Quotes by American Authors - Page 613

A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.
Henry David Thoreau
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
Brené Brown
Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.
Peter Heller
To be good, see goodness in everyone.
Debasish Mridha
In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, "Did Jesus have sex?" and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, "Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?" or "Did Mary and Martha, 'whom Jesus loved,' ever enjoy a good orgasm?" Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.
Darrel Ray
If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.
Taylor Swift
I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.
Sherman Alexie
We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return.
Brit Bennett
Seeing each choice as a kind of energy can empower us. To say "yes" might feel like a dripping faucet. To say "no" might feel like a playful puppy. In feeling the energy, we get to choose beyond what is expected and routine.
Jeanne McElvaney
I realize thirty is just a number, that you're only as old as you feel and all that. I also realize that in the grand scheme of things, thirty is still young. But it's not that young.
Emily Giffin
To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time.
Shannon L. Alder
Holding myself to perfectionistic standards, I used to think I had to become lifelong friends with everyone who entered my life. This was exhausting, and I now know it’s not true. I believe the old saying that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” (127)
Jenni Schaefer
A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.
Steven Pinker
There's a new kind of Giving-I remember when Philanthropy was inconspicuous and anonymous.Now it has turned in to " Look at me, I just saved the world" kind of show.
Charmaine J.Forde
Today, if you pay a[n US] dollar for a pound of apples in the supermarketm only about six cents covers the farmwork used to get it there; (...)
Tracie McMillan
Love someone deeply and unconditionally to find the magical power of love.
Debasish Mridha
The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.
Corey Taylor
Keep me heaven my soul has holes, leaking good morals, I once had control over dark matters of the world, give me courage and strength for my Lord, and sew the holes that hold you near. Keep me heaven my soul has holes.
Anthony Liccione
Happiness is wanting what you have.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
True beauty, the kind that doesn't fade or wash off, takes time. It takes pressure. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that makes the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would otherwise never exist.And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can't see. We believe that there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent that our bodies can't contain it
Amy Harmon
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.
Henry David Thoreau
What does the body matter if the soul is dead?
Francine Rivers
It's funny, but have you ever noticed that the more special something is, the more people seem to take it for granted? It's like they think it won't ever change. Just like this house here. All it ever needed was a little attention, and it would never have ended up like this in the first place.
Nicholas Sparks
I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.
Lydia Millet
It was your choice to sleep with her Gavin! It didn't just happen!
Belinda G. Buchanan
Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?
Nataly Kelly
If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?
Steve Maraboli
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we're stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It's not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
Stephen King
It was really hard to stay positive. And that's normally a talent of mine.
Paige Harbison
And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.
Jeff Lindsay
There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.
T.L. Rese
Your friends will believe in your potential, your enemies will make you live up to it.
Tim Fargo
Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.
Robert Byrne
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.
Judith Herman
There were never enough stars in the sky to count how many times a day he fell in love with her.
Jewel E. Ann
You can't wait around for something to become good, it either is, or isn't.
Toni Aleo
People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.
Harper Lee
Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations-plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.
Norman Cousins
Our beliefs are the lens through which we see the world. They are the glasses we put on in the morning, which provide the patterns we see. As we become more self-aware, we can identify our patterns, and then, to the extent we desire, change our lenses.
Patrick Sweeney
It is not the love of money that is evil—it is the lack of money that causes evil. It is working at a job we hate that is evil. Working hard yet not earning enough to provide for our families is evil. For some, being deeply in debt is evil. Fighting with people you love over money is evil. Being greedy is evil. Committing criminal or immoral acts to get money is evil. Money by itself is not evil. Money is just money.
Robert T. Kiyosaki
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control it proliferates laws of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed.
Alan W. Watts
His fingers have been slowly lacing through my hair.
Colleen Hoover
I am looking forward to the departure of the corrupt Obama administration in 2017.
Steven Magee
Tomb thou shalt not hold Him longer Death is strong but Life is stronger Stronger than the dark the light Stronger than the wrong the right Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.
Phillips Brooks
Erase the victim mentality. Remember you are capable of achieving greatness. If only you'd believe in your abilities to overcome. You are victorious. Celebrate the victory.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Somehow difficulties are easier to endure when you know your dream is waiting for you at the end.
Lisa Mangum
When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while other starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people there...when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be happy?..."... "If you can see the whole thing," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives....But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the art is, is to see it as the moon. They way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
Ursula K Le Guin
My life is an adventure." she said, growing confident as she opened her eyes again. "I will not be shackled to this satellite anymore.
Marissa Meyer
Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.
Kilroy J. Oldster
You will know if you are on the right path when God directs your choices, not your spouse or significant other.
Shannon L. Alder
Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
Ann Brashares
Percy is the most powerful demigod I've ever met. No offense to you guys but it's true.
Rick Riordan
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
Paul Theroux
My mom said:‘Don’t put your finger in your brother’s ear! If you want to know how that quarter trick is done, go ask the magician.’ So I tugged on The Great Arturo's pant leg until he finally taught me how. That was my first magic trick! I was five years old.
Autumn Morning Star
It had initially been thought that the zombie virus was an offshoot of Ebola. Many zombie-virus symptoms mimicked the terrible, hemorrhagic fever.
Andrew Cormier
Because it is so hard, in any life, to believe in what you can't fully understand.
Sarah Dessen
Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In heaven there will be no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.
Grant Gilmore
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
William Faulkner