Quotes by Authors - Page 2334

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

I was nine when I figured out it’s better to be respected than liked.

Concentrate your energies your thoughts and your capital. ... The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

Springtime blooms the starry treeBearing fruit the mariners see.High by night and low by dawnThe silver apple guides us home.

If we were to plot the distance between where you are RIGHT NOW and the nearest good idea, it would describe a line too big to fit inside the universe.

The real generosity is when a man does something generous when nobody knows about it.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.

Love not your dream but the road leading to it and you might still fail but you shall definitely end up enjoying every moment of your life

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

I thought it was love, but it wasn't. It was a need to be the right girl for him. I just couldn't understand why I wasn't good enough, or how he could marry her.

If we became a pal to what scared us the most, we could find a simple way to ease all that bothered us, we would find peace, peace that we could live with.

What's more, we had discovered that people have several times more potential for growth, when they invest energy in developing their strenghts instead of correcting their deficiencies.

. . . the sole aim of Okinawa Karate is to teach A person to handle violence and violent individuals; whether it is tactile, mental or spiritual

a story is ready when it falls from your face

Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

Jenks and I stood there like statues watching him twitch, his eyes rolling up in his head. He clutched at his clothes pulling the wooden pole they hung from down on top of him. Slowly his right hand came scrambling out away from his body to clutch at my left leg. Without thinking I shoved my crucifix at him and he pulled his hand back with a hiss, shielding his face again. As quickly as I could, I dug my tubes of Holy Water out of my coat pocket and emptied them on his head. He shrieked again and clawed at his face. Jenks followed suit, pouring his two vials on Skorzeny's body and legs. Skorzeny started to foam and bubble before our eyes.I was paralyzed. I couldn't quite believe what was happening. Those books hadn't described any of this. I was feeling dizzy and sick. The shrieks turned to groans and a gurgling deep in his throat. He pulled his hands away from his face and it looked like the disintegrating Portrait of Dorian Gray. I looked over to Jenks who had an odd expression on his face.I looked over to Jenks who had on odd expression on his face. He motioned to me and reached for my left hand which, I noticed, was still clutching the airline hag with the stake and hammer in it. I dropped it and he grabbed it off the floor, moving over to the smoking form still squirming in the closet which smelled even more foul than before, and oozing a greenish yellow pus from the crumpled clothing on his scarecrow frame.Jenks looked back at me and handed me the stake and hammer. 'Go ahead. This was your idea. Finish it.' I declined, turning away.Jenks spun me around violently and thrust the stake into my left hand. He pushed me toward what was left of Skorzeny and forced me to my knees. He forced my hand toward Skorzeny, positioning the stake over the man's chest. Then he stuck the hammer in my right hand.'Do it, you gutless sonofabitch. Finish it... now!' And he stepped away.I looked at him and back at Skorzeny. Then I gave one vicious swing and hit the stake dead center. The thing made a gurgling grunt, like a pig snuffling for food, and started to regurgitate a blackish fluid from its mouth. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and hit the stake three more times. Then I fell back and threw up.When I looked back, Skorzeny's hands, or what was left of them, clutched at the stake trying to pull it out. Suddenly, he emitted a kind of moaning, sucking sound, gagged and more bile-colored liquid flecked with black and red came coiling up in a viscous rope like some evil worm from his mouth. And he stopped moving, his hands still clutching the stake.Then a sort of gaseous mist started to rise from his body and it was so much worse than the original smell that I pushed Jenks aside and ran from the house. I ran all the way to a patrol car where I slumped against the left front wheel as Jenks slowly strolled toward me. He walked past me, ignoring me, and opened his trunk, taking out a couple of small gas cans, and headed back to the house. I wasn't paying much attention until he left the house again and I saw it was aflame.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

But why give a man something it's so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They're the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don't realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don't know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patron, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he's well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because 'he's a man.

I thought he should have realized sooner that important people don't show up very often, and you should hold on to them when they do. Maybe I was smarter than he was all along, because that was something I'd always known.

Standing up for oneself is not always easy but it is often the only way to walk our true life path. The beaten path only gets you where most people go. Be original and explore new roads.

With grace and gratitude, great lives evolve.

His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body.

What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?

At the end of the day it's about how much you can bear, how much you can endure. Being together, we harm nobody; being apart, we extinguish ourselves.

If it’s taking to long to get up the career ladder, get a career lift.

When it begins, where it goes how it ends...It all comes down to you.

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

In the horrors of war, please bring me peace.

She looked up and their eyes locked. “Want to be my birthday present?” she asked in a breathy whisper.Chase’s mother didn’t raise any fools. He released her hips and trailed his hand down her arm until their fingers entwined.“Let’s get out of here.”He tugged her from the dance floor, trying not to rush like he was running from a fire. But, damn. There was a fire in his britches.

Beautiful girls – the true beauties – are rarely vain, arrogant, poseurs. It is the girl who makes disproportionate efforts with makeup, clothes, heels and hair who suffers these conceits. They are girls who have made themselves appear beautiful without ever reaching the exalted status of being beautiful girls.

