Quotes by American Authors - Page 627

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.
Tom Waits
Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.
Erica Jong
We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.
Jeff Jarvis
In my experience, people who don't stick around during the hard times weren't worth having around anyway.
Kimberly Belle
I never did or countenanced in public life a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith having never believed there was one code of morality for a public and another for a private man.
Thomas Jefferson
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
Vladimir Nabokov
This is insanity!""No, this is scholarship!
Brandon Sanderson
He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.
Chuck Palahniuk
Rest," he whispers against my temple, and despite my sleepiness, the feel of his lips moving across my skin makes me shiver. "I'll be here when you wake up.""Oh, God," I mumble, sliding my arm over Eli's chest and snuggling close. "Have we become that old couple that doesn't have sex anymore?"Eli's chuckle rumbles against my ear. "We had sex this morning.""Okay," I say already being pulled into slumber.
Elle Jasper
I've never been afraid of them. Not once. Because I had you.
Nicholas Sparks
empathy is more powerful than sympathy
Angie Thomas
But everyone has some kind of power to hurt people.
Kristin Cashore
Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly.
Anthea Carson
It's because I haven't courage,' said Samuel. 'I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called his name - but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It's not an uncommon disease. But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.''I'd think there are degrees of greatness,' Adam said.'I don't think so,' said Samuel. 'That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He's suffering over the choosing right now. It's a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn't that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.
John Steinbeck
The black widow, who had dispatched a lover or two, was sought out for her wisdom. The young spider asked her, "Did you keep his harmful secret under the threat of danger, or did you spin a web so confusing that he didn't know if you were friend or foe? Did you release him from the web and your presence or will you give another the venom in which to finish him?" The black widow was quiet and then said, "All of the above.
Donna Lynn Hope
Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.
Walker Percy
You’re not beautiful,” he said. “Your profile said beautiful. You kind of overreached on that one.
Diane Dunning
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W.H. Auden
You have a unique gift to offer this world. Be true to yourself, be kind to yourself, read and learn about everything that interests you and keep away from people who bring you down. When you treat yourself kindly and respect the uniqueness of those around you, you will be giving this world an amazing gift... YOU!
Steve Maraboli
Here is a universal law: that when it comes to negative and positive, you will always thrive more powerfully in the positive if you have first been immersed in, and have heroically overcome, the polar opposite negative of that thing. To abide in the positive existence of something, without having known and overcome it’s polar opposite— that is to be only a frame of the real structure. Easily toppled down and taken apart. True power is in the hands of the one who thrives in the positive, after having known and conquered the negative. Because when the demons come along, she will say to those demons: “I know you, I have owned you, but now you bow down to me.
C. JoyBell C.
It had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechanics even in the case of corgis that are lean and trim, which these were not.This struggle, which appeared to be only one skirmish in a conflict of epochal standing, had driven all lesser considerations, such as guarding the gate, from the combatants' sphere of attention...
Neal Stephenson
when you feel like hope is gone, look inside you and be strong and you'll finally see the truth- that hero lies in you.
Mariah Carey
Easy. Peasy
P.C. Cast
it seems that man has learnednot to seenot to knowfor he's found the potof goldbut lost the rainbow...
Barry DeCarli
The contrast between earthly and spiritual is not a contrast between the tangible and the intangible; it is between the transitory and the eternal. Earthly is temporary, spiritual is everlasting. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 127]
Edward T. Welch
I've often told people who ask if there is a God: Get around enough people with horses and see what happens. See how they survive in spite of all the things they do, and you'll become a believer!
Buck Brannaman
- had a million things to do today; death would have to wait, -(The Tin Star)
J.L. Langley
Her pulse raced, pounding in her ears above the howling wind. A wave of dizziness crashed over her with the rapid flood of adrenaline. She gasped in a breath. “Don’t let go.
G.S. Jennsen
If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.
James Carlos Blake
No sex?" He looked at me in disbelief. "Well if you can't have ze sex, what can you do?"For the sake of simplicity I took my left arm and lined it up just under my collarbones. "Nothing below here," I said. I took my right arm and lined it up to my knees. "Nothing above here.""What about your armpit?" he asked. "Can your boyfriend do anything he wants to your armpit?"I thought about it. Armpits seemed pretty harmless. "Yeah," I said optimistically. "My boyfriend can do anything he wants to my armpit.""This is good," the Frenchman said. "He can stick his penis in and out of your armpit, and if you grow hair there it is almost like vagine."Is it too late to change my answer? I wondered, pulling a cardigan over my bare shoulders and covering any hint of an invitation.
Elna Baker
Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective.
Tommy Wallach
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.
Michael J. Fox
This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody getswhat they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more byeach glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of somethingat sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listennow? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was onlysomething I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
Jorie Graham
Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.
Richard Rohr
One warm morning in July, a ghost came to our breakfast table.
Holly Thompson
Apathy sets in when our passion for the future is miscarried.
Andrew Root
And I guess I'm the assignment that will put you right with your family?""Yes.""It's no' going to happen, lass."She turned her head to him. "Then why did you bring me with you tonight?""Something I've been asking myself.
Donna Grant
On the line beside Describe your family, I wrote, "Bad."What is your favorite subject in school? "None."List three of your favorite activities. "Soccer, ballet, and fighting."Two of those favorite activities were lies but one of them was the truth.I am fond of fighting.
Barbara O'Connor
God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.
Don DeLillo
I am going to kill you," he hissed.She gulped. "Don't you want to lecture me first?"He stared at her with a heavy dose of stupefaction."I take that back," he said with precisely clippedwords. "First I am going to strangle you, and then I am going to kill you.""Here?" she asked doubtfully, looking around. "Won't my dead body look suspicious in the morning?
Julia Quinn
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Anne Sexton
The directness of her question throws me. "I don't know. Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunities...to get together with someone. And we've both screwed up so many times"- my voice grows quiet - "that we've missed our chance.""Anna." Mer pauses. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.""But—""But what? You love him, and he loves you, and you live in the most romantic city in the world.
Stephanie Perkins
I'm not worried about plagiarism, I don't care if every person between here and Hell's creation put their name on my work as long as it ends up in the eyes of someone that found peace in the words
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Learning too soon our limitations we never learn our powers.
Mignon McLaughlin
America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.
John Piper
The reality is that people reach for a Bible when they're feeling lost. But if they hadn't shelved it, maybe they wouldn't have gotten lost.
Crystal Woods
I hold a little fundraiser every day. Its called going to work.
Stephen Colbert
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
Robert Conquest
it was like trying to see a shadow in the dark.
Melissa Andrea
Love is the perception of perfection beyond the protection of our projection.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Though sometimes conflicted and seemingly restricted - grace be [the] wings of clarity.
T.F. Hodge
Under a sky that hasn't been blue for weeks.
Hillary Frank
Live for a reason. Live with passion.
Debasish Mridha
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient.
Louis Brandeis
In this universe there are no time machines or keys that can turn hearts back around.
Sarah Tregay
Your need to feel significant will never be met, until you can conquer your fear and manage your focus.
Shannon L. Alder
How much maltreatment and exploitation could someone handle before losing self-control?
Mary Kubica
...I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people. - Roy Gates
Marcus Brotherton
I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind.
Bill Withers
Never scorn a woman. They get violent.
Pepper Phillips