Quotes by American Authors - Page 507

As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without realising it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
He likes to humble our foes by making them seem ridiculous. As he said to me the other day, ‘Kill a man, and you cede him honor in the eyes of the gods. Laugh at him and you shame him'.
Raymond E. Feist
Find another solution. That’s how you move toward success.
Amber Hurdle
Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.
Steven Pinker
Erik got to his feet, aware of her watching him, and tried not to preen at the frank admiration in her eyes. Preening was not manly.
Tiffany Snow
My advice to those who are about to begin in earnest the journey of life is to take their heart in one hand and a club in the other.
Josh Billings
You’ll never get a new ending if you keep starting with the same tired beginning.
Lisa Daily
True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.
David O. McKay
I'm not afraid of storms for I'm learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott
ANTHONY: Women don't like to be told what to do. They like to be the ones telling us what to do. You want her to do something, you're gonna have to go about it a different way
Cambria Hebert
Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.
Anthea Carson
As you release a belief that doesn’t serve you, you want to lock in a new belief that is powerful.
Sheri Kaye Hoff
A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.
Criss Jami
Men are daft around women, incautious and boastful.
Kristin Cashore
Faith is why I'm here today and faith is why I made it through.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Great idea," I said. "Call the police. Call the fucking police.
Ava Gardner
..each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.
Bill Clinton
In the Pretty Woman shopping scene, it’s not really about the clothes, or how much they cost, or how great she looks. When Vivian leaves the store, she’s not only a pretty woman, she’s a different woman. It gets me every time.
Victoria Van Tiem
Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
Stephen King
OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
Nick Flynn
Journalism is an act of faith in the future
Ann Curry
When you expect nothing from the world - not the light of the sun, the wet of water, nor the air to breathe - everything is a wonder and every moment a gift.
Michael J. Sullivan
You intend to keep me confined in here with you for three days?" His voice was low and ominous."It doesn't have to take three days," she said, "It just depends how long it takes for you to come to your senses.""My senses?" he shook her so hard she thought her teeth would rattle. "It is you whose mind is disordered if you think you can tame me like some pet! Is that what you think, Vesta? That you can somehow turn a man like me into your little lap dog?""No," she said, as earnest as she had ever been in her life. "I could never imagine you as a lap dog. Ever. You are a Mastiff. Big, powerful, dignified, brave, and yet gentle." She nodded with a look of self satisfaction. "Yes. Most definitely a Mastiff." from THE VIRGIN HUNTRESS
Victoria Vane
In the year 2052, it's not love but hate that unites the world.
T.S. Pettibone
And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom, that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don't want at all. If you're lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you're going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.
Kristin Newman
Reluctantly, I pulled out my necklace and showed it to them.Samuel frowned. The little figure was stylized; I suppose he couldn't tell what it was at first."A dog?" asked Zee, staring at my necklace."A lamb," I said defensively, tucking it safely back under my shirt. "Because one of Christ's names is 'The Lamb of God.'"Samuel's shoulders shook slightly. "I can see it now, Mercy holding a roomful of vampire at bay with her glowing sheep."I gave his shoulder a hard push, aware of the heat climbing to my cheeks, but it didn't help. He sang in a soft taunting voice, "Mercy had a little lamb...
Patricia Briggs
Like Mum and that bastard.” “You mean Da?”“Call him what you like.
G.A. Aiken
Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If you prefer smoke over firethen get up now and leave.For I do not intend to perfumeyour mind's clothingwith more sooty knowledge.No, I have something else in mind.Today I hold a flame in my left handand a sword in my right.There will be no damage control today.For God is in a moodto plunder your riches andfling you nakedlyinto such breathtaking povertythat all that will be left of youwill be a tendency to shine.So don't just sit around this flamechoking on your mind.For this is no campfire songto mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.Jump now into the spacebetween thoughtsand exit this dreambefore I burn the damn place down.
Adyashanti
In this space, in this moment, we are who we want to be. I am lucky, because for me that doesn’t take much courage. But for others, it takes a world of bravery to make it to the clearing.
David Levithan
Some dream it, some do it, some do both.
Walt Disney Company
The people who enlighten us are the ones who tell us their secrets.
Marty Rubin
On a fundamental level, I am someone who would throw sand at children.
Allie Brosh
Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.
Rachel Hartman
Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect you have enough.
Gail Sheehy
So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.
Terri Windling
Half our fears are baseless the other half discreditable.
Christian Bovee
I sit on the bed. I remember a golden bracelet, thin gold, an apple with a bite taken out of it for the clasp, and the words "I Love You," and I take it out from the box of treasures under the bed. I remember Mama said, "I mean it. Though we never say it in this family," as she put the bracelet around my wrist last Christmas. And I still believe her, what she said about love. We just never say it in this family.
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
We search the world for truth we cull The good the pure the beautiful From all old flower fields of the soul And weary seekers of the best We come back laden from our quest To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.
John Greenleaf Whittier
You look like you’ve been on a month-long bender. Have you?”“No, Ken, I have not. I’ve just had a long week.” Walked the streets of a city bathed in blood and stood amid a hundred thousand corpses. Negotiated a three-way peace treaty among opposing factions of a warring alien species who’d previously held me captive. Bullied the Metigen leadership into doing my bidding. Found out we’re not the real humans, and the real humans are currently enslaving the real universe. Oh, and I think I’m addicted to my ship. How was your week? “Nothing a shower and some food won’t fix.
G.S. Jennsen
Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
Cultivate clarity, strength, vitality and power from natural, beautiful and organic living foods.
Bryant McGill
A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.
Philip Zaleski
Christlike attributes come into our lives as we exercise our agenncy righteously.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
The image of him shifted with the violent frenzy of leaves. He was there and he wasn’t, as the leaves whipped and the lightning fell away in a slow strobe effect across the expanse of sky. How he had gotten up there, I had no idea, but he had been there. Crouched in the tree in the middle of the courtyard, he watched me intently through the open window.
Gwenn Wright
Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.
Peter Kreeft
You may have fallen down, but you can get back up again. You may have doors shut, but new doors will open for you. You may have been lied on, but the truth will come to the light. You may have been hurt, but the pain will pass. You are a survivor. You have a history of surviving.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Ghosts,” Doktor Messerli continued, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or done that you cannot escape.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
First, there will be no kidnapping. I know you're stronger and bigger and have magic and crap, but I'm drawing the line at kidnapping.
Carrie Ann Ryan
We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn’t be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn’t be a metaphor, it would be a reality.And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.This realization. This realization that I will live my life in this world where I have privileges.I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly.I can wash dishes.
Rachel Corrie
I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office — I’ve worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.
Lev Grossman
It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot -- and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.
Hunter S. Thompson
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.
Ken Wheaton
Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt.
Theodore Roosevelt
Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.
Rebecca Solnit
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
Gary Snyder
A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.
Christina Hoff Sommers
I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.
Elizabeth Gilbert