He said "cool" like I say a Spanish word when I'm not sure of the pronunciation.

People don't trade money for things when they value their money more highly than they value the things.

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length on the other hand an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.

There are always messages, even enigmas to be searched, mysteries to be solved in all of my books. I like to puzzle readers, but I do not make so to the point of being so complex that they will lose interest in the plot. And that for me is the essence of every great literature around the world, and that’s been so for ages.(....)Some were inpired by real life characters, some other books I wrote are hybrid fiction/non-fiction, so I pretty much get inspired by people who have lived, and even who are still breathing among us… so don’t get discouraged if I didn’t mention your personality traits yet. I might even have your name over my books, I must some day…

She knew she could answer it. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other even when every step hurt. And she knew there was pain in the journey, but there was also great beauty. She’d seen it standing on rooftops and in green eyes and in the smallest, ugliest rock. She would find the answer.

Some things in life are worth waiting for.

It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves—that you could have magic without monsters.

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

I asked the Dalai Lama what it was like to wake up with joy, and he shared his experience each morning. 'I think if you are an intensely religious believer, as soon as you wake up, you thank God for another day. And you try to do God’s will. For a nontheist like myself, but who is a Buddhist, as soon as I wake up, I remember Buddha’s teaching: the importance of kindness and compassion, wishing something good for others, or at least to reduce their suffering. Then I remember that everything is interrelated, the teaching of interdependence. So then I set my intention for the day: that this day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That’s a meaningful day.

That wasn’t blood. It was love. It pours out of you when you lose faith.

There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Each wearing the sacred shirt. Side stepping to the left in time to the echoing heartbeat of the drums and the echoing yearning of the songs. There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the firelit snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Expecting something wonderful to happen. Everyone singing. We will live again. We will live again.

If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.

Nobody wants to tell a truth which harms himself.

That smile could move mountains. It could also break hearts.

Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.

One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger.When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary to equate "greater than ourselves" with "stretched across the heavenly vault." It could mean "just slightly greater." A cocoon of energy that we carry with us, that is capable, under some conditions, of affecting physicality. Furthermore, I conjecture that the totality of all these souls is what constitutes the Godhead. I mean this in the same sense as the "Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes, whereby man, that is everyone together, creates "that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater statute and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was created."And that leads me to my Insight: God was not there at the beginning of evolution; God is what lies at the end of it.

With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.

Blood was magic made manifest. There it thrived. And there it poisoned. Kell had seen what happened when power warred with the body, watched it darken in the veins of corrupted men, turning their blood from crimson to black. If red was the color of magic in balance---of harmony between power and humanity---then black was the color of magic without balance, without order, without restraint.

Although I’ve been thoroughly conditioned by pain to see it otherwise, an ending is nothing more than the backside of a beginning.

If you aren't happy for what you already have then what makes you think you will be happy with more.

Our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved.As we remember that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God,” (Mosiah 2:17) we will not find ourselves in the unenviable position of Jacob Marley’s ghost, who spoke to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s immortal "Christmas Carol." Marley spoke sadly of opportunities lost. Said he: 'Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'Marley added: 'Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!'Fortunately, as we know, Ebenezer Scrooge changed his life for the better. I love his line, 'I am not the man I was.'Why is Dickens’ "Christmas Carol" so popular? Why is it ever new? I personally feel it is inspired of God. It brings out the best within human nature. It gives hope. It motivates change. We can turn from the paths which would lead us down and, with a song in our hearts, follow a star and walk toward the light. We can quicken our step, bolster our courage, and bask in the sunlight of truth. We can hear more clearly the laughter of little children. We can dry the tear of the weeping. We can comfort the dying by sharing the promise of eternal life. If we lift one weary hand which hangs down, if we bring peace to one struggling soul, if we give as did the Master, we can—by showing the way—become a guiding star for some lost mariner.

The problem is you make the tricks look good. You are a brilliant acrobat, and a witty comedian. You are skillful. People want a fool to be foolish--trip on banana peels and grin and spout nonsense. These men want fools to make them feel better about themselves, not to remind them what they lack.

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal.

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue.O.K.A. Y.I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back:The puppy farm.The gentle untying of the shoelace.THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!Our first night together.Running on the beach.Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee.Shared ice-cream cones.Thanksgivings.Tofurky.Car rides.Laughter.Eye rain.Chicken and rice.Paralysis.Surgery.Christmases.Walks.Dog parks.Squirrel chasing.Naps.Snuggling.'Fishful Thinking.'The adventure at sea.Gentle kisses.Manic kisses.More eye rain.So much eye rain.Red ball.The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat.All dogs go to heaven.'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.'OH FUCK IT HURTS.I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.

TIMETimeAnd how it slips through my fingersWithout putting its ring on them,And I remain simply its lover

They succeed not because they are perfect but because they do not let their imperfections stand in their way to success.