Quotes by American Authors - Page 583

I also had a father, who had loved for a long time without being nearby. How many others were walking around and not even knowing that someone far away cared for them? Imagine all that love floating in the air, waiting to land on someone's life.
Pam Muñoz Ryan
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.
Robert Frost
The human voice was the first instrument and remains the most powerful and effective method of musical creation and emotional transference.
Deke Sharon
It was a strange thing, this feeling of empathy. He'd never experienced it before. He realized that what hurt this woman hurt him as well, that what made her bleed caused a hemorrhage of pain within his soul.
Elizabeth Hoyt
Two things don't need to be "equally bad" to point out that they're both bad.
T.J. Kirk
Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.
Don Roff
Conscience as I understand it is the impulse to do the right thing because it is right regardless of personal ends and has nothing whatever to do with the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.
Margaret Collier Graham
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
Richard P. Denney
I've concluded that I learned far more from my failures than from my successes.
June Hunt
I was very afraid at the beginning, until Master told me that pain isn't the truth; it's what you have to get through in order to find the truth.
Deepak Chopra
What we often forget is that most everyone else has dealt with the same struggles and uncertainties. You get to pick your response when this doubt creeps in. Will you allow it to undermine your confidence, or instead, choose to look at it objectively?
Susan C.Young
...It's just nice to see you out from his shadow. Because things don't grow in the shadows, you know? So it was frustrating to see you standing there...and really cool to see you step out of it. I don't know who this new guy is, but make sure when you're with him, you're not standing in his shadow. Stand where everyone can see you.
David Levithan
Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?
George R.R. Martin
There! I can’t fix the whole country, and it will only last a few days, but I present you with the sun, on behalf of my dreadfully boring magic.”He bows low, holding out his hand. I reach out tentatively, afraid of being burned, but the globe merely hovers above my hand where I slide it on top of Finn’s. It’s golden and deliciously warm and instantly makes me happier and more at ease than I’ve been in weeks.I laugh, delighted, and by the look on Finn’s face you’d think I was the one who had given him an absurd and wonderful gift.
Kiersten White
Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There’s no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.
Laura Kreitzer
You are imminently connected with this universe through your breathing. You can improve this great relationship by breathing consciously and appreciating this universe in this process.
Debasish Mridha
Believe when you are most unhappy that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain life is not in vain.
Helen Keller
Shared laughter is love made audible.
Izzy Gesell
At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight... For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.
Ted Chiang
Patience is a virtue, but there comes a moment when you must stop being patient and take the day by the throat and shake it. If it fights back; fine. I'd rather end up bloody at the end of the day, then unhurt with no progress made, no knowledge gained. I'd rather have a no, then nothing. I'd forgotten that about myself.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.
Natalie Goldberg
There was a tinge of evil to it, a lot of sex, but under that was alittle boy peeking out, an uncertain little boy. That was it. That was the attraction. Nothing is moreappealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political.It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!
Wilhelm Reich
Keeping up with him would require running, and there is no dignity in running after any man for any reason, injured or not.
Suzanne Johnson
Pain is pain...Just because one person's problem is less traumatic than another's doesn't mean they're required to hurt less.
J.A. Redmerski
She was right. After all, if she herself had wondered whether she was Indian enough -- she, who had always been to me a sort of epitome of Indian -- then who could be? Who could claim the sole right or way to an identity?
Tanuja Desai Hidier
That's such bullshit, Mythology repeated by parents because it lets them force their kids into sports and push them too hard by pretending that in the end it will pay off with the holy scholarship. You know how many kids get a free ride? Hardly any. Like, maybe fourteen.' -Finn (165)
Laurie Halse Anderson
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
For the first time, he looked at her, and she wasn’t a stranger, she was Clary—his friend. His family. The girl he’d sworn always to protect. The girl he loved as fiercely as he loved himself.
Cassandra Clare
You're my missing puzzle piece," she whispers as we continue dancing."Your puzzle piece?" I question. "I'm not broken...but before you; I was never whole, either," she clarifies. "You're the missing piece that made me whole. And now, you're the piece that keeps me from breaking.
Ashley Jade
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
Stephen King
Do not be afraid to walk the path that you must go just because you cannot see the end. The path becomes clearer as you continue to go on.
Tracy Allen
The thing I write will be the thing I write.
Steve Shilstone
This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?
Charles Yu
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
Christopher Morley
Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the crudest words.
Joyce Brothers
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
Robert McKee
View every obstacle as a learning post.
Azim Jamal & Brian Tracy
If my God damns people for love but saves them for brutle warfare, then that is not the God I know or wish to worship.
Cristina Marrero
Every cat knows how to keep his owner feeding them: You may scratch and bite ninety-nine times, but the hundredth time, you must leap into a lap and press your nose to their nose. Rules are for dogs.
Catherynne M. Valente
Richard Nixon coveted, to the point of obsession, a controversy-free, stage-managed coronation.
David Pietrusza
Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits.
Scott Belsky
Savor the moments in life that make your heart glow. Chase after and find the moments that will take your breath away. In the end, it is only those milestones on life's journey that matter.
Michael Delaware
We need more worship wars, not fewer. What if the war looked like this in your congregation--the young singles petitioning the church to play more of the old classics for the sake of the elderly people, and the elderly people calling on the leadership to contemporize for the sake of the young new believers? This would signal a counting of others more important than ourselves (Phil 2:3), which comes from the spirit of the humiliated, exalted King, Christ (Phil 2:5-11).
Russell D. Moore
Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.
Larry McMurtry
LIZZ WINSTEAD Instead of Jon playing a character—the news anchor, one of the derelicts in a derelict world of media—Jon made a creative decision to take the show in the direction of the correspondents presenting the idiocy, and then Jon is the person who calls out the idiocy with the eloquence that the viewer wishes they had. And he did it in a way that’s not condescending, it’s not smug. It’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s calling out bullshit. So Jon became the voice of the audience.
Chris Smith
sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)
Chila Woychik
If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.
Megan Abbott
Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.
David Brooks
Fake confidence on the outside often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside.
Rob Lowe
Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life... Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.
Bernard Cornwell
One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker.
Ken Liu
It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
Tim O'Brien
The crowd was getting hysterical, so I reached into my back pocket and flippe open my wallet to reveal my badge. "Official business," I announced. "Please leave the area." This had the desired effect; it deescalated the mood and prompted most of the crowd to disperse. It's funny what a plastic badge and a meaningless phrase can do. The authority of the police is anothe mass delusion that can be useful at times. I hadn't even needed to claim I was a cop; all it took was a couple of simple cues to invoke the delusion.
Robert Kroese
Reading stories forces us to exercise our empathy and imagination muscles, and that helps us conceive what the Bible depicts or demands, helps us connect with others, helps us illustrate what the text teaches, and helps us apply the text’s truths.
James M. Hamilton Jr.
I have never known the mind of a wolf hunting a deer, but I imagine it must feel a little like this: the twisted excitement of seeing the weak and wounded cowering before you, the knowledge that, in this instant, you have the power to end its life or grant it mercy. In this moment, I am a god.
Marie Lu
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.
Amy Lowell
It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
Thomas Pynchon
Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these fo
Rachel Carson
On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
Chuck Wendig