Quotes by American Authors - Page 623

There's just as much wisdom in knowing when to keep quiet as there is in knowing when to speak up. Use your voice wisely.
Scott Stabile
There is freedom in stepping out and taking risks when you know at any given moment, you can always begin again.
Eva Gregory
Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.
Robin Hobb
Lunch can wait. Everything can wait. Time to run.
Lisa Schroeder
To be satisfied with what one has that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount that man isn't rich.
Mark Twain
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.
Darnell Lamont Walker
But more importantly in my book of life, it's what you can't buy with money that is often more important than what you can buy.
Carew Papritz
Fear is the greatest enemy; the father of all suffering, and love is the only cure for humanity's great afflictions
Bryant McGill
The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.
Nelson Algren
As I drift through the autumn of my life like a fallen leaf blown about by the winds of time, I sometimes ponder my destiny.
Peggy Toney Horton
One ought to have some sort of transcendent realization that the world exists because the gods are trapped in the same abyss you've occupied for three years. It should be inspiring or comforting or, I don't know, cathartic.
Anaea Lay
Martin Luther spent two hours a day in prayer. John Wesley spent two hours a day in prayer. According to a recent poll taken on both sides of the Atlantic, the average church leader, pastor, priest, evangelist, teacher today spends four minutes a day in prayer and you wonder why the church is powerless.
R.T. Kendall
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.
Philip Roth
Life was never intended to consist of a glut of luxury, be an easy course, or filled only with success. There are those games which we lose, those races in which we finish last, and those promotions which never come. Such experiences provide an opportunity for us to show our determination and to rise above disappointment.
Thomas S. Monson
The bond between food and me is like other relationships in my life: complicated, evolving, demanding, and in need of constant work. But together we’ve come so far, moving from my childhood obligation to clean my plate, to a mindless need to fill up, to a truly nourishing and pleasurable exchange. That’s the real reward.
Ashley Graham
Someone Else's words can detour your potential!
John Di Lemme
No. I made that choice. I let all that anger and pain get twisted up in my thoughts for you.” He leaned in. “It fucking kills me. Every night. I relive what I did to you every night.” His forehead rested against mine. “Until you,” he said softly, “I never felt truly helpless.
Nenia Campbell
The day I became a writerit wasn't the day a whore paid me in sexin exchange for one of my bookswhich happened often and more and moreas time went onit wasn't the first time someone actually paid for one of my bookswhich happens less and less as time goes onIt was the day I realizedthat everything is created by manGod, Satan, Judas, phobias, excrement, even deatheven womeneverything is created by manSo I said to myselfshit, let me make something let me tape together some words and sentencesand proseand predicatesand the residual shit that sticks to my ass after I wipeand compose a new kind of thingBut then I realized that others had discovered thisfor themselves as wellAnd suddenly the world became a jungleWhere everyone eats each other aliveAnd shits out the same shit
Dave Matthes
We must learn to view change as a natural phenomenon-to anticipate it and to plan for it. The future is ours to channel in the direction we want to go ... we must continually ask ourselves "What will happen if ... ?" or better still "How can we make it happen?"
Lisa Taylor
Consider, if you will, the morning boner. What a metaphor of hope and renewal! How can anyone give way to despair when one’s groin greets each day with such a gala spectacle of physical optimism?
C.D. Payne
The pressures of life and influence of society have caused many to become something and someone they are not. Remove the layers. Dig through the dust and debris. Find the genuine jewel - YOU.
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.
Elie Wiesel
I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're gonna do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. YOu just use the future to escape the present.
John Green
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
Zora Neale Hurston
Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.
Siri Hustvedt
It's my opinion, with some people, just knowing they are alone, living inside of their own miserable, self hating, dysfunctional mind, with their own immature, insecure, self pitying self is its own revenge. Their existence is their karma.
Colleen Truscott Fry
How to be happy in life? The short and simple answer is to SMILE more often!
Al Munoz
Shoot for the stars, so if you fall you land on a cloud.
Kanye West
Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.
Joe Hill
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are some beliefs and places in this city that are incomprehensible to some-hell-to most, and it's best to leave them alone.
