoff
We never know how high we areTill we are called to rise;And then, if we are true to plan,Our statures touch the skies.The heroism we reciteWould be a daily thing,Did not ourselves the cubits warpFor fear to be a king.
Emily Dickinson
Good lord, what have I gotten myself into?
Aaron B. Powell
I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.
Mo Willems
We train the mind so that we can enjoy greater peace, happiness, wisdom & equanimity.
Allan Lokos
... understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.
James Agee
Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.
Daniel Woodrell
Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.
James Fenimore Cooper
The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.
George Packer
When I look to the future it's so bright it burns my eyes.
Oprah Winfrey
Playboy stretched his arm, patting Carlos on the back. "Well, you know what they say: If you love someone, let'em go. If they don't come back, hunt'em down and kill'em!
Alex Sanchez
Wisdom is the essence of education. Kindness is the essence of morality.
Debasish Mridha
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Hal Borland
I feel proud that I have been counted worthy to have blood shed by a traitor, and to suffer torture at the hands of those who have undertaken to trail our Flag in the dust. Signed, Yours as Ever, Franklin M. Haven.
Franklin Marion Havens
Andy once clipped a magazine article about how black dogs are always the last to be adopted at shelters and, therefore, more likely to be put down. Which is totally Dog Racism, if you ask me.
Stephanie Perkins
Success to me is being happy, truly fulfilled, being proud of myself, and doing different things all the time.
Leighton Meester
She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy.
Alex Shakar
Never let the story beat you home.
Deondriea Cantrice
[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.
Paul R. Halmos
Kindness can transform someone's dark moment with a blaze of light. You'll never know how much your caring matters. Make a difference for another today.
Amy Leigh Mercree
Greatness always indicates simplicity. Wisdom always results from curiosity.
Debasish Mridha
Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.
Gavin de Becker
Answers are free, mistakes are costly.
Danielle Tate
She threw one leg over his and straddled his lap, then reached under herself and found him again.He tore his mouth from hers. “Wait.”“No.” She looked him frankly in the eyes. “I don’t care if you spill at once. I need you inside me now.”His beautiful eyes widened and then narrowed. “You’ll not always hold the reins, my lady.”She smiled sweetly. “Naturally not, but I do now.
Elizabeth Hoyt
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley
Respect both what you need to know and what you don't need to know. Respect mystery, for mystery is still needed to run the universe." -- The Legacy Letters, by Carew Papritz"Things I didn't know.
Carew Papritz
At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.
Stephen King
I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.
Richard Powers
When that bastard calls back, you tell him he’s won this round. I’ll marry him. But I don’t take well to being blackmailed, and tell him I intend to spend the rest of my life making him miserable, got that?
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Everything just feels so empty without her. She was more a parent to me than my birth parents were. She took me in, fed, dressed me, but most importantly, she treated me with respect. She taught me that my abilities were nothing to be ashamed of, nothing I should try so hard to deny. She convinced me that what I had was a gift-not a curse- and that I shouldn't let other people's narrow minds and fears determine how I love, what I do, or how I perceive myself in the world. She actually made me believe that in no way, shape, or form did their uninformed opinions make me a freak.
Alyson Noel
All things are strange which are worth knowing.
Catherynne M. Valente
Making someone responsible for your misery also makes them responsible for your happiness. Why give that power to anyone but yourself?
Scott Stabile