Quotes by American Authors - Page 617

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.
Sam Harris
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
Elizabeth Gilbert
It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.
Theodore Roosevelt
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
Loren Eiseley
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Anaïs Nin
A friend is one who withholds judgment no matter how long you have his unanswered letter.
Sophie Irene Loeb
ANDREW: But do you think there’s a line? You know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?FLETCHER: No. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.
Damien Chazelle
As long as other people's opinions matter more than your own, you're owned by them. You're not even free.
Oprah Winfrey
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!
Thomas Merton
When one good thing happened to you, other good things seemed to follow.
Candace Bushnell
One should regard one's religious or denominational affiliation as a point of departure, a point of entry, not the point of arrival because on cannot confine God to a particular religion or faith tradition, and therefore should not claim one's exclusive ownership of God. Regarding one's religious or denominational affiliation as _accidentality_; not as _inevitability_, is important in religious discourse and practice because such a sense of _accidentality_ of one's affiliation allows a space of _alterity_ of reciprocal contestation and challenge, and a space of planetary gaze that sees others as fellow human beings, _regardless_.
Namsoon Kang
Sometimes, all you can take are memoriesBut if you’re lucky enough to capture the moment,it lives forever, immortally fixed.
Keegan Allen
Things on the essential list: vodka, Nine Inch Nails, a steady supply of mortal men, and an all-purpose bitchy attitude.
Richelle Mead
Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
Piers Anthony
You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.
Boris Johnson
Freedom that is not fought for, that is not gained by personal sacrifice is freedom that will never last, because in the heart of the one set free, it will have little value. A treasure that costs nothing is a treasure that is easily neglected and lost.
Bryan Davis
I held a nail in place and slammed it with the hammer. Best. Chore. Ever.
Cate Tiernan
The elimination diet:Remove anger, regret, resentment, guilt, blame, and worry.Then watch your health, and life, improve.
Charles F. Glassman
I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption--vain because it is endless--and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.
Lydia Davis
Daja doesn't exactly need to be tested on whether she's honorable or not." "Doesn't she? Don't all of you? This is your first taste of the things which may come from your being powerful mages. People will offer you gold, status, even love. I want to know how you will react. If want to know if your teachers will release greedy, thoughtless monsters into the world.
Tamora Pierce
They stared into the distance as though they were being absorbed into an alternate space-time reality. Perhaps they were. But probably they already had been.
Amy Tanner
Live today facing forward—with your back on yesterday, your eyes on tomorrow, and your head and heart in the moment.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Would you like to hear about the fascinating things lizards can do if you chew off their tails?
Elle Lothlorien
Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.
Criss Jami
For the first time in a long time he decided to trust that the woman next to him, who smelled like peaches and cream and made him think of nothing but sex, wasn't going to kill him in his sleep.
Katie Reus
When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were taken, the roads that were walked, and that there are no guarantees to an unseen future.
Lionel Suggs
That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started.
Paul Auster
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
Before a secret is told one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin
Fortunately for serious minds a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.
A. Eustace Haydon
Come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
Herman Melville
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Klan as an Order stands behind Pure Womanhood and it is an inspiration to look into the face of one of your sex occupying the sacred desk and administering the Word of God to this people.
James Brice Klan
The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
To achieve greatness, let us be helpful and grateful to others.
Debasish Mridha
Even the strongest blizzards start with a single snowflake.
Sara Raasch
I knew I sounded hysterical, and Adrian’s calmness only drove that home. “I think I have an idea,” he said. “An idea that’ll get us some hardcore protection … but I don’t know how you’ll feel about it.”“I’m open to anything,” I assured him.He hesitated a moment and gave a decisive nod. Then, to my complete and utter astonishment, he got down on his knees before me and clasped my hands in his. “Sydney Katherine Sage,” he said, his green eyes full of love and earnestness. “Would you do a brooding, deadbeat Moroi the honor of being his wife?
Richelle Mead
...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.
Chuck Klosterman
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.
Thomas Harris
Small minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand.
Dan Brown
The wild notes of tuba and trumpet and trombone rattled and hummed through the trees. In the first group of musicians, there were kids as young as fourteen playing the tuba and one kid who probably couldn’t drive banging a bass drum. They stomped together in rhythm to the music. Two ladies had dressed up in what looked like princess outfits. They wore white gloves and socks with tassels.
Hunter Murphy
The Pilgrims didn't have any experience when they landed here. Hell if experience was that important we'd never have anybody walking on the moon.
Doug Rader
Can I ask you something?" you said. "How did you ever survive that scandal?"She said, "I refused to be shamed.""How did you do that?" you asked. "When they came at me, I kept coming," she said.
Gabrielle Zevin
Your aspirations are deeply influenced by your inspirations. Don't produce bad situations due to a lack of creative ambitions.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
A princess once carefully kissed a porcupine to be kind, upon which he began to think himself a prince. He then dressed like a prince, behaved like a prince, and announced himself to be a prince. The world, therefore, saw him as such, and so a porcupine prince he was. (Of course, most were reluctant to argue with him otherwise.)
Richelle E. Goodrich
It's your destiny to be here, Dana.""Oh really. How nice. Is it Brandon's destiny to be here too?""Yep.
James L. Rubart
Keep a grateful journal. Every night list five things that you are grateful for. What it will begin to do is change your perspective of your day and your life.
Oprah Winfrey
struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature.
Garth Stein
Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.
Neal Gabler
I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.
Katherine Anne Porter
I think that a lot of the time, people are generous towards those whom they pity; but only find fault in those whom they see as better than themselves. There is a fake kind of goodness; and that is the goodness that is only good towards other people that make the givers feel better about themselves. Would you be good to someone you think is so much better than you are? Or who has so much more than you have? Or is your goodness only reserved for those who make you feel like a god because you give to them? Too often, there are shining, beautiful people, who suffer so much in this world, because there would be so many others willing to snuff out their flames! Goodness of a person is not measured by sympathy or compassion; rather, goodness is measured by empathy. Empathy goes beyond all the physical things you see with your two eyes. It’s easy to be good to those you pity; much harder to be good to those whom you envy!
C. JoyBell C.
One of the highest marks of citizenship is fighting for the common defense.
Richard Brookhiser
Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
Chuck Palahniuk
People with the gift of charm exude a delightful demeanor—an attractive likability that enwraps you in their warmth.
Susan C.Young
My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.
Wendell Berry
True strength. There is no conflict with vulnerability or humility. Indeed, vulnerability and humility are essential here, and ultimately what makes strength true. One does not don the mask of strength in response to fear, which is a con, like those crazy small reptiles that stand up on their hind legs and spread useless wings to intimidate as a last resort. You stand there in self-respect for Christ’s sake and take it with some courage, responding in accordance with your honest values, taking sincere responsibility for them. Stand up for who you truly are, not the image you would like to sell, nor shrink to fit into the false harmony around you.
Darrell Calkins
You can't force creatives into a box. If you try, they'll no longer be creative. And no one will want your box.
Ryan Lilly
IT IS SAID that time is unrelated to everything else. It goes on and on, unnoticing of our actions, our falls, our triumphs. Who’s to care then, if time does not remember us? It flies by, fleeting, inattentive and disinterested in any occupants of this earth. What are we, then, if time thinks so little of everyone it passes? Time is truly apathetic to the many to whom a little empathy would mean so much.~April~ Disarming Reign of Blood
Alexia Purdy