Quotes by American Authors - Page 16

As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
Elizabeth Gilbert
What a growing number of sociologists have found ought to be common sense: by locking millions of people out of the mainstream legal economy, by making it difficult or impossible for people to find housing or feed themselves, and by destroying familial bonds by warehousing millions for minor crimes, we make crime more—not less—likely in the most vulnerable communities.
Michelle Alexander
Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.
Bill Maher
I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.
Orson Scott Card
And instead of dying Immediately after they shot him, he would go on to survive several days solely because of the cold that January. Maybe that's why we are drawn to those who posses the coldest of hearts ... In effort to survive. 
Bethany Brookbank
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities..
Christian Nestell Bovee
Don't you love your mother, dear?""I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.
Dean Koontz
There will be a time when you are forced to follow your heart away from someone you love.
Ashly Lorenzana
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here was an arresting notion--unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
Bill Bryson
I love your laugh. I want to hear it every day. I want to be through all this darkness and devastation. I want happiness now. I want our due. I want what we’ve deserved from the beginning.” He paused and stared deep into her eyes, willing her to understand how much he loved her. “I want you.
Sarah MacLean
It would take entire lifetimes for the men of Carthya to deserve their women.
Jennifer A. Nielsen
What they teach you as history is mythology, and true mythology is far from fantasy - every kind reveals true fragments of our real history. A bulk of our real history can be found in Egyptian and Greek mythology. Yes, myths reveal to us worlds of other dimensions that make up our true reality. History books teach us that the minds of the past operated on the same frequency, dimension, or level of consciousness as we do now. Not true at all.
Suzy Kassem
Then it began to dawn on us: There was no miracle moment. Although it may have looked like a single-stroke breakthrough to those peering in from the outside, it was anything but that to people experiencing transformation from within. Rather, it was a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel. After pushing on that flywheel in a consistent direction over an extended period of time, they'd inevitably hit a point of breakthrough.
James C. Collins
You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.
Amy Poehler
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
Janet Fitch
The sun's rays have vision and give us vision. However, it is the birds' eyes and the two invisible angels by your side that record everything. Nothing goes unnoticed throughout the universe. Wherever there is a vibration, there are eyes and ears. Some energies don't need ears or vision to see or hear, they can feel what is in your heart and tap into all your sins and fears.
Suzy Kassem
What does it mean to not be hidden from the eyes of God even in the womb? What does it say about God that He "beheld [David’s] unformed substance"? Alone in the field, far removed in both space and time from the overwhelming voices we contend with every day, David came to a remarkable revelation: He was loved simply because he existed.
Jonathan Martin
Action is the universal language of success.
Steve Maraboli
Ah, sarcasm. The final refuge of the desperate.
Ashlyn Macnamara
That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
Nicholas Sparks
You can’t blame yourself for what Socrates did. Those birds came because he wanted them to come, at least a part of him did. The pissed off part. Let that roll around in your brain for a while.”Jamie considered this. “No, Eddie. The hurt part, that’s what did it.”The crow shrieked again. It seemed louder, and that meant it was closer. Or maybe it was another crow, maybe several. Jamie and Eddie looked toward the sky, listening to the screams. Jamie spoke first.“We can’t let it happen again. We may be the only ones who know the truth about what Socrates can do.” “That thought probably has occurred to Socrates too.
Kenneth C. Goldman
You can never meet your potential until you truly learn to love yourself.
Teresa Collins
In the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.
Robert G. Ingersoll
One's true religion is what one cares about most.
Walter Starcke
Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.
Robert Hicks
The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this--that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.
Lysander Spooner
Get correct views of life, and learn to see the world in its true light. It will enable you to live pleasantly, to do good, and, when summoned away, to leave without regret.
Robert E. Lee
Pray for wisdom to deal with whatever is worrying you. Pray that God will act to change the circumstances according to His will. He doesn’t always do what we want Him to—but He knows what’s best for us, and He can be trusted.
