Quotes by American Authors - Page 684

But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
Gloria Naylor
I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
Sylvia Plath
Pursuit of truth, not success, is the ultimate purpose of an illuminated life.
Debasish Mridha
For a man who walks in the light, to stay humble is not to walk in the dark; you don't need to project yourself to be thought an honest man.
Mike Norton
We create ourselves endlessly.
Debasish Mridha
Cursed, I was cursed, and my mother said she’d given up magic for good, said it was a terrible thing, but she wasn’t above using it to keep me at her side, and she’s a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud and phony, and I hate her I hate her I hate her!
Kendall Kulper
But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. "Wait," he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: "Den lemme go wid you, honey." But she was going.
William Faulkner
She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.
Jennifer Donnelly
So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.
Shalom Auslander
Some people are street-smart, some people are book-smart, but most people are just dumber than dirt.
Lois Greiman
When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
Idowu Koyenikan
Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!
Wally Lamb
This isn't the hand of some swooning princess who sits tatting lace and waiting for some prince to save her. This is the hand of a woman who would climb a rope of her own hair to freedom, or kill a captor ogre in his sleep. And this is the hand of a woman who would have made it through the fire on her own if