Quotes by American Authors - Page 676

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
Tim O'Brien
You will be remembered more for your bangs in life, than the bling.
Anthony Liccione
...It's who you are. You're like a hummingbird, defying reality, a beautiful mystery, spreading your sweetness to all the needy flowers. Well, I'm no pretty garden blossom and I don't need your brand of sugar.
Karin Kallmaker
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton
THE POLITICIANIf it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!CATHERINEEspecially since you can't rob the people anyway.THE POLITICIANSure...How was that?CATHERINEWhat you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.THE POLITICIANThat book should be in every home!
Preston Sturges
Villains and plots and enemies are simple things to me. But friendships are complicated, and love is harder still. It has wounded me deeper than a sword ever could.
Jennifer A. Nielsen
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
Junot Díaz
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.
Ursula K Le Guin
Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled. The question it poses, of universal and orderly materialism, is the most important that can be asked in philosophy and religion.
Edward O. Wilson
Light and flow is what shifts the world’s vibration, not the stagnation and resistance that comes with opposition.
Alaric Hutchinson
To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
David Guterson
It's a lie that matches his desire.
Naomi Novik
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
Orson Scott Card
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
Henry David Thoreau
Our children are watching us live, and what we ARE shouts louder than anything we can say.
Wilfred A. Peterson
Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.
Philip Roth
You don't drown because you can't breathe. You drown because you try to breathe what is not breathable.
Katherine Catmull
Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.
Mark Slouka
Heal my heart and make it clean, open up my eyes to the things unseen, show me how to love like you have loved me.
Kiera Cass
First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.
Frank McCourt
The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.
Darrell Calkins
Stay strong, stay positive, and never give up.
Roy T. Bennett
God gives us a glimpse of what heaven will be like for the believer. It will have the characteristics of a happy home, a holy city, a glorious garden, and a beautiful bride. This staggers the imagination!
Billy Graham
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
Richard Preston
When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.
Ray Bradbury
Do not worry about what words to use. Worry about why this story needs to be told and the rest will take care of itself.
Moira Katson
What good is an “I LOVE YOU” If said only when you have to?What good is it to ride a horse if you cannot gallop?What good is it to believe in someone if you doubt your own belief?
Carew Papritz
One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.
Russ Shafer-Landau
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.
Thomas Paine
He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.
Henry Van Dyke
An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.
Jackie Haze
and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive
Audre Lorde
It doesn't change that I still want him, I still want to be with him, I still feel like the fucking air has been sucked out of the room when he walks in and I still think about him all the time.
Santino Hassell
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
Amelia Earhart
The limbo of life is like a song, a melody that comes around occasionally but that sticks in your head and never goes away.
Leigh Hershkovich
The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod. Grappa is made from the spent skins and stems and seeds of wine grapes; marmalade from the peels of oranges. The wine behind grappa is great, but there are moments when only grappa will do; the fruit of the orange is delicious, but it cannot be satisfactorily spread.“The skins of onions, green tops from leeks, stems from herbs must all be swept directly into a pot instead of the garbage. Along with the bones from a chicken, raw or cooked, they are what it takes to make chicken stock, which you need never buy, once you decide to keep its ingredients instead of throwing them away. If you have bones from fish, it's fish stock. If there are bones from pork or lamb, you will have pork or lamb stock.
Tamar Adler
It's never a good day when an ancient demon shows up on your toilet bowl.
Angie Fox
There are two kinds of patriotism -- monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
Mark Twain
...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?
Paul Beatty
We don't heal in isolation, but in community.
S. Kelley Harrell
No matter how crazed you get, no matter what pressures you're under, no matter who needs what by yesterday... Always remember: everything you do uses a portion of someone else's life.
Bill Jensen
You know I'm no squealer, Harry.''You're a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.''I'm a good man,' he said. 'You oughtn't to talk to me like that.''They can't make it fast enough to keep you a good man,' I told him. But I didn't worry about him any more because who was going to believe him?
Ernest Hemingway
More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.
Nancy Isenberg
No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.
Dean Koontz
I swallowed, feeling like I'd just gotten the wind knocked out of me. He was breathtaking.
Tijan
I fully recognize there is an urgent need for constructing the _strategic we-nes-in-sameness_ and promoting the _solidarity of sameness_. The sheer realization of the inextricable interconnectedness of I-ness/me-ness and we-ness/us-ness is the round for an authentic solidarity with one another in spite of and regardless of the difference.
Namsoon Kang
Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you so can the things it brought.
Paulina Porizkova
Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
Mitch Albom
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
Carl Sagan
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.
Lemony Snicket
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
If you want to be the best, be the best, if you are not the best, pretend you are
Muhhamad Ali
The first rule in life is 'everybody lies.' Remember that and you'll get a lot further.
Jennifer Crusie
The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc.
Thomas Szasz
How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof.
Cornelius Van Til
Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.
Clarence Day Jr.
All problems, though appearing outside of you, must be resolved within YOU.
Vivian Amis
She wanted -- needed -- a McCall induced orgasm.And if he kept kissing her like she was the sexiest thing in the world, she might have one in the next half a minute.
Robin Bielman