Quotes by American Authors - Page 124

In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?
Miranda July
For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty.Now I am pretty lonely.
Lemony Snicket
If you fill your head with positive thoughts, there won't be any room left for negative ones.
Orrin Woodward
War is catastrophe. It breaks families in irretrievable pieces. But those who are gone are not necessarily lost.
Ruta Sepetys
It's easy to be worried about the media's influence on our lives. But there is a need for us to also simply be kind to ourselves, to be kind to our bodies. Not just because we deserve more respect and more self-care, but also because the world deserves more of our attention, and we just can't give it out if it's diverted to obsessing over our thighs.
Rosie Molinary
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Alice Duer Miller
Kelsier smiled. 'It means that you, Vin, are a very special person. You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the final empire.'Kelsier leaned forward again. 'But, you weren't born an aristocrat. You're not noble, Vin. You don't have to play by their rules--and that makes you even more powerful.
Brandon Sanderson
Knowledge is half the battle. The application of knowledge is the other half.
Gary Steven Borthick 1970 - 2001
The problem about cutting out the best of your heart and giving it to people, is that 1. It hurts to do that; and 2. You never know if they are going to throw it away or not. But then you should still do it. Because any other way is cowardice. At the end of the day, it's about being brave and we are only haunted by the ghosts that we trap within ourselves; we are not haunted by the ghosts that we let out. We are haunted by the ghosts that we cover and hide. So you let those ghosts out in that best piece of your heart that you give to someone. And if the other person throws it away? Or doesn't want it to begin with? Someone else will come along one day, cut out from his/her heart that exact same jagged shape that you cut out of your own heart, and make their piece of heart fit into the rest of yours. Wait for that person. And you can fill their missing piece with your soul.
C. JoyBell C.
I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.
Charles M. Schulz
Now I wonder if maybe allowing another person to give you strength takes a certain kind of strength in itself.To be able to lean all your weight on someone else with confidence in the knowledge they won’t drop you. How often does a person really find that kind of trust in another?
T.L. Martin
A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.
Criss Jami
I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?
Nicholas Sparks
Your time is your time. Be awake to it. It's hard work to be wisely alive.
Carew Papritz
Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.
Michael Cunningham
Wake up! Wake up! Soon the person you believe you are will die - so now, wake up and be content with this knowledge: there is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all ONE, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor, and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life; just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are for more than you imagine. you are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else too! It's all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don't worry, just be happy. You are already free!
Dan Millman
See if you can approach your own practice with a healthy combination of mindfulness, playfulness, precision, and curiosity
Cyndi Lee
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams
The results of philanthropy are always beyond calculation.
Miriam Beard
I have been incapable of moving, even a finger or an eye, for at least a year now. I feel relatively certain about this timeframe because I have been watching the crepe myrtle outside the window of the room I am in...
Jason Leclerc
There's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing.
James Kouzes and Barry Posner
Discipline is not a negative word. It comes from the Greek word "to train.
Gary Chapman
There are heartaches in life, painful things that happen and disappointments that steal away dreams.
Jennifer St. Giles
Treat yourself like a fat person with aches and pains and a suitcase full of excuses, and good luck--you'll stay exactly where you are. Train like an athlete and, though you may not look like one now, you will become one.
Chalene Johnson
Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.
Alfie Kohn
We were born between Oh Yeah& Goddammit. I knew lifeBegan where I stood in the dark,Looking out into the light,& that sometimes I could seeEverything through nothing.The backyard trees breathedLike a man running from himselfAs my brothers backed awayFrom the screendoor.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Sexual temptations are lurking around every corner in our lives today! Resisting the temptation to gratify the flesh is a full-time job.
Gary Rohrmayer
Believe yourself again and again to find yourself.
Debasish Mridha
And don't you let your guard down for a second because you think anything's inevitable.
Suzanne Collins
Regin to Declan:"Lemme guess," Regin said. "You had your introductory spiel all planned, but rational thought deserted you when you saw me stroll in braless."----"For the record," She continued, "it's not my fault I came in here looking like Chesty LaRue. You caught me on laundry day, so I have no undergarments on. Though I will cop to a little extra spring in my step for your benefit.
Kresley Cole
She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west—the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.
Bernard Lewis
When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]
Anne Bishop
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
Ransom Riggs
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
Leo Buscaglia
This should be the motto of every follower of Jesus Christ. Never stop praying no matter now dark and hopeless it may seem.
Billy Graham
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
John Steinbeck
Here’s a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don’t even like — people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren’t even alive anymore — to control your life? How long?
Andy Stanley
Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.
Shannon L. Alder
When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?
Scott Douglas
There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief...
Bob Dylan
Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.
Connie Willis
If you stay in the company of anger, pain, or hurt, happiness will find someone else to visit.
Kristen Crockett
For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.
Tana French
Nothing's easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had.
Gwen Bristow
Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
William S. Wilson
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
Richard Wilbur
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state--it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.... Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I put on the boots and kicked some monster ass.
Jim Butcher
The Left had to go searching for a new civil-rights struggle with which to cram conservatives back into their “victimizer” cubbyhole. The Left now pushes against civil rights in its ignorant search for the new struggle. There was, however, one problem: All the good civil-rights issues have been dealt with already. And so the Left, which focuses all of its efforts on social issues, was relegated to pushing crime-increasing myths about the evils of cops; the celebrities were forced to pretend that men peeing next to women was the next great Martin Luther King, Jr.–style struggle.
Ben Shapiro
Fantasy, myth, legend, truth - all are intertwined in the story that is Scotland.
Laurence Overmire
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
...their relationship was a point of near-constant discussion in Night Vale, all of their imperfections and faults, which made them individuals worth loving. They had built those faults into the usual messy, comfortable, patched-up, beautiful structure that any functioning long-term relationship ended up being.
Joseph Fink
You can either feed negative thoughts or you can starve the suckers.
Fawn Weaver
The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs.
Mark Galli
Cassidy's heart tried to leap out through his taught skin and hop into his wet hands. But outwardly it was all very calm, very serene, just as always, and it seemed to last a tiny forever, just like that, a snapshot of them all on the curved parabola of a starting line, eight giant hearts attached to eight pairs of bellows-like lungs mounted on eight pairs of supercharged stilts. They were poised on the edge of some howling vortex they had run 10,000 miles to get to. Now they had to run one more
John L. Parker Jr.
O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
Walt Whitman
Hermes gazed up at the stars. "My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it. It doesn't matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don't appreciate your genius for inventing the Internet-""You invented the Inte
Rick Riordan
How could I remain unyielding? His words penetrated the flimsy barriers I’d set up around my heart. I’d meant to set up a barbed wire fence, but the barbs ended up being covered with marshmallows. He slipped through my defenses easily. He touched his forehead to my hand, and my marshmallow heart melted.
Colleen Houck
I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.
James Baldwin