Quotes by Authors - Page 4015

Problems are everywhere, so are Solutions. Unfortunately, we see more of the Problems than the Solutions.

I'll teach you how to come with a man inside you. Not a boy, Addison, a man.

Especially at a time when one's life was new, roots helped.

Regardless of how your life will impact others and what that will look like, I just know that when your identity is grounded in God, when you trust in Him, you become part of a bigger picture. And you begin to live out this wonderful poem He has written for your life. This is the truth when life is smooth sailing, and this is the truth when storms come.

When we find successful people in our field, learn from their experience and understand some important things more specifically

Life has taught me to release my ears from hearing negativity, destructive remarks, false rumors and stupid ways. I learn to open my eyes and my mind to think ahead of my life, to learn more of who I am.

Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables.

Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.("Bums")

Most days I juggle everything quite well, on the other days there's always red wine.

Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.

Everyone needs to prove they're strong. The truly strong only have to do it once.

Time's never up", she whispered, not looking at me, but at my canvas. "Just like there's always time for pain, there's always time for healing. Of course there is.

You walked in, and the air changed. It gives you an advantage and you're enough of a challenge. I'm not trying to be a challenge. It's one of the things that makes you one.

When you come to life from a heart of service, you may be surprised by the blessings you will receive in return.

Knowledge is acquired by diligent study.

And certainly I know I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that again, and know that, while the door may be currently locked, there is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling.

No opionions, just strongly held convictions.

valor is sexy.

We only do well the things we like doing.

When it comes to scary business, I believe that forewarned is forearmed.

Peace gives you the world, laughter gives you the sky, joy gives you the world, and love gives you the universe.

How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or something that would cause them to stagger in intimate rawness in friendship and love?

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

To improve a country, educate the citizens.

There was something familiar but strange about her - Snow White with a suntan. Cinderella in biker boots. Tough and delicate and magical and real all at once.

I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it

Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.

The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell.

The saddest sorrow is to desire death while you have life.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.

She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

How lonely I was, even when I was with him. How it felt, him not making love to me, being affectionate, making me feel desired or desirable. How much it bothered me that, even though I'd talked to him about all of this, even wrote him other e-mails, it didn't ever seem to penetrate.

We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef

She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.

A team succeeds where an individual fails.

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

Elections only happen in two ways," Reyna said. "Either the legion raises someone on a shield after a major success on the battlefield-and we haven't had any major battles-or we hold a ballot on the evening of June 24, at the Feast of Fortuna. That's in five days."Percy frowned. "You have a feast for tuna?

There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

It was so awful! And he kept on looking at me and I knew I must get out of bed or he'd come and touch me. I did, too, but when I got out I wasn't me-I was a little white bunny. And he started out of the room and I had to go with him for fear he'd touch me. It felt so horrid, going out with him and looking back at mother there asleep."We went into the main part of the house, and one of the big front doors was open, and we went out through it. And then he gave a big jump, and so did I, and it took us clear up into the sky. We couldn't fly, but we kept jumping and jumping."Sometimes we stayed in the sky a little while, jumping from cloud to cloud, and the moon would get closer and closer and bigger and bigger, and its face would change and get horrible and grin at us until it seemed like its mouth was a mile wide and open, to swallow us up. And then we'd come down again and jump from one cliff to another, and the sea would be roaring down under us, and the waves all grey and cold and moving around and boiling like they were mad or afraid."We went all over the island and sometimes we jumped over the sea to the mainland and back again; and sometimes I tried to get away and run back to Mother - I thought she'd know me even if I was a bunny - but always, whichever way I turned, the hare was there in front of me, and his teeth were shining."We kept it up all night, and I was so tired and cold and miserable, and so scared. I didn't know whether he would ever let me go home or whether he would take me to Aunt Sarai. Then finally I did get away and the hare chased me!"She broke off, her voice rising again to a wail."It was so awful! I ran all over the island, into all sorts of queer little places that I never knew were there before - it seems so different after dark - and finally, when two or three times I'd been so tired that I thought I just couldn't go any farther, before he caught me, I saw the house in front of me and the front door still open and I started to run in, and then I thought - what if they'd planned it that way, and Aunt Sarai had come down from her portrait and was inside there in the dark, waiting for me?

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

But then I wondered if sometimes our friendships are a bit like clothes and when they start feeling uncomfortable it's not because we've done anything wrong. It just means that we've outgrown them.

Let me leave you with this thought, written by my father before he died. If you incorporate it into your system of values, it will serve as a worthy guide to the management of your sexual energy: Strong desire is like a river. As long as it flows within the banks of God’s will—be the current strong or weak—all is well. But when it overruns those boundaries and seeks its own channels, then disaster lurks in the rampage below.

The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.

We make our own criminals and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

The smoke shifted direction and I breathed in. Breathed out. On the inhale I was angry. On the exhale…there it was again. Fear. The fear made me angry and the anger made me afraid and I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Or who I was.

When flowing water...meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses. It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it...Do not turn and run, for there is nowhere worthwhile for you to go. Do not attempt to push ahead into the danger... emulate the example of the water: Pause and build up your strength until the obstacle no longer represents a blockage.

Say what you wanna say and let the words fall out

Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! ... Milton tried to see the first woman; but Cary, he saw her not ... I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus" --"Pagan that you are! what does that signify?""I say, there were giants on the earth in those days: giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the stregth which could bear a thousand years of bondage, -- the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, -- the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation. ...I saw -- I now see -- a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from hear head to her feet, and arabesques of lighting flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear -- they are deep as lakes -- they are lifted and full of worship -- they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehova's daughter, as Adam was His son.

Your inability to see the wisdom in someone else is not a reflection on their lack of perspicacity, it is a reflection on yours.

I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

Strive to be a possibility thinker rather than an impossibility thinker.

He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

At first glance, the ball seemed to be an elegant success. However, re-evaluation would allow an observer to see more than a graceful party. Many well-thought plans highlighted what this really was: a marriage market.

Only expectation has value as currency,

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")

I called Vee."How are you doing?" I asked."Good. How are you?""Good."Silence."Okay," Vee said in a rush, "I am still totally freaked out. You?""Totally.

Curiosity is a descending stair…that leads to only who-knows-where.

Emotions rage inside me, something like a world war twisting inside my stomach and poking holes in my lungs. I can't pick apart reality from fantasy - does that mean insanity isn't far from my reach?

No one on earth is "functionless". The problem we usually have is that functions of people are being displayed in the wrong positions! Change position!