Quotes by American Authors - Page 511

The only reason guys wanna play pool with girls is to see you leaning over the table, looking sexy. Not that I wouldn't enjoy that... immensely." - Chris
Jennifer Comeaux
Maybe having schizophrenia is my big fuck-you to the status quo. Only, I guess at this point, being normal and well-adjusted would be, like, the biggest fuck-you of them all. So I guess I'll just try to shoot for that, if I can.
Nic Sheff
Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my everlasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.
Ken Liu
Bast looked at him incredulously."The whole world is burning down,"he said."Open your eyes.
Patrick Rothfuss
Zakath stared at the floor. 'I suddenly feel very helpless,' he admitted, 'and I don't like the feeling. I've been rather effectively dethroned, you know. This morning I was the Emperor of the largest nation on earth; this afternoon, I'm going to be a vagabond.'You might find it refreshing,' Silk told him lightly.Shut up, Kheldar,' Zakath said almost absently. He looked back at Polgara. 'You know something rather peculiar?'What's that?'Even if I hadn't given my word, I'd still have to go to Kell. It's almost like a compulsion. I feel as if I'm being driven, and my driver is a blindfolded girl who's hardly more than a child.'There are rewards,' she told him.Such as what?'Who knows? Happiness, perhaps.'He laughed ironically. 'Happiness has never been a driving ambition of mine, Lady Polgara, not for a long time now.'You may have to accept it anyway,' She smiled. 'We aren't allowed to choose our rewards any more than we are our tasks. Those decisions are made for us.
David Eddings
She asks why I like her.Might as well askWhy I breathe.Maybe tomorrow I won'tBreathe or like herAnymore.Maybe tomorrow the tidesWill stop.Maybe tomorrow will bringNo more rainbows.Maybe tomorrowShe will stopAsking useless questions.
Gail Carson Levine
The wind has shifted to the East. A storm isn't far off. I can smell the moisture in the air, a fetid, living thing. Isolated drops fall, licking at my hands, my face, my dress. The quests squawk in surprise, turn their palms up to the sky as if questioning it, and dash for cover.
Libba Bray
Be a smile on someone's lips.
Debasish Mridha
To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.
David McCullough
There is in certain ancient things a traceOf some dim essence --More than form or weight;A tenuous aether, indeterminate,Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.A faint, veiled sign of continuitiesThat outward eyes can never quite descry;Of locked dimensions harboring years gone by,And out of reach except for hidden keys.
H.P. Lovecraft
Do not turn the power of your mind upon others, but turn it upon yourself in such a way that it will make you stronger, more positive, more capable, and more efficient, and as you develop in this manner, success must come of itself. There is only one way by which you can influence others legitimately, and that is through the giving of instruction, but in that case, there is no desire to influence. You desire simply to impart knowledge and information, and you exercise a most desirable influence without desiring to do so.
Christian D. Larson
We must be willing to fall flat on our faces. Fearlessly putting ourselves out there is simply a required part of the process. At the very least, it results in the gift of humility and, at best, the triumph of our human spirit.
Jill Badonsky
Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.
Thomas Merton
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
David Foster Wallace
When you have something this good, you keep it. Forever. And that's all the magic there is to it.
Nadège Richards
As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.
Ross Wetzsteon
The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.
Donald Miller
You lose nothing when fighting for a cause ... In my mind the losers are those who don't have a cause they care about.
Muhammad Ali
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
Brené Brown
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
George Santayana
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
Four rehabs meant a fifth was somewhere down the road.
John Grisham
In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called ‘astrology.’ But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.
Robert P. Crease
Morgan said, “And what have you brought me?”“Something unexpected,” Sam said pr
T.J. Klune
Like the sun, touch someone with the warmth of your kindness.
Debasish Mridha
Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.
Alan Armstrong
Earlier this year, I'd told a mother at school I'd been married fifteen year. She asked, "What's the secret to a long marriage?" I thought for a second, then answered, "Staying married.
Maria Semple
Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom Perrotta
When you yield yourself in complete and wholehearted obedience to God, He can do great things through you.
Jim George
The way I feel about you doesn't come with a set of restrictions. There are no rules that say if you do this or you don't do that, I won't care anymore. This is just an aspect of who you are and I love you for the entirety of you, not for the different pieces I can pull out.
Donna Augustine
The blade sings to me. Faintly, so soft against my ears, its voice calms my worries and tells me that one touch will take it all away. It tells me that I just need to slide a long horizontal cut, and make a clean slice. It tells me the words that I have been begging to hear: this will make it ok.