Sandy DeLuca
Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.
Daniel Keyes
Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Know that EVERYTHING in Life has purpose. There are no accidents, no coincidences, EVERY moment is a blessing given for our Spiritual benefit and learning.
Raymond D. Longoria Jr.
...if you spent all your time being protected, you never got to find out anything new.
Sage Blackwood
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
Annie Dillard
To the unaware person, karma is the prison in which the mind is held hostage. Because of karma, an unaware person is doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity as the seeds planted yesterday bear bitter fruit tomorrow. But to the mindful person, karma offers the promise of freedom. Mindfulness allows us to change our mind in the present, plantingnew seeds that will bear sweet fruit.
Darren Main
Changing your location doesn’t necessarily mean losing your problems. They’ll show up wherever you are, changing to fit the situation. But until you break them down and deal with it, there is nowhere far enough for you to run away from them.
K.K. Hendin
This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is important to realize that you cannot get a Ph.D. in caring, that caring cannot be delegated by specialists, and that therefore nobody can be excused from caring. Still, in a society like ours, we have a strong tendency to refer to specialists. When someone does not feel well, we quickly think, 'Where can we find a doctor?' When someone is confused, we easily advise him to go to a counselor. And when someone is dying, we quickly call a priest. Even when someone wants to pray we wonder if there is a minister around.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.
Tina Fey
How many kids are in the Graveyard?""A bunch.""Who sends your supplies?""George Washington. Or is it Abraham Lincoln? I forget.""How often do you receive new arrivals?""About as often as you beat your wife.
Neal Shusterman
As you explore new opportunities and new directions, consider this:• How do I want to make a difference in the world?• How do I want to be remembered?• What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind?
Julie Connor
If you hold a candle close to you, its flame rises. And if you hold it away from you, its flame shrinks. The same way you hold a candle close to you, keep all your plans, aspirations, projects, and dreams close to you too. Do not share your plans or goals until you complete them, because as you hold your candle away from you, your goals will shrink in the eyes of others. Envy, jealousy, and resentment will put out your flame before it grows. Never reveal what you are doing until you have accomplished it. Resentment does not only come from those close to you, but also distant strangers. Therefore, fiercely guard the passions burning inside your heart, so that their flames can safely reach the highest ceilings of success without the eyes of envy.
Suzy Kassem
Don't analyze her love. Just turn the green light on and move into her soul.
Melody Lee
Education is a means, not an end. We don't enroll in formal education ad nauseam as a way of escaping life. Rather, we educate ourselves in order to become equipped to respond wisely to God's calling.
Ken Wytsma
...One thing you learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.
Neal Shusterman
FABLEHAVEN: None who enter will leave unchanged. Trespassers will be turned to stone.
Brandon Mull
And fetch some straw.We’ll put it between us and the ground. No reason we shouldn’t sleep soft tonight.”“Straw. I love luxury.
Joanna Bourne
The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.
Garth Stein
Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.
Mark Bittman
I call him my friend, but in the last year it's seemed too casual a word for what Gale is to me. A pang of longing shoots through my chest. If only he was with me now! But of course, I don't want that. I don't want him in the arena where he'd be dead in a few days. I just... I just miss him. And I hate being so alone. Does he miss me? He must.
Suzanne Collins
You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.
Steven R. Boyett
Forgiveness is a very curious thing, in that you must not only know how to forgive; but you must also know how to accept forgiveness. Both of these aspects are equally important. When someone forgives you— believe it.
C. JoyBell C.
She shook off his grip. "I am what I am, and I don't particularly care what you think of me.” "Well, I care what you think of me. I care enough that I stayed at this disgusting party for you. And I care enough that I'd attend a thousand more like it so I can spend a few hours with you when you aren't looking at me like I'M not worth the dirt beneath your shoes.
Sarah J Maas
Life is only precious because it ends, kid.
Rick Riordan
Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.
Erich Fromm
All right, we need a way to get into the palace. Any ideas?""Ask nicely? Charge in? Fly? Wait, do you mean reasonable ones?
Noelle Crawford