Quotes by American Authors - Page 908

Social hierarchy doesn’t hold a candle to the power of feeling isolated in your own skin.
Elyse Draper
I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.
Anaïs Nin
How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked. He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.
Ishmael Beah
I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
Shirley Jackson
Love fades. Mine has.
Richelle Mead
I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led.
Thomas Jefferson
Forgive me, Your Grace. Are you suggesting a woman is some sort of … piece of fruit to you? One squeeze, and you know if she’s ripe?
Tessa Dare
I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.
Harper Lee
Of everything we must first ask: is it real or not?
Mike Klepper
What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.
Margot Lee Shetterly
Can’t clean up after you anymore, baby brother, so don’t punk out. Make it count.
Rachel Vincent
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
W.H. Auden
Mom says it's because she has PMS.Do you even know what that means?"I'm not a little kid anymore. It means pissed-at- men syndrome
Nicholas Sparks
...escaping Neph's magic was impossible. He could sooner tear stars form the heavens.
Brent Weeks
Maybe heartache was more normal than the absence of it.
Jennifer Handford
You know, everything's a sort of lie, and then you die.
Arthur K. Flam
Sometimes, the risks we take are so extreme that if things didn’t work in our favor, we could lose EVERYTHING for the sake of our faith.
D. Nicole Williams
Where a mediocre mind finds adversity, a great mind finds great opportunity.
Debasish Mridha
Take it one step at a time—inarguably wise advice. And yet we all take a running leap, hoping the wind will catch us on its wings and lift us clear to the top of the beanstalk. Those few Jacks who have reached new heights in this manner inevitably wish they had taken more time to prepare for the overbearing giant who greeted them.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live.
Gordon R. Dickson
Where has God promised to fulfill our every whim according to the minutia of our earthly desires? Where has He promised to keep us from suffering or disappointment? Things He did not spare His own Son? You were raised in one of the finest manors in the borough, by a man and woman who could not have loved you better. You have been given the best education, the best of everything. You are of sound mind and limb, and yet you dare to rail at God? I for one grow weary of it. Now leave off simpering like an ungrateful brat and make something of this new life you've been given.
Julie Klassen
He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.
Dashiell Hammett
I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming "Traitor, sinner, imposter.
Sylvia Plath
Anytime you're afraid to try something new...just remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the titanic.
David Drake
She died that night. Her last breath took her soul, I saw it in my dream. I saw her soul leave her body as she exhaled, and then she had no more needs, no more reason; she was released from her body, and being released, she continued her journey elsewhere, high in the firmament where soul material gathers and plays out all the dreams and joys of which we temporal beings can barely conceive, all the things that are beyond our comprehension, but even so, are not beyond our attainment if we choose to attain them, and believe that we truly can.
Garth Stein
The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.
Eric Temple Bell
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning how to dance in the rain.
Vivian Greene
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
Catherynne M. Valente
I've been checking you out since we were fres
Cassie Mae
As the last curtain falls on a spent year, a new year pirouettes to center stage with the elegance and charm of a prima ballerina – and delivers the promise of peace, hope, love and joy.
Peggy Toney Horton
Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.
Christie Silvers
Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.
Lilith Saintcrow
[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Herman Melville
When you start to accept responsibility for the results you get in life, you also take back the power to change your future outcome.
Kevin Ngo
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.
Michael Finkel
Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world
Sy Montgomery
Because she looks to the sky so often, people think that her life is sweet, that her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars. But quite the opposite is true and I wish they could see— she looks up so much because all around her it's hard to see without breaking her heart. She once saw in a movie a window sign that said "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the stars." From that movie onwards, she decided to look up! Doesn't mean her life is sweet, doesn't mean her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars.
C. JoyBell C.
Life's been one tough little shit, but there's a very obvious reason why she hasn't let me get too comfy, settle too long or sink too deep. She knows she has to kick me in the ass sometimes to get me moving on my journey.
Jennifer DeLucy
I will never be without information,' she determined. 'I will do better than my sisters. If a bird or any other beast comes out of that uncanny republic where husbands are grown, I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.' For this is how Marya Morevna surmised that love was shaped: an agreement, a treaty between two nations that one could either sign or not as they pleased.
Catherynne M. Valente
We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
Hunter S. Thompson
We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities in faith as well - and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a great "chain of being," someone once told me, and I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain connected, unbroken. Our arms are linked - we try to be neighbors of His, and to speak up for his principles. That's a lifetime's job.
Dorothy Day
(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)
Ada Calhoun
Everyone is longing for love, everyone is suffering from the needs and wants, so be loving, kind, and compassionate to everyone.
Debasish Mridha
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
Atul Gawande
The first thing I needed, possibly the only thing, was to kiss her and I did, for as long as I could. I let us both breathe for a minute, and I perched her on a counter so I could touch the face I’d missed so much. I poured every bit of frustration, anger, sadness, and worry into that kiss. Meg understood and received it all, pushing her fingers into my hair and giggling against my lips. I didn’t care that anybody passing by could be watching us through the window, or that I could fall right there and sleep for a week.
Laura Anderson Kurk
He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.
Kevin Brockmeier
Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.
Bryant McGill
A soap opera character on the bar TV says, "You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts!" Another character, another scene--she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman--the leas character wonders if she's dead. The man says, No, you're alive," and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn't tell me he has . . . Tourette's syndrome.
David Byrne
There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.
Gene Siskel
Submissive men, men who desire to serve as consensual slaves, are on one of the most difficult journeys in the world today, because they have rejected patriarchal privilege and embraced their own heart's calling instead.
TammyJo Eckhart
Nothing will give you emotional laryngitis like living in close proximity to someone who refuses to listen. Having emotions but no voice chokes the life out of relationships.
Lysa TerKeurst
Just as Jesus predicted, what originates in the secret place won't always remain a secret. ... How do we guard -- or maybe it would be more appropriate to say, guard against -- our hearts? How do we monitor what's going on in that secret place that has the potential to go public at any moment?
Andy Stanley
My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.
Mike Duron
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
Bill Barich
Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of "systematically assisting Sisyphus's stealthy, cyst-susceptible sister," which is easier done than said.
Lemony Snicket
In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.
Michael Crichton
Believe me, once you have tasted worship—the kind of worship that captures your heart and rivets your full attention on the living Lord—nothing less satisfies. Nothing else even comes close. Once you have tasted true worship, you will never want to play church again.
Charles R. Swindoll
The greatest war we fight is the one within ourselves.
Eric Christopher Jackson
My sexuality hasn't offended you. Me being me without your permission did.
T.Taylor
It's okay to wander.
Tony Dungy