Billy Graham
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying motherhood lacks meaning. There's great dignity in the smallness of motherhood; we're essential in our contingency. And though we may not follow the Western model of the epic hero, we mothers can find a metaphor for our lives. The metaphor is in the kuroko, the Kabuki theater stage assistant. You've heard of Kabuki—with its wildly theatrical actors, its gorgeous costumes, and spectacular scale. The kuroko are assistants who help the actors move through their elaborate dramas. Meant to provide unobtrusive assistance with props and costumes, kuroko try to remain in the wings. They huddle in half-kneeling posture, wearing black bags over their heads and bodies—the better to recede into both actors' and audience's preconscious mind. Scurrying to arrange the trailing hems of heavy brocade kimonos, like an American mother repeatedly straightening her daughter's wedding train, the kuroko's role is to suport the real players of life's dramas.
Lydia Minatoya
She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.
Dean Koontz
We are not entitled to ALL of anything, not even ourselves... and rightfully so.
Tanya Masse
Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to coloured people. Elizabeth smiles like she's talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things.
Kathryn Stockett
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
António R. Damásio
If you ever leave me again,’ she said, her eyes stinging, ‘I swear to all the gods-‘Percy had the nerve to laugh. Suddenly the lump of heated emotions melted inside Annabeth.‘Consider me warned,’ Percy said. ‘I missed you, too.
Rick Riordan
I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.
Anaïs Nin
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
Dan Simmons
Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect—the beneficial results of suggestion, expectation, and positive thinking.
Larry Dossey
A smile is a light that sets your inner self aglow, letting others know you’re home.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
Barbara Kingsolver
When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.
Kiana Davenport
A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.
Don Roff
Don't destroy Half-Blood while we're gone," was Chiron's parting instruction. Argus pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at us. This took a few minutes since he has one hundred eyes, but we got the message - be good, or else.
Rick Riordan
What we touch with our fingers is false. What we feel through our perceptions is real. What we see through our eyes is an illusion, but what we see through our heart is real.
Debasish Mridha
It is everything that makes a man. It is everything that makes this man. And that is who I am alive, and that is who I am dead.
Carew Papritz
Know what an optimist is, Major? A pessimist without much experience.
Nicholas Proffitt
The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art.
Patricia Highsmith
Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.
Saul Bellow
Whenever you fall pick something up.
Oswald Avery
I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.
Henry James
It smelled pretty rank, but I was getting used to the smell of death, as much as anyone could get used to it.
Amanda Hocking
Love knew no bounds, knew no limitations. It looked beyond the unseen realm and reached in for a taste, for a moment of regenerated happiness, and in that moment fate was altered and the destinies of many were changed. Their land, their Northbrook, they discovered, was a very magical place.
Madison Thorne Grey
If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough space for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world.
David Levithan
Maybe the only good thing about death is that you never have to relive it. You never have to remember the pain.
Pittacus Lore
How would your life be different if instead of spending your energy and focus on hating those who hate you, you spent your energy and focus on loving those who love you?
Steve Maraboli
...Ethan, but I'm certainly not the type of woman to just go home with two men whether I know them or not. It would be highly inappropriate, not to mention stupid.""And you're not stupid.""Not as far as I can tell"...
M.K. McClintock
Nobody knows what the whales may have to click and clack about, but it could be a form of voting-time to stop here and synchronously dive down in search of deep water squid, now time to resurface, move on, dive again. Clans also seem to caucus on which males they like and will mate with more or less as a group and which ones to collectively spurn. By all appearances, female sperm whales are terrible size queens. Over the generations, they have consistently voted in favor of enhanced male mass. Their dream candidate nowadays is some fellow named Moby, and he's three times their size.
Natalie Angier
People become successful the minute they decide to.
Harvey MacKay
Far be it from me to ever let my common sense get in the way of my stupidity. I say we press on.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
All matter, including you and I, has rhythmic movement within it and our quest should be to create a proper rhythmic harmony within ourselves…you feel happy when you sit near an ocean because your vibrations try to synchronize with the frequency of the waves.
Ed Viswanathan
We say the rarajipari is the game of life, Angel said. You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can't control it. You can only adjust.
Christopher McDougall