Quotes by American Authors - Page 924

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died.
Rebecca Skloot
A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.
Criss Jami
The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.
Allan Lokos
Those who receive the blessing are those who see beyond its disguise.
Gina Greenlee
I suggest that people walk around under the moon barefoot, as I have today. There's that voice of your mom and dad and aunt and big sister and uncle and annoying cousin in your ear saying "Your feet are going to get dirty and you're going to turn into a bat" so the defiance in the act of simply taking your shoes off and standing there under that moon— is astronomical. A dirty-feet-moonlit-defiance that will make you smile.
C. JoyBell C.
Because tragedy happened to you, it gives you a greater sense of oneness with others who experience tragedy. Because we have been comforted through the Word of God, we in turn may be able to comfort others.
Billy Graham
She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.
Stephen King
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The woman of my dreams. The woman of my nightmares. Everything good and bad about my life. The “I do” that “I didn’t.
Chris Fabry
If what we learn is no more than what we expect to learn, then we have learned nothing at all.
John H. Lienhard
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
Jonathan Haidt
We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn’t cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a distinctly ‘unnatural’ way, so that the mind clings less and lets go more.
Jay Michaelson
The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that -- as if that weren't enough -- but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
Philip K Dick
I'd learned that the same internal voice that told me I wasn't good enough had a habit of judging other women, too. They fed into each other, so it was best to quell such thoughts before they gathered strength.
Kjerstin Gruys
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
Emma Goldman
You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and
Patrick Ness
Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.
Peter Enns
Angie: "How do I pitch these ideas to her?"Mira: "From a distance, preferably wearing body armor.
Kristin Hannah
I am sorry for you tonight, Mr. President. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. Upon what you decide depends on whether or not you are going to get your canal. If you fall back upon the old methods of sanitation you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back up Dr. Gorgas and his ideas, and you let him make his campaign against mosquitoes, then you get your canal. I can only give you my advice; you must decide for yourself. There is only one way of controlling yellow fever and malaria, and that is the eradication of the mosquitoes. But it is your canal; you must do the choosing and you must choose tonight whether you are going to build that canal.
Thomas W. Martin
Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Now I think of breaking up as moving. Imagine you have your own house, full of your own boxes. A person you meet has his own house, full of his own boxes. When you have a relationship with that person, you shack up in a third house, into which you can each put any number of your boxes. You shouldn't move them all in at once, or else you will seem too eager. And don't dawdle too much either, or you will seem skittish about commitment. You kind of aim to match each other's pace, so that the power balance feels fair and equal. Happy marriage--at least ideally--would be the situation in which both parties enthusiastically choose to keep all of their boxes in their shared house. Conversely, when someone starts to doubt the relationship, he might move a box or two back into his own house, just in case. While he's weighing his options, he may transport a few more boxes to the safety of his own home. When he's ready to take back his final few boxes, he breaks up with you. If you were too infatuated to see it coming, there you are, with all of your boxes in the shared house, and none in the security of your own home.
Tyler Oakley
Accepting the fact that she did indeed have Alzheimer's, that she could only bank on two unacceptably effective drugs available to treat it, and that she couldn't trade any of this in for some other, curable disease, what did she want? Assuming the in vitro procedure worked, she wanted to live to hold Anna's baby and know it was her grandchild. She wanted to see Lydia act in something she was proud of. She wanted to see Tom fall in love. She wanted one more sabbatical year with John. She wanted to read every book she could before she could no longer read.She laughed a little, surprised at what she'd just revealed about herself. Nowhere in that list was anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bite of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice-cream cones.
Lisa Genova
You are on my side," she says."What side is that?" I ask."The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists.""Who are we playing?""The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them.
Jenny Hubbard
We don't see the truth with our eyes, we see the truth with our heart.
Kate McGahan
The future belongs to the competent. It belongs to those who are very, very good at what they do. It does not belong to the well-meaning.
Brian Tracy
Puerto Rico was the Republic of Texas on jet-fuel testosterone and psychedelic estrogen.
David R. Martin
Divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat without a struggle.
E. Lockhart
Sometimes what you think is true, what you think is safe and good, is actually evil in disguise. Evil is so enticing, so deceiving, that you don't know its evil until it's wrapped you up and caressed you as a lover. You gaze into its eyes, enraptured by the pretty words whispers softly in your ears, realzing to late that the pretty words were all just twisted lies
Quinn Loftis
Five syllables," Apollo said, counting them on his fingers. "That would be real bad.
Rick Riordan
He unlaced his arms and took a step forward. "You hurt?""Not badly." She tried to smile, but her lips only curved on one side. "My main problem is that I'm stuck to a cactus."(...)"How'd you manage to get tangled up with a cactus?" J.T. crouched beside her and started extricating her from the prickly plant."Well, believe it or not, I was on my way to apologize to you when a prairie-dog hole jumped up and grabbed my shoe heel.
Karen Witemeyer
What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.
Scott Turow
In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.
Christopher Hitchens
Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.” --Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard
He had not been tossed aside by time, but lost in it.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
The unconditional love of God leads to a life of freedom and transforms each day into a potentially wild adventure.
Randy Elrod
How stupid, I thought dreamily, to have ever thought I could give this up. Not just the kissing, although, as Archer’s hands cupped my face, I had toadmit that part was pretty awesome. But all of it: joking with him and working beside him. Being with a guy who was my friend and could stil makeme feel like this.
Rachel Hawkins
It plumps up your thinker and fills up your heart. And where you end up is not where you start.
Brynne Barnes
Treaty with Tripoli, Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;
U.S. Congress
One of his hands move away from my face to flatten against my back, pulling me closer to him as he deepens the kiss. He parts my lips under his as my mind seems to sign quietly in content. I kiss him back as fiercely as he kisses me, unable to control the infatuation that rushes through me - feeling almost like fireworks. Not so careful anymore.Little shivers of urgency shoot through me. I push off the window, pressing closer to him. The rush of sensation that is coursing through me feels like I've drunk a gallon of coffee. It feels like an electric buzz is flooding between us.
Ashley Earley
I would rather be kind than wise.
Debasish Mridha
The Professor doesn’t have a problem being called Dick? If my name was Richard, I’d go by Richard or Rich . . . not Dick. Hell, I’d even settle for being called Chard.
Simone Elkeles
Remember, as a believer, you are already in God’s kingdom, even if you are still standing on this earth.
Van Harden
Sometimes I get so sad that it jest sounds good.
Abbi Glines
Success is a process, but a failure is a forward step for success.
Debasish Mridha
When you're young you think you know it all, when you're old you wish you could remember it all.
T.A. Uner
I bought this the day before at a shopping mall. I didn't want to forget him. Maybe I didn't want him to forget me.
Mitch Albom
Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.
Chelsey Philpot
... I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they huggedthat bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.
Albert Goldbarth
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
She could hear the rattle of hooves on stone evolve into a thunder of pursuit.
Cinda Williams Chima
He was with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all was left was desire.
Ru Freeman
Being thankful for and celebrating what is attracts more of what can and will be.
T.F. Hodge
Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.
Reid Hoffman
The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.
Marcus J. Borg
The only people for me are the ones who spill things, the ones who drop their cups sometimes, the ones who get dirty hands and messy hair, the ones who can go barefoot if they feel like it, the people who forget things, and can laugh at themselves every day...
C. JoyBell C.
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
Jonathan Franzen
I dare to believe in the beauty of my dreams, and I use my imagination to see them fulfilled.
Steven Cuoco
What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.
Lynda Barry
She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time.The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages.
Chuck Palahniuk
It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.
Stephen Chbosky