Quotes by American Authors - Page 943

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.
Alice Walker
Sometimes you are the answer to your own prayer.
Dillon Burroughs
I’m almost afraid to tell you. Let’s put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country.
Elle Lothlorien
There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.
Zeena Schreck
The room flashed brighter still and then gasps filled the room. They were all gathered around Roxy and she was unsure why. She didn’t feel any different, Hadn’t the spell worked ? Roxy opened her mouth to speak and then she heard it…… a purr.
Amanda Turner
If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction.
Martin Kornfeld
She didn't hear him in any nutty way, they didn't sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn't avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn't be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot.
Anne Patchett
Hope, belief, and despair are not simply moods. They change our physical performance. They alter how quickly we react, how hard we fight, how quick we are to give up.- Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
M.T Anderson
I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
Jane Hamilton
Sincere forgiveness isn't colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don't worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time.
Sara Paddison
Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
Christopher Hitchens
You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
Sarah Vowell
Those who fight against God's people are fighting against God, and fighters against God will not prevail.
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society
Whether you smile to make a great first impression for customer service, building rapport, communicating your intentions, networking, sharing your happiness, closing deals, or demonstrating you are fully present and engaged, smiling is the key to your success.
Susan C.Young
When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
The way you date(treat) your spouse, truly has an impact inside and outside of your marriage.
Lindsey Rietzsch
I think it was a sense of being completely swallowed up by nature that gave the prairie its powerful attraction.There is nothing like it in all of Europe. Even high up on a Swiss glacier one is still conscious of the toy villages below, the carefully groomed landscape of multicolored fields,the faraway ringing of a church bell. It is all very beautiful, but it does not convey the utmost escape. I believe, with the Indians, that a landscape influences and forms the people living on it and that one cannot understand them and make friends with them without also understanding, and making friends with, the earth from which they came.
Richard Erdoes
If teams keep playing us this way, it's going to be like this
Peyton Manning
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Richard Shaull
One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.
J. Courtney Sullivan
I was ready for huge transformation, emerging from the chrysalis, like the butterfly, a true metamorphosis, alive in all my beauty.
Leeza Donatella
Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
Cormac McCarthy
In the darkness, don't doubt, blame or cry. Be the light to enlighten the whole sky.
Debasish Mridha
Chasing ghosts while pursued by daemons...
Gail Carriger
New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.
Kurt Wenzel
You tempt the devil,” he whispered then laid his head down and sighed. “Angels always do.
Bijou Hunter
This two-track plan of nationalism and development (in China) is a historically powerful weapon.
Patrick Mendis
As a writer, my job is to change your perspective, and make you think outside the box.
Mary Sage Nguyen
Have you noticed how prejudice still exists today? For instance, now they challenge famous people for their past achievements: People like Christopher Columbus and now even Vince Lombardi. Nothing surprises me. I never grew-up with prejudices against anyone. I don't care what color you are or where you came from. This sort of stuff to me never made sense. You see I grew up in an "educated family." Education teaches you not to be so ignorant.
Chris Mentillo
So far he’d been there for three hours, hadn’t gotten a thing done, was heading out for a free lunch, and was getting paid for it. Jobs were awesome.
J.P. Barnaby
When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves. The latter moves the nature of godliness from the King to our servant to a slave, a deduction into the realm of selfhood and then the lower, slavehood. It's a spiritual mathematics in that men who need God in his godhood are humble yet strong and spiritually ambitious while men who need a slave in their selfhood are ultimately paralyzed and will remain paralyzed.
Criss Jami
So you want me to go to a human orgy, where I will not be welcome, and you want us to leave before I get to enjoy myself? ~Eric Northman
Charlaine Harris
It isn't about love," Vee said. "It's about fun.
Becca Fitzpatrick
Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.
Ursula K Le Guin
The one thing I have that nobody else has or can duplicate is my sound. The sound of my voice. The sound of my life. Others may say similar things but they can’t say them like I do.
Suzette R. Hinton
You fellas don' know what you're doin. You're helpin to starve kids...You don' know what you're a' doin'.
John Steinbeck
Joy multiplies when it is shared among friends, but grief diminishes with every division. That is life.
R.A. Salvatore
What is perfect, anyway? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don’t want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.
Allie Burke
It is obvious that you like to be in control of things. With this girl, you lose control. You despise that, especially since she is younger.- Maria Delgado
AlTonya Washington
Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.
Stephen King
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
Rob Bell
My mind argued with itself about whether to adhere to proper etiquette or whether to fling aside all modesty and throw my arms around him. My feet chose the latter before my mind had a chance to settle it. I flew off the stool and landed in his embrace. Freezing rain drenched his coat and shirt. His arms wrapped around me tighter, and there was nothing so right as being pressed against Nathaniel Strider.
Tess Oliver
Old-age sucks, but the alternative doesn't look that great, either.
Lois Greiman
What if my boobs decide to grow WHILE I'm at school?
Renata Suerth
I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my world. I wanted so badly to run away from my life. But you can't bury yourself in other people's pages and scenes. You aren't David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer. Those love songs on the radio might speak to you, but they're not about you or the person you pine for. Life is not a John Hughes film.
Jason Diamond
But the lost one is with you.Her tenderness strengthens you,Her gaiety uplifts you,Her honor purifies you.More than memory,The lost one is found.
Gail Carson Levine
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
Gertrude Stein
Conscious minds can, at the most, comprehend that the whole idea of a 'God' is his superiority, his omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; and therefore, at the least, desire him, someone far greater than themselves.
Criss Jami
The claim 'God does not exist' is just as much a claim to know something as saying 'God does exist,' meaning the atheist needs just as much substantiation for his claim as the theist does for his.
Scott Klusendorf
A large piece of lead floated out of Bobby head, followed by dark chunks of what could only be pieces of Bobby's brain.The torrent started up again. It flowed steady rather than pulsed with his heart. I knew from that, and from the amount of blood, that it was that mofo vein bleeding. And probably more than a small tear if the amount of blood was telling. I thought there had to be a hole the size of Montana in that thing."Jesus Mother Mary" I said, then "Stitch!"The scrub tech slapped a needle holder into my palm, a curved needle and silk stitch clamped into the end of it. I might have closed my eyes—I've been told I do that sometimes in surgery when I'm trying to visualize something—though if so I don't remember doing it. I took that needle and aimed it into the pool of blood."Suck here Joe, right here."When I thought I could see something, something gray and not black red, I plunged the pointy end of the needle through whatever the visible tissue was and looped it out again. I cinched it down and tied it quick, then repeated the maneuver again after adjusting slightly for lighting, sweating, my own bounding heartbeat, and the regret I wasn't wearing my own diaper.We're losing, I thought.
Edison McDaniels
Forgiveness is God's greatest gift
Dan Brown
Besides, two kinds of people have the courage to make someone else's decisions: the hero, who comes to your rescue when you can't even cry out for help, and the tyrant. The only difference between them is the hero listens. As soon as you can talk, he'll put you down if you say so.
Skyler White
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
Jim Morrison
We love against the night, burning like stars against the darkness of bread and circuses.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.
Chuck Klosterman
You know,” she said dreamily, passing over his question, “you’re not nearly as handsome as Lord St.Vincent.”“There’s a surprise,” he said dryly.“But for some reason,” she continued, “I never want to kiss him the way I do you.” It was a good thing that she had closed her eyes, for if she had seen his expression, she might not have continued. “There is something about you that makes me feel terribly wicked. You make me want to do shocking things. Maybe it’s because you’re so proper. Your necktie is never crooked, and your shoes are always shiny. And your shirts are so starchy. Sometimes when I look at you, I want to tear off all your buttons. Or set your trousers on fire.
Lisa Kleypas
And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.
Robert Nozick
If there was one thing I learned from all my research, it was that the majority of the early pioneers didn’t dwell on the hard times; they indeed related every aspect of their lives to their relationship with God, specifically in regards to this disastrous journey. They thanked Him for their lives and the fact that they made it through. Most didn't blame leaders or those around them. They learned to accept their plight and move forward with faith.
Mike Ericksen
It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.
Barry López
They should put their clothes on if they could find them which might be difficult in the darkness.He decided that could wait until dawn.
Shelly Thacker