Quotes by American Authors - Page 844

How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?
Frank Herbert
But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
Maggie Nelson
Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.
Robert F. Kennedy
It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair.
Emily Dickinson
But only a few have the will -- be it born of courage or recklessness, folly or sublime wisdom -- to act and, by their action, transform themselves. They will pay for their courage, of course; the world does not treat its "others" lightly. But so will the rest of us -- the ones who love them -- haunted as we are by our envy of their bright, burning beauty, which we can bear neither to look at nor to turn away from.
Ed Tarkington
I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.
Michael Gira
And Nephilim—we tend to love very overwhelmingly. To fall in love only once, to die of grief over love—my old tutor used to say that the hearts of the Nephilim were like hearts of angels: They felt every human pain, and never healed.
Cassandra Clare
I looked around and thought about my life. I felt grateful. I noticed every detail. That is the key to time travel. You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.
Amy Poehler
When teaching someone a boundary, they learn less from the enforcement of the boundary, and more from the way the boundary is established.
Bryant McGill
It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.
Flannery O'Connor
To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems
Matt Groening
I don't accept defeat as final. Only death is final - and even then I hope for a reprieve.
Phil Gramm
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain
When we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of God.
Billy Graham
Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
Robert Anton Wilson
If every vampire who said he was at The Crucifixion, was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock . . .
Joss Whedon
Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes
Gregory Benford
silly man. I know the man I am marrying is destined for great things, as the many remarkable things he has done thus far have brought himto such a high oint already. Mark my words, Alex. You are a man whose future lies before him for all to marvel at one day. And you, Colonel Hamilton, are mine, and I am yours always.
Melissa de la Cruz
There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.
George H.W. Bush
We may all be on the same journey but not necessarily on the same road.
Patty Ptak Kogutek
What's a fuck when what I want is love?
Henry Miller
Thoughts Become Things... Choose The Good Ones!
Mike Dooley
I have found that it's not so much how you start, but how you finish that counts." -Declan
Brittany L. Engels
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.
Les Brown
If you spend your life over analysing every encounter you will always see the tree, but never the forest.
Shannon L. Alder
Her grandmother had once told her that one of life's best lessons was not being afraid to look foolish -- to just ask the question.
Melissa Senate
We do not measure the value of a person by their outward appearance, rank, or creed, rather by the sum of the agápe in their heart. Your value in the cosmos is greater than precious metals or jewels, humans have to potential to take us all into a period of great enlightenment, or to our ruin. The choice is yours.
Guy T. Simpson Jr.
It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.
Jen Selinsky
We weren’t allies, but not being enemies was close enough for me.
Lisa Kessler
I was 8,569 miles away, 37 butt-numbing hours of travel across seven time zones in the last two days, or was it three? Amelia Earhart, eat your heart out.
Kristine K. Stevens
Ruth once wrote, “Dear Journal, Never let a single day pass without saying an encouraging word to each child . . .‘More people fail for lack of encouragement,’ someone wrote, ‘than for any other reason.
Billy Graham
Self distrust is the cause of most of our failures. In the assurance of strength there is strength and they are the weakest however strong who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.
Christian Bovee
On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay.
Aspen Matis
I believe that our ability to worship God, to reaffirm our covenants and receive the healing power of the Holy Ghost, to receive the instruction we need in order to make personal progress - all of these things are greatly affected by how secure and safe we feel in our Church environment during the three-hour block of time on Sundays. If we have to spend our energy dealing with feelings that we are not accepted, being concerned about our appearance, or worrying that what we do or say will be judged harshly, in other words that the fellowship of our ward members is anything but "fixed, immovable, and unchangeable", we certainly won't be able to make the kind of progress we could make otherwise.
Virginia H. Pearce
The Lady may favoryou, but at least I am in charge of my own destiny.
Priya Ardis
The visions of a healthy brain,Give us pleasure over and again;For this home was done,From the daytime dreams of one.
Omar Kiam
Sometimes I think I spent forever waiting for you,' he says. 'My whole life, I've never had someone like you. Someone who doesn't have to be there, but is anyway. Someone who wants to just ... be with me because they want me. For me. Not because I'm your brother or your kid or anything, but because you choose me.
Amanda Grace
The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam.Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air 'money' require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed.
Chris Martenson
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could travel into the future, see where you messed up, and then go back in time to rearrange things in order to make your future better? You can. If you can foresee regret, you can mind-travel to the future. If you can train yourself to mind-travel effectively, you can intentionally affect your future by doing something about it today.
Richie Norton
Your spirit lives on in your work. YOU decide what manner of work that will be.
Iimani David
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google "clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, "Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: "to me." They should be saying, "Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say "to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm.
W. Kamau Bell
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Anna Louise Strong
To understand and to know someone better, you need is to love them first
Rocky13
Who the hell calls at two in the morning?""Maybe it's Matt Wilde, confessing his love," Lindsay says."Very funny,
Lauren Oliver
Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence - and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.
Paul Kalanithi
We choose our truths the way we choose our gods, single-sightedly, single-mindedly, no other way to feel or see or think. We lock ourselves into our ways, and click all the truths to one.We put our truths together in pieces, but you use nails and I use glue. You mend with staples. I mend with screws. You stitch what I would bandage.Your truth may not look like mine, but that is not what matters. What matters is this: You can look at a scar and see hurt, or you can look at a scar and see healing. Try to understand.
Sheri Reynolds
Christianity, true Christianity, is experienced when we crucify the anger, pride, vanity and lust that dwells within ourselves and consciously replace it with the sacrificial love, humility, modesty and chasteness of the One who so many profess to believe in and follow. -Jason Neville Versey
Jason Neville Versey
A second chance is a direct pathway to a grateful heart and an astonished mind.
Holly Elissa Bruno
Oxygen deprivation and supplemental oxygen are both bio-hazards for Mauna Kea workers
Steven Magee
Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.
Moira Katson
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?" - Daenerys Targaryen
George R.R. Martin
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
Elizabeth Alexander
W-what are you?"Selena looked down at her rival. "What you should have been and never were. The Queen of the Witches.
Anne Bishop
It's a strange sensation to pick up a book you read and enjoyed just a few months ago and discover you don't remember it.
Daniel Keyes
You just go a little crazy, you know. Sometimes. And why? Well only because your soul is just too big for you, it flies away somehow.
C. JoyBell C.
She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.
Dennis Lehane
I can no longer stay quiet in this world, I have a voice and I feel it reverberate off my internal walls, making its slow climb upward until its melody can be heard all around.
Elin Stebbins Waldal
Desperate times call for slutty measures.
Elizabeth Good
Does it not whet your appetite for the critical opera omnia of such an author, where he will freely have at the lenth and breath of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore of Babylon is given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God?
Robert Farrar Capon