Quotes by American Authors - Page 531

Happiness will never flourish in a life bereft of optimism.
Carlos Wallace
I've taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It's my Most Violated List. . . Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM. You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawl. A dollar seventy-five? That's bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it's time to work on your anger issues. Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice. My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It's a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness. . . get some perspective. . . I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. 'Do you do well to be angry?'. . .The world will not end. . . Mute your petty resentment.
A.J. Jacobs
I'm doing what I've always done. Loving you and hoping you'll be brave enough to love me back.
HelenKay Dimon
A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.
Chuck Palahniuk
Often when we hear people speak about meditation, we hear about wisdom, we hear about knowledge. But what, actually, is the effect, what’s the use, of wisdom or knowledge? Understanding. When you understand mind, you’re not at its mercy. When you don’t understand, you’re lost in the midst of it.
Stephen Levine
I've been dealing with physical pain these past few days and here is one of the things it has made me realize: a lot of times we find ourselves in situations, and the mindset that got you into the situation cannot be the mindset that frees you from the situation. Whether it is physical pain or emotional pain - you've got to see yourself beyond the pain. See yourself healthy and healed in the midst of the pain. By His Stripes...
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
The only difference between holding one god as exclusive or supreme and believing in many gods specialized in function is the number.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.
Wayne W. Dyer
If you want greater prosperity in your life start forming a vacuum to receive it.
Catherine Ponder
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney Company
Well, that's an evil smile...
James Patterson
Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.
Jay-Z
We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.
Marianne Williamson
Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
...my sisters are tough. Our strength is in our laughter (Dan)
Amanda Welch
…when we really connect with who God is… we will find He is better than anything we could ever imagine…
Shelley Hitz
Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree. The Sixth Ancestor said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.
The Mumonkan Case 29 translation by Robert Aitken
Why shouldn’t we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word “obscenity.” If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick.
Billy Graham
Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
Lorrie Moore
Now I just want it to end. I’ve always wanted the happy ending, but now I’ll just settle for the ending.
David Levithan
Everyday in heat, rain or cold, I ran - alone in the woods - in the hills near our home. There I felt the gentle touch of God. I head Him whisper, 'You're stronger now. It's time to tell the truth of what happened. Tell your story to give hope to others.
Nikki Rosen
Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and accept that we are impoverished and broken and realize that, if we were not, we would be God. The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others -- and is a natural prerequisite for our presence to God in prayer.
Brennan Manning
Be attractive and winsome, but do not compromise your convictions for the sake of popularity.
Billy Graham
To persevere in one's duty and be silent is the best answer to calumny.
George Washington
The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.
Terry Tempest Williams
For God's sake put on your glasses, Sam. You're staring right at my boobs.
Jillian Eaton
What are you gonna do, angel face? Stab me with your eyebrow pencil?
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
I thought about all the people who'd had to do this through history. The millions taking flight from disasters, fleeing tyrannical despots, making exodus from pogroms, escaping waring soldiers and pouring out of bombed cities. What had kept them going was the promise of safe haven, whether in some sprawling refugee camp or under the protection of a friendly army. We didn't have that.
Michael Adams
If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.
Diana Gabaldon
This is an unbearable kiss, unbearable, unreal, unimaginable.” - Esme from Sister Mischief
Laura Goode
The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.
A.W. Tozer
To know the good from the bad, measure the heart. Actions reveal the true coloring of one's heart, not their intentions.
Suzy Kassem
Discover the Bible for yourself.
Billy Graham
To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.
Criss Jami
It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought.
Stephen King
Adán fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, manchaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.
Don Winslow
Well, first you will have to eat again, not just like you Earth people do, but the corvalen, one dose is not enough. And once you start down that path, you want more, you need more, and then there is the end of your peaceful life.
Sara Zaske
A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.
John Steinbeck
I admit I'm bipolar but if you think I'm stupid you're crazy
Stanley Victor Paskavich
How many boys like him were out there in the ether, holding on to their big brothers and sisters who were still alive? How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn't let go of their loved ones when they're gone?
Ben Sherwood
I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.
Leslie Feinberg
He didn't want the respect of people who weren’t worth wiping his nose on—people who weren't worth the spatout gum attached to the bottom of his worn-out shoes. The only respect he wanted was from himself and the people who really mattered in his life. The people who really loved and cared about him.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
I have the right to remain violente. Everything I say can and will be used against you.
Eminem
We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.
Henry Ward Beecher
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?
Ada Calhoun
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
Jonathan Safran Foer
You know who should watch out?" Imogene lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper."Gavin's brothers. Mmm-hmm. Now that Gavin is tying the knot, Carolyn has a bee in her bonnet about getting all her other boys married off.
Sara Humphreys
Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke says to me. “And you’re giving it away. You can’t see it. Your obsession is blinding you.” He is angry. He is talking in shorthand. “You’re losing yourself.
Terry Tempest Williams
But she's still afraid that the more she misses him--his face, his skin, the way he looked at her--and the more hope she has that she'll see him again, the more she has to lose.
Julianna Baggott
The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father.
Michael S. Horton
The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.
Peter Kreeft
To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile!
Washington Irving
I thought we were celebrating being richer and cleverer than everyone else!
Scott Lynch
Life is a constant build up and release of tension. If we go too far in either direction bad things happen.
Chris Matakas
Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.
Lois Lowry
It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.
Justin Cronin
It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.
Thomas McGuane
My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.
Rachel Held Evans
That summer lying in the long grass with my head propped up against the back of a saddle, with the zenith above me and the drop of distance below, I listened to the mountain silence until I could hear as far into it as the faintest clink of a cowbell. In the mountains, what might be out of sight had never really gone away. Like the mountain, that distant bell would always be there. It would keep reminding.
Eudora Welty