Quotes by American Authors - Page 54

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly. (friend who is a priest said regarding prayer)
Sybil MacBeth
When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we've already made. As we recognize what we've invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge.
Adam M. Grant
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
Mark Lawrence
The world is not full of crazy ninja perfume ladies!
Elisa Paige
Your laughter is louder than my personal demons' whispers.
Oliver Tremble
For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.
Madeleine L'Engle
Brigid O'Shaughnessy: “I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know.” Sam Spade “You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere
Dashiell Hammett
Many can argue not many converse.
Louisa May Alcott
As you think about the future . . . give thanks and trust God . . . Even when life may be difficult, we should thank God for all He does for us—which we do not deserve.
Billy Graham
For happy are the merciful for they shall, too, know mercy.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
Their words of encouragement were just what I needed. I was doing a great job, and I appreciated their cheers.I felt a dormlike camaraderie in the burn unit, since each of us knew the challenges we were facing like no one else could, and therefore how meaningful each triumph was.
Stephanie Nielson
The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.
Ross Macdonald
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act accordingly to their beliefs.
Henry Miller
Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.
David Halberstam
Every guy seems nice until he’s not.
Claire LaZebnik
God's got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you're just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.
Mary Doria Russell
Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm.
Pema Chödrön
The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.
Holly Lynn Payne
Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
You have to notice the truth in order to be able to avoid it.
Sarah Schulman
There is no one as intolerant as an open minded liberal.
James Vaughn
Dysfunction comes when we intertwine the church and God and view them as one.
Randy Elrod
Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.
Robert Anton Wilson
In the words of a pastor friend, "Christianity is less about holding on to God and more about God holding on to you.
Lori Hatcher
not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
Thomas Jefferson
The secret of high finance...if you really need a loan, you won't qualify. And if you don't need a loan, all the lenders will line up to give you money.
Joanne Fluke
In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.
Vladimir Nabokov
I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love."...make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God's will for me to serve my family through them.
Sally Clarkson
So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
John Fante
Her eyes narrowed, but she wasn't yelling.I think she liked me... kind of. The way a mother would like an annoying spastic two year old who belonged to someone else.
Robyn Peterman
If you’re supposed to work with someone, I’d recommend not getting all hot and bothered with them the night before. The word of the day was “tense.
Katherine McIntyre
Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain "If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep" (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.
Gary F. Marcus
Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
Meditation is like going to the bottom of the sea, where everything is calm and tranquil. On the surface of the sea there may be a multitude of waves but the sea is not affected below. In its deepest depths, the sea is all silence. When we start meditating, first we try to reach our own inner existence, our true existence- that is to say, the bottom of the sea. Then when the waves come from the outside world, we are not affected. Fear, doubt, worry and all the earthly turmoils just wash away, because inside us is solid peace. Thoughts cannot touch us, because our mind is all peace, all silence, all oneness. Like fish in the sea, they jump and swim but leave no mark. When we are in our highest meditation, we feel that we are the sea, and the animals in the sea cannot affect us. We feel that we are the sky, and all the birds flying past cannot affect us. Our mind is the sky and our heart is the infinite sea. This is meditation.
Sri Chinmoy
The statesman shears the sheep the politician skins them.
Austin O'Malley
So long as I remain in Day's life, I will hurt him. Any other alternative is impossible.Now, he is free.
Marie Lu
All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when we ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Our universe grants every soul a twin-a reflection of themselves -the kindred spirit - And no matter where they are or how far away they are from each other- even if they are in different dimensions, they will always find one another. This is destiny; this is love.
Julie Dillon
I was reaching for one of the handles when I heard Heidler’s voice from behind me. ‘It would not be wise to enter. It is a bad time to disturb the dead.
Micheal Rivers
Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, but, leave him when he is wrong.
Abraham Lincoln
i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
Khaled Hosseini
Matt was the antidote to fear and trepidation. It was as if he’d become so acquainted with death that he could sit in its lap and ask it to tell him bedtime stories.
Gary Ponzo
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers of rain, I am the fields of ripening grain. I am in the morning hush, I am in the graceful rush Of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room. I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing. Do not stand at my grave bereft I am not there. I have not left.
Mary Elizabeth Frye
He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.
Philip Zaleski
You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.
Natalie Babbitt
In this day and age we care more about our pride than our lives.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
...the modern bias in contemporary Western scholarship (which has spread to the rest of the world as well) insists upon focusing all attention on the formation of the modern world and ‘‘modernity.’’ By directing attention to a time period rather than to a region, Western scholars can place the West at the center of any discussion, and subordinate backward Asia to Western history, without explicitly condemning Asian cultures and polities or arguing for a narrowly Eurocentric view of the world. Nevertheless, modern history is effectively a racist pursuit that not only elevates white Westerners above all others, but also actively denigrates Asian history.
Peter A. Lorge
Leaders: Your job in the future is to create a space where others feel save being vulnerable. Where fears and failures are openly discussed and used as lessons moving forward.
Bill Jensen
For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife.
Matthew Neill Null
He tunneled his dirty hands through her hair and kissed her breathless. Her neck, her eyes, the corners of her mouth. He kissed her lips as if his life depended on it. Kissed their future into her. All they could have and all they could be.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.
Peter R. Pouncey
Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.
Criss Jami
But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination
Dean Koontz
I will say only this - when le prête is in the right mood, he can make even the devil afraid to turn his back
Tiffany Reisz
Missional leaders are comfortable in the own skin.
Gary Rohrmayer
Cosmopolitan discourse emphasizes the _cosmic belonging_ of all individual human beings as the ground of our hospitality, solidarity, justice and neighbor-love. Cosmopolitan discourse is about turning a _compassionate gaze_ onto others regardless of one's nationality and citizenship, origin of birth, religion, gender; race and ethnicity, sexuality, or ability
Namsoon Kang
I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.
Jane Yolen