Amanda Steele
It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.
Jennifer Niven
The one thing I do know is that Miki is obsessed with me, maybe in his own fucked up way he loves me. He won’t let me go and in the end that will kill him…- Shi
Rochelle H. Ragnarok
I did leave something behind with you: my heart. Of course, you didn't know it at the time. Maybe I didn't either. What have you done with my heart, Leo? Have you taken good care of it? Have you misplaced it?
Jerry Spinelli
You don't scare me, Cadence Jones. I've lived with crazy, I've ridden with crazy, I've vacationed with crazy, I've visited crazy in various hospitals, I've sat in on therapy sessions with crazy. Frankly, I think women who don't have major emotional disorders are really very dull.
MaryJanice Davidson
we're all freaks sometimes, Melody," he replied. "You're just... well, better at it than most.
Brandon Sanderson
I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided--'visions' is too serious a word--our looks, two looks: art 'copying from life' and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail --the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.
Elizabeth Bishop
I don’t know what it is that comes over me, but suddenly I’m crossing to his side of the table and sitting down in his lap, arms wrapping around his neck. His lips are soft against mine, and when I part them he tenderly obliges, tasting me delicately. His fingers prod at my back, never going further than the small indent at the base of the spine, and it’s all very lovely and nice. “I think I could get used to you,” I say, looking down into his beautiful brown eyes, deep like the color of autumn. (From "Undone, The Romance of Nick and Layla [Part 5"]).
Crystal Cierlak
Foolishly romantic, yeah, sure, maybe: but she'd rather have dreams of Prince Charming than the reality of Mr. Wrong.
Lisa Cach
LA VIDA NO ES LA QUE VIVIMOS.LA VIDA ES EL HONOR Y EL RECUERDO.POR ESO MAS VALE MORIRCON EL PUEBLO VIVO,Y NO VIVIRCON EL PUEBLO MUERTO.Life is not as it seems, Life is pride and personal history.Thus it is better that one die and that the people should live,rahter than one live and the people should die.~Lopitos
Oscar Zeta Acosta
It looks as if Hollywood brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.
Groucho Marx
Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.
Beth Kephart
The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This became a habit – tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God – but as years passed, the habit hardened into religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint's followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis – how could they meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means.
Elizabeth Gilbert
What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse.
Renee Fredrickson
Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.
Lois Greiman
Nefret had always had an uncanny ability to read his thoughts. 'Did she cry?' she asked sweetly. 'And then you kissed her? You shouldn't have done that. I'm sure you meant well, but kissing someone out of pity is always a mistake.
Elizabeth Peters
Trouble and perplexity drive me to prayer, and prayer drives away perplexity and trouble.
Elizabeth George
One day the world will be so badly wounded that those who try to repair it will only be called "close-minded.
Danielle Valenilla
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
Dan Simmons
A man who looks like Frodo just spent $150 on erotica books and asked for my phone number. I considered giving him yours just to spite you.
Syrie James
Take a look at the plants. They come together and thrive peacefully in the garden or park. They lean on each other without trying to outdo one another. They serve as a sign that we can see beyond our differences and embrace each other in love while allowing our uniqueness to add color to our world. If plants can live in harmony and show their beauty to the world, we as humans can do much more.
Kemi Sogunle
I couldn't hear anything or anyone, there was only the sound of our sex and the smell of books.
Juliet Gauvin
You keep right on building that fence, Faye. See what good it does you.
Elle Lothlorien
Life is meant to create memories not money.
Debasish Mridha
Do you have a personal mantra? Mine comes from a childhood song. "Wherever I go the grass grows greener.
Richie Norton
I once took a city with five men and a lame goat. If I can do that, you can convince the necromancers to pledge themselves to you. Do this or die.
Ilona Andrews
If only you knew how beautiful you are unconditionally. Don't you know it's enough if all you do is breathe?
Brittany Burgunder
Future strong is grace, kindness, and gratitude within a pressure cooker.
Bill Jensen
What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.
Stanley Keleman
The history keepers will no doubt tell their own tale, and the priests another. It is the men's accounts that seem to survive a world obsessed with conquest, our actions beyond bedchamber and hearth remembered only when we leave their obscurity. And so we become infamous because we were not invisible, the truth of our lives ephemeral as incense.
Tosca Lee