Quotes by American Authors - Page 816

Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.
Pearl S. Buck
Academic failure contributes to poverty and poor health and undermines workforce productivity in ways that harm the entire society.
Anthony Biglan
They were Muslims, man, but not your uncles. They need a deen that's not your uncle's deen. Iman, think about it like that, iman! It's supposed to be all about having no fear of death, right? And we got that part down, we've done that and we have plenty of Muslims who aren't afraid to die. Mash'Allah--but now Muslims are afraid to fuckin' live! They fear life, yakee, more than they fear shaytans or shirk or fitna or bid'a or kafr or qiyamah or the torments in the grave, they fear Life... You got all these poor kids who think they're inferior because they don't get their two Fajr in, their four Zuhr, four Asr... they don't have beards, they don't wear hejab, maybe they went to their fuckin' high school proms and the only masjid around was regular horsehit-horseshit-takbir-masjid and they had to pretend like they were doing everything right...well I say fuck that and this whole house says fuck that--even Umar, you think Umar can go in a regular masjid with all his stupid tattoos and dumb straghtedge bands? Even Umar, bro, as much as he tries to Wahabbi-hard-ass his way around here, he's still one of us. He's still fuckin' taqwacore.
Michael Muhammad Knight
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Willa Cather
Be the light that inspires others to dream.
Ken Poirot
What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
Brian Christian
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.
Lee Smolin
Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
Mary Oliver
And it was the speed that provided some solace. For if it moved like that, it would always move like that, and somehow, because of it, things change, somehow things end.
Alexander Maksik
Once again, it is difficult to start from the premise of mindless evolution and end with the idea that humans are anything more than organisms bent on preserving and passing on their DNA. The fact that humans not only pursue art, philosophy, and science, but also exult in those things more than reproduction cannot easily be explained through materialism.
Joel Furches
Victims blame, managers maintain, and leaders change.
Orrin Woodward
From the back came an unearthly, satisfied chuckle. All I could see in the rearview mirror was a dark shadow with red goat-slitted eyes. Fear slithered throu
Kim Harrison
Today is a good day to tackle a fear and make yourself proud.
April WIlliams
Forgiveness with kindness is the best revenge.
Debasish Mridha
(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.
Jincy Willett
That was one of the things she loved about him. He assumed she could walk and chew gum at the same time. He never second-guessed her, and he didn't try to change her. He accepted.
Jill Shalvis
Strangers can be consequential when you want to practice an atrophied or unexplored facet of you, as they don’t know how you usually act.
Kare Anderson
Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
William Stafford
I wanted to see my family, but didn't want to leave the other guys. The people waiting for us were strangers, even though I knew every last one of them.
Clint Van Winkle
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
I had to learn what my grandfather and mother knew about some of this journey’s problems. My job was to sit back and let the Lord work it out according to His will. That’s the best way —always!
Deborah L. Parker
Poor, dear old Mack, he was ninety-eight per cent perfect. His two percent failing was that he had absolutely no idea of the value or the power of arbitration. He was the veteran of a hundred battles, and I never once could say to the other fellow, 'Your dog started it.
William S. Hart
I discovered that the real meaning of Christmas has nothing to do with you at all. It is about a very special gift. I want to you tell you about this gift.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
Our two peoples are sworn enemies,” he whispered. “You would not do it.”“Call me your enemy no more,” Jan bade him, drawing nearer. “I grow weary of our being enemies. The scars your talons left upon my back this autumn past are old scars now, long healed. Time to heal this ancient rift between our peoples as well.
Meredith Ann Pierce
God is big enough to handle anything you throw at him . . . the one thing you have to remember though, son. When you throw something, it's no longer in your hands.
Sarah Monzon
Good units walk a thin line between indiscipline and ineffectiveness. Ignore the rules too often and you’ve got a mob, but enforce the rules too strictly and you’ve got a herd.
Henry V. O'Neil
Controlling unwanted thoughts is not the problem. Believing, thrusting, and taking direction from them is.
Charles F. Glassman
When civility is illusory, war is inevitable.
Steve Maraboli
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.
Wallace Stegner
Dicky was intelligent but he ended up selling tea because he was socially retarded.
Johnny B. Truant
Empowerment is the ability to refine, improve, and enhance your life without co-dependency.
Steve Maraboli
Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven is too great, hell is too horrible, eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of eternity.
John Piper
Mother's Eden: Does your Matthew... Well, does he make you feel as if he just handed you a handful of Stars?Eden: He make me feel as if he handed me the moon as well, Mama. Maybe the whole universe.
Catherine Anderson
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I think anything like that-which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone-people always feel sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?
Andrew Wyeth
We are force-fed beliefs through incessant advertisements by a culture that ceaselessly fosters our conformity to values which are of no service to the individual.
Chris Matakas
We don't get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.
Kami Garcia
He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.
William H. Gass
We do know that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on our coffins.
John Steinbeck
No. Merely a trick of the light. But I had the impression you were seeking something more formal than‘Okay, go for it,’ as Ven would say,” Alaric said, a hint of a smile surfacing. “Looked pretty impressive,didn’t it? It’s a priest thing.
Alyssa Day
Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.
Aaron Lauritsen
Faith is not blind if you consistently take the right actions to reveal it.
Charles F. Glassman
Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.
Michael Meade
May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.
Roman Payne
True forgiveness is when you can say, 'Thank you for that experience.
Oprah Winfrey
Misha, my best friend who got me into bed and fucked me with a lie.
Penelope Douglas
The wacky thing about those bad guys is that you can't count on them to be obvious. They forget to wax their mustaches and goatees, leave their horns at home, send their black hats to the dry cleaner's. They're funny like that.
Jim Butcher
If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.
Madeleine L'Engle
I am closed off into myself and no one but me can ever help me get out.
Alice Kohler
I don't hate anybody," Tobias said calmly. "It's strange, but right now, I don't even hate the Yeerks. It's like, they're trying to survive. And we're trying to survive. I'm not really sure why it has to be an either-or thing.
K.A. Applegate
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Our hearts and imaginations need to dance and play if we are to live awake
Jaeda DeWalt
Souls were webs of light that contained the essence of a human's life. Memories and loves, children and families. Every moment of life, pressing in
Carolyn Turgeon
(...) this first-approximation reification of language very easily passes over unnoticed into a harder idealization, especially in everyday parlance. It is this idealization that, for instance, leads people to say that "the language" is degenerating because teenagers don't know how to talk anymore (they were saying that in the eighteenth century too!). It is also behind seeing the dictionary as an authority on the "correct meanings" of words rather than as an attempt to record how words are understood in the speech community. Even linguists adopt this stance all the time in everyday life (especially as teachers of students who can't write a decent paragraph). But once we go inside the heads of speakers to study their own individual cognitive structure, the stance must be dropped.
Ray S. Jackendoff
Faith is not being sure where you're going but going anyway.
Fredrick Buechner
... Will you be okay or is there something I could help you with?""I'm just going to change in to comfy clothes and hit the sheets.""And what's the verdict on whether or not you want my help with that?" He flashed a cocky smile at me. He was undeniably sexy, in an "I-have-poison-blood-in-my-veins" sort of way.
Kelly Hashway
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
James Madison
The modern hero is a person who does something everyone thinks they could do if they were a little stronger, a little faster, a little smarter, or a little more generous. Heroes in ancient times were the link between men and perfect beings, gods. Heroes in modern times are the link between man as he is and man as he could be.
John Edwards
Warner. A white bird with streaks of gold like a crown atop its head. A fair - skinned boy with gold hair, the leader of Sector 45. It was always him. All along . The link.
Tahereh Mafi