Quotes by American Authors - Page 944

The only honorable, desirable kind of fear that shouldn't be feared is the fear of harm on a loved one. It's the kind of fear that leads to self-sacrifice and the kind of fear where you would truly jump in front of a bus to save another.
Criss Jami
Out of all the magic words in existence, kind words produce the most powerful transformation spells.
Richelle E. Goodrich
There is nothing more beautiful than the light of a Candle and the Aroma of it's Heart
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many people who'd married and abandoned each other for less. The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own human vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I go down now, I would not go down alone.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate the Christian from the man of the world. In America, for example, churchgoing has become popular, but churchgoing may not necessarily be accompanied by genuine depth in prayer and Bible study or a change in lifestyle.
Billy Graham
In his business, he observed human nature and came to certain conclusions about it. The conclusions lacked wisdom and originality; in fact, they were tiresome. But they were important to McGarrity because he had figured them out for himself. In the first years of their marriage, he had tried to tell Mae about these conclusions, but all she said was, "I can imagine." Sometimes she varied by saying, "I can just imagine." Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her, and she was unfaithful to him.
Betty Smith
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Bill Bryson
That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.
Matthew Woodring Stover
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.
Meghan O'Rourke
It is your life, so who should change it?
Debasish Mridha
Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall. The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period. The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.
Judy Cornish
Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
Jared Diamond
The foolish families worry over blood. I care nothing for purity of family or ancestry. That is a vain thing. I care only for strength. What a man can do to other men, women.
Pierce Brown
Ballroom dancing was inherently social, but steps replaced words and beats ironed out pauses. The shy, the awkward, and the weird found a home where good rhythm or a barn of a memory vanquished their shyness, awkwardness, and weirdness. Some got good while others stayed middling. Everyone, though, had fun.
Erin Bomboy
The requirement to obey and acknowledge God and Jesus Christ has caused the teachings of the Christian tradition to stray from morality to idol worship,creating a world in which a murderer can be forgiven and sent to heaven, whereas a loving and caring skeptic would be cast into damnation.
David G. McAfee
The last thing she'd wanted was anything as complicated as a relationship, for it felt as though there we're though complication in her life already.
Nicholas Sparks
The human mind is a rover, it constantly returns to think about times past, cogitates upon the future, and actively considers the entire range of alternative plans to meet our daily survival demands.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The wheel of Rome spins constantly. Gods rise and fall, mortals live and die, and round and round we go. We all play a part in that wheel... And I make sure the wheel never stops spinning. You see, if the wheel stops, balance is lost.
Katlyn Charlesworth
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Gertrude Stein
Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie to her about being victimized as a child, so she compared the reports of abuse by child molesters who were not being polygraphed on their answers with a later group who was informed that they would have to take a polygraph after the interview. The group that was being polygraphed was also given immunity from prosecution for crimes previously unknown in order to take away one of the many reasons that offenders lie
Anna C. Salter
It was as if he'd suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made a conscious effort to simplify his life, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary stress. No longer interested in society's definition of success, he began purging his life of material things. Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be be happy than busy.
Micah Sparks
It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.
Ludwig von Mises
Sharing your success with others reveals your true humanity. Don't ever be afraid to open your heart to that practice. It has made all the world of difference to me.
Andrea Michaels
Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment
Sharon Salzberg
When she felt the tears coming up, building like a great hard pressure inside her, hot, so hot she thought they would burn, she swallowed them down deeper and deeper until they became a hard little stone in her chest.
Francine Rivers
One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
Walter Isaacson
As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so that to change a character's name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.
John Gardner
In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable.
Jonathan Franzen
Almost any age is better than twenty-two.
David Rakoff
I miss that jellied coconut and thatinvigorating coconut water,Oh, how I miss my sweet Barbados,"Yes, this is your lost daughter
Charmaine J.Forde
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Audre Lorde
Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits.
Scott Belsky
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.
Raymond Carver
You should go upstairs and relax a little. Take a nap or read one of those books that make your cheeks burn."tShe playfully squinted at him. "How would you know what I look like when I read?"tHe leaned forward, crossing his arms on the table. "I like watching you read."t"Really?" she questioned.t"Why?"t"It's sexy the way you react to the stories," he whispered. "Your gestures are usually simple like a giggle or a gasp. But occasionally, your nipples harden.
Stacey O'Neale
Theologically, the demand for “circumcision” can take many forms, even today. It appears whenever one thinks along these lines: “Faith in Christ is fine as far as it goes, but your relation to God is not really right and your salvation not adequate unless…” It does not matter how the sentence is completed. Whenever such fine print is introduced to qualify trust/faith, there is “circumcision,” and Paul’s defense of the adequacy of trust/faith can come into its own again. The Galatian situation is never far; in fact, it is all too familiar.
Leander E. Keck
Jesus and Paul knew the Old Testament completely. Their comments about divorce were meant to add to, not replace or change, what was already written in the Old Testament about marriage and divorce.
Caroline Abbott
In Egyptian Arabic, the word 'insan' means 'human'. If we remove the 'n', the word becomes 'insa', which means 'to forget'. So you see, the word 'forget' is taken from the word 'human'. And since it was God who created our minds and hearts, He knew from the very beginning that we would quickly forget our history, only to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So the ultimate test of every human is to seek wisdom. After all, wisdom is gained from having a good memory. Only after we have passed this test will we evolve to become better humans. Man is only a forgetful mortal, but God — He sees, hears and remembers everything.
Suzy Kassem
Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.
Brian Tracy
No one controls who we turn into but us.
Amy Engel
Be yourself. That is where you should always be.
Debasish Mridha
Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different.
Laurell K. Hamilton
You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
Alexandra Fuller
When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.
Kiana Davenport
Right mothering meets the child’s need. Focusing on what the child should not be draws resistant energy. Pointing out what the child should be feeds self-hatred and struggle.
Vimala McClure
It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The Sea
Caitlín R. Kiernan
If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.
Sam Harris
In an age of widespread communication and accountability, people expect political participation and accountability much more than they did in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The only way the demand for meaningful political participation and choice can be suppressed is to constrain liberty - Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Chapter 1 (‘Defining and Developing Democracy’). p. 4
Larry Diamond
Why is it that the people who seem to have the most to say aren’t doing anything at all?
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
You are the child of this universe. For you, she was waiting billions of years.
Debasish Mridha
Congress has mandated an annual report on street gang, outlaw biker, and domestic extremist activity in the military since 2008.
Carter F. Smith
Christ is the core of my child's curriculum.
Tamara L. Chilver
Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.
Anne Rice
A little kingdom I possess Where thoughts and feelings dwell And very hard the task I find Of governing it well.
Louisa May Alcott
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant
Our Company was participating in a management seminar in which we were taught a strategy that goes by the unlovely name of 'reverse your buts.' I did not make this up! It works like this:Maybe you're thinking, 'I love you, but you're driving me crazy.' Instead, try thinking, 'You're driving me crazy, but I love you." Isn't it amazing how different that feels?
Emily Watts
It is assured that men of all ages imagine a woman naked when they first meet.
Tiffany Madison
You know how they say that right before you die your life flashes before your eyes? It doesn’t. That is just a notion they came up with for books and movies to make death seem romantic. Here’s what really happens: Your intestines feel like a dishrag that’s being wrung dry and your stomach acts like a balloon when you let the air out of it
Dinah Katt
People are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives.
Helen Prejean
We enjoy beauty through our perceptions, and we create beauty through our expressions.
Debasish Mridha
Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.
Jimmy Carter