Quotes by Authors - Page 1383

We did everything possible to keep up the spirits of the men, but it was exceedingly difficult because there was nothing for them to do.

We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how we get back up

Save your explanations, I got some questions for you first and you'd better answer them!' [slurred Hellian.] 'With what?' [Banaschar] sneered. 'Explanations?' 'No. Answers. There's a difference-' 'Really? How? What difference?' 'Explanations are what people use when they need to lie. Y'can always tell those,'cause those don't explain nothing and then they look at you like they just cleared things up when really they did the opposite and they know it and you know it and they know you know and you know they know that you know and they know you and you know them and maybe you go out for a pitcher later but who picks up the tab? That's what I want to know.' 'Right, and answers?' 'Answers is what I get when I ask questions. Answers is when you got no choice. I ask, you tell. I ask again, you tell some more. Then I break your fingers, 'cause I don't like what you're telling me, because those answers don't explain nothing!

The day you stop learning is the day you begin to die. Lack of knowledge is the fundamental principle for killing "alive and kicking" dreams.

I love you more than the cookie monster loves cookies.

from: The Portrayal of Child Sexual Assault in Introductory Psychology Textbooks - Elizabeth J. Letourneau, Tonya C. LewisOne of the central questions surrounding the debate on memories of CSA is how often false or repressed memories actually occur. The APA working group (Alpert et al., 1996) and other experts (e.g., Loftus, 1993a) noted that no reliable method can distinguish between accurate and inaccurate memories. Therefore, no one can determine the prevalence of false or repressed memories. Nevertheless, six texts (30%) implied that false memories occur frequently (see Table 1). Of these, three included the opinionated suggestion that a "witch hunt" may be occurring in which innocent parents are routinely accused of, and then severely punished for, CSA. Two texts suggested that false memories of CSA must occur because an entire support group (the FMSF) has been formed for falsely accused parents. These authors apparently failed to consider that some members of the FMSF may actually have sexually assaulted children but are motivated to appear innocent. (85)

To persevere is one thing, but to push on ignoring your intuition is something quite different. Self-awareness is the practice of learning the difference.

A little madness shows the way to happiness.A little kindness can heal the sadness.

For those of you who think that I have my life altogether, I definitely do not. Every season brings new challenges. For example, since I had my fifth child, I am notoriously 5-10 minutes late everywhere no matter how hard I try to be on time. I would like to say that I am 'fashionably' late, but that isn't the truth either. Running in a mad dash in a parking lot (all holding hands of course) to make it somewhere 5 minutes late (instead of 6 minutes cause that makes a big difference) while one child is missing shoes and my hair is going in every direction. Yep, that is my family.

Are the choices you are making going to really make you happy NOW or happy eventually?

Introverted seekers need introverted evangelists. It's not that extroverts can't communicate the gospel, either verbally or nonverbally, in ways that introverts find appealing, it's that introverted seekers need to know and see that it's possible to lead the Christian life as themselves. It's imperative for them to understand that becoming a Christian is not tantamount with becoming an extrovert.

You must love when your eyes are closed and love when your eyes are open. Love endlessly.

Thane - She grasped my face in her hands and pulled me to her, pressing soft kisses on my lips. My arm slid around her waist, and my hand pressed against the small of her back until her body melded with mine. My tongue demanded entrance, and she opened to me, allowing me to taste her, tease her, devour her. tAnd in that moment, I claimed her as mine.

Mind is like a net, drawn by the needles of past and future. Mindfulness is the way for not getting stuck into that net.

Zoltán looked at them through the window. He hated the man. Now he hated work. Work for these? Work with these? He saw before him the great puszta. Here the long, cracked stripe of a ditch once again stole the blue of the sky, transforming it into a deeper colour, renewing it, like an artist's palette: every pool on the meadows, every clump of flowers, was a jewel on the bosom of nature, a diadem, a string of pearls: oh, nature was lovely... That is, it would be if it could... But mankind... Among these? Struggle, fight, this greedy little piece of meat... Dark furrows on the wondrous surface, the many-branched, tufted promise of the maize, jewelled patches on God's regal robe: why was the world so lovely? to cover up the ugliness of man?

If you loved someone, you couldn’t let lies come between you. No matter what happened—even if you’d already lost each other forever—you owed each other the truth.

Gazing into his eyes, I was lost in their intensity. It was like looking into the bluest sky and carrying on to infinity. I felt mesmerised, hypnotised and transfixed all at once.

She has committed great sins, but they've been forgiven, and that's why she loves so deeply.

It would be nice to report she lived happily ever after till the end of her days. But such cheap, cop-out one-liners belong to other uncomplicated fairy tales.

Change is an institution that we all have to get enrolled into if we are really willing to make a difference! Those who are illiterates to change agree that whatever will be will be! That does not sound well!

Charlie touched her face gently with long, tanned fingers. “Sometimes I don’t know half of what you say, but I’m damn glad I get to hear it.”“I bet you say that to all the mortals,” she joked, then winced as the pain shot through her again.“You’ve been hurt,” he said, as if noticing for the first time all the blood and gore and exposed body goo.“Yeah, but it only hurts when I laugh.”“Then don’t laugh,” he murmured, finishing the old routine as if he’d been born into Vaudeville. His hands gently probed the edges of the gash.

When these flies were put together in all-male groups they formed long, moving chains resembling conga lines, with each male attempting (unsuccessfully) to mate with the male in front of it.

Hooking both thumbs into my waistband, I rocked my hips from side to side, and slid the dress pants down my thighs. As gravity took over, pooling the fabric at my ankles, I heard her say, “Sexy.” Bullshit. “Just so you know, I feel like an idiot.” “Just so you know, you’re melting my panties.” With a sarcastic snort, I grabbed a knee to pull my leg free. “Are you even wearing panties?” Chances were slim.

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

Being alone is better than being your whore.

Politics means implementation of the best ideas for the society in the path of wellbeing and progress. This is the approach that gave the world, leaders of glorious characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Subhas Chandra Bose (the actual man behind India’s Independence), Vasil Levski (the man who liberated Bulgaria from the Ottoman oppression), Nelson Mandela and many more. These people were technically politicians too, but unlike the majority of the politicians ofmodern society, their approach to politics was what it should be in a real system of politics.

To love God is to love your neighbour.

Solitude is our greatest teacher

He left a bit too easily and with obvious relief. His feet were swift and sure on the muddy path.

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike?

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.

The main proof that you actually do not exist is that nobody ever criticizes you.

Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...

These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I’ve been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn’t care what White Raven would do. So today I’ve just done what I would do. I’ve just done what I think is right. I’m not going to stop making up stories. But I’m thinking now that they aren’t just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate.

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

It is never wise to run any race but your own.

I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.

Those who praise God abide in victory.

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.

He offered to make-out with Hunter if it would prove that he's ok with me being gay.""Hmm," said Adam. "Yeah I think I need to see proof.""Shut up.""Tell him it has to be shirtless. Wait, let me get my phone out-

now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don’t want anything personal, let’s just do it, I don’t want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes… sure, he said, standing there, let’s just pretend that we’ve already done it, there’s nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I’d rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one. it was a lousy night in Vegas and he walked to the window and looked out at the dumb lights. you a fag? she asked, you a god damned fag? no, he said. you don’t have to get shitty,...

A leader in 10 minutes can unlock your potentials which in reality would have taken you 10 years to do without them.

Our only business is to love God, not to ask God for our necessities.

those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.

In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.

When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease -- comprised of organisms excessively multiplying, mindlessly consuming, and generating waste with little regard for the health and well-being of its host -- planet Earth.

I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.

The gospel opens our heart to the goodness of God,

A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult.What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

Sometimes a goal in life we are striving for may seem dim or unreachable. Direction has suddenly changed so fast we’re left with aimless thoughts and confusion. Don’t be troubled! You’ve proved to yourself you have the drive. Your new direction will come with patience. Each of us need time to rest our heart and mind before we reach the next mountain.

I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.

Appearances, beauty, value and life have their unique mysteries and essence. I prefer that essence to be breathing with humility, honesty, compassion, respect and a timeless love.

The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it's less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has.

This isn't goodbye. It's "see you later".

...Our stories are drive by who we are and what we do, and not by the events that happens to us.