Quotes by American Authors - Page 941

Mr. Sand, do you think it's possible to fall in love in the space of a single day?"He smiled. "I wouldn't know. I only fall in love at night. Never lasts beyond breakfast, though.
Tessa Dare
You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.
Sherman Alexie
You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.
Rabih Alameddine
As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that.
Robert David Steele
Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
Stephen King
Baby, I was in a war. Of course I get it. That's where all the bad in the world comes from. Guys who like being mean. I was that guy once. We were all that guy, for at least a minute. We had to be.
Judy Blundell
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
Philip K Dick
The reality of loving God is loving him like he's a Superhero who actually saved you from stuff rather than a Santa Claus who merely gave you some stuff.
Criss Jami
I've been called promiscuous. Not a pretty word, is it? Makes you think of the gloop that comes out of your nose or what comes up your throat when you're gagging, if you're trying to swallow down something you didn't necessarily mean to swallow. Promiscuous: your face has to pucker when you say it.I prefer to think of myself as an adventurer. Charting the souls of so many of god's creatures, and of the floaty beings that populate the land of notions. It's a job. It's a calling. It takes strong thigh muscles, intelligence, cunning, a good pair of boots. It takes heart, in fact. The heart to stay on. To not be defeated.
Sylvia Brownrigg
Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.
W.E.B. Du Bois
You see, Katie," Pastor Ron said, "that’s what makes faith so tough to grasp, but also makes it so wonderful. It’s all about believing in something—whether it’s God, or other people, or even yourself—when you’ve got nothing else to go on. Nothing but a little voice inside telling you it’s more than a hunch.
Kaylin McFarren
What she really meant was: here is my heart, have a care.
Jodi Picoult
Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.
Arlaina Tibensky
Hugging is quite an intimate contact. Considering the studies done on proxemics we looked at earlier; when you get within two feet of another person you are inside their intimate space. There are some people who truly do not want you in their 'bubble' unless you are close friends or they’ve given you permission. Assuming familiarity incorrectly can destroy rapport, make a bad impression, and risk everything you have done well up to then.
Susan C.Young
Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this "seeding meat." Oyster says, "Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story?" Looking out the car window, he says, "You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?
Chuck Palahniuk
I guess it's over now," I said bravely. "Right?""Is that what you want?"My throat clenched. I shook my head."What do you want, Haven?""I want you," I burst out, and the tears spilled over again. "But I can't have you."Hardy moved closer, gripping my head in his hands, forcing me to look at him. "Haven, sweetheart . . . you've already got me.
Lisa Kleypas
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem's arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.
Hanya Yanagihara
Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren't present could derive meaning from it?
Kevin Wilson
You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.
Paul Bowles
Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.
Frances Mayes
My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.
Rachel Hartman
A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.
Paul Fleischman
Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?
Emilie Autumn
You are just as connected to the Universe as a finger is to a hand, or as a branch is to a tree. The entire cosmos is expressing itself through your being.
Joseph P. Kauffman
Who are your heroes? Why do you look up to them? Why do we respect those who live and think for themselves as opposed to doing what is expected? We all admire the idea of living a life unbound by thoughts of fear. People who seem to live that dream inspire us to want to do the same. They mirror the qualities that we possess but are too scared to access.
Kat Von D.
If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.
E. Stanley Jones
People say karma's a bitch. Personally, I really don't think I'm that bad.
Donna Augustine
The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.
Daniel C. Dennett
You've read half the books in this house? This whole house?" "Well, approximately half." Sticky said. "To be more accurate, I suppose I've read more like" - his eyes went up as he calculated - "three sevenths? Yes, three sevenths." "Only three sevenths?" said Kate, pretending to look disappointed. "And here I was prepared to be impressed.
Trenton Lee Stewart
I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
Marilynne Robinson
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.
David Foster Wallace
You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that.
Wendy Wunder
Good science fiction has its roots in good science.
Dan Brown
We always been rich, Lydia. We just ain't had much money.
Marilyn Sue Shank
...a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.
Abraham Verghese
Gather the best you have to offer and create a heartfelt, prosperous life full of purpose.
Gail McMeekin
If I go a little over the top sometimes, don’t worry; That’s where all the sunshine is.
Michael Treanor
He bit his lip, struggling to make words out of the war waging itself in his chest."I don't know what this makes me," he managed at last.Hook laughed, not unkindly. "It makes you whatever you want it to make you.
Austin Chant
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?
Saul Bellow
Shame often causes me to hide my mistakes from others. But really, when I make a mistake, I should make it loud and clear, so I can see that it didn’t work as a strategy, and be able to make a course correction, either by myself or with the help of others.
Sharon Weil
He knew Alec enough by now to know the conflicting impulses that warred in him. He was conscientious, the kind of person who believed that the others around him were so much more important than he was, who already believed he was letting everybody down. And he was honest, the kind of person that was naturally open about all he felt and wanted. Alec's virtues had made a trap for him; these two good qualities had collided painfully. He felt he could not be honest without disappointing everyone he loved. It was a hideous conundrum for him. It was as if the world had been designed to make him unhappy.
Cassandra Clare
Giving her a slow, coaxing smile that turned the heat in the room up by a thousand degrees, he stroked her lips with the balls of his thumbs as he murmured, “Can we get back to talking about possibly inviting that werewolf for sex?
Thea Harrison
Here is to all the brilliant minds that love deeply, for they write the stories that make us dream of true love. Here is to all the visionaries that create a miracle when others give up hope. Here is to all the artists, musicians, actors, singers, songwriters, dancers, screenwriters, philosophers, inventors and poetic hearts that create a perspective of heaven we can experience in this lifetime. But most of all, here is to the wild souls that the world calls broken, insane, abnormal, weird or different because they are the ones that renew our faith, by what they overcome and create, in a world that needs a sign that God doesn’t forget the least of us.
Shannon L. Alder
I sure do miss that woman. Smart. Funny. Sweet. She never gave me a moment's trouble.""Gosh, I'm sorry about that. I knew it was boring between you two, but not that bad.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Rare indeed is the seed who can bury its nightmares & still stem & blossom into its wildest dreams.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Empty night, Harry. Didn't your little adventure in the lake teach you a damned thing?"I scowled some more. "Like what?""Like life is short," he [Thomas] said. "Like you don't know when it's going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can't ever be said.
Jim Butcher
We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Your brain activates a magnificent system to store memories as reference points for you to learn from... not to create a past for you to be stuck in.
Steve Maraboli
I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
John Green
Gazing around, looking up at the lofty pinnacles above, which seemed to pierce the sky, looking down upon the world,--it seemed the whole world, so limitless it stretched away at her feet,--feeling that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to Heaven, remoteness from earth which comes only on mountain heights, she drew in a long breath of delight, and cried: "At last! at last, Alessandro! Here we are safe! This is freedom! This is joy!
Helen Hunt Jackson
Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
Tom Bissell
Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Walter Isaacson
People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold.
Thomas A. Edison
That thing ruined my favorite T-shirt," complains Mario."Whatever." It’s Marianne’s voice. "You were just looking for a reason to get your shirt off." I try to look around for her, but my neck refuses.
Bill Blais
more to be a human being with
Gary D. Schmidt
Many creative minds, just like many light bulbs, lit up simultaneously, could lead to brainstorming and breakthrough innovation.
Pearl Zhu
If you risk nothing then you risk everything.
Geena Davis
They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.
André Aciman
The Spirit goes ahead of us when we witness— preparing the way, giving us the words, and granting us courage.
Billy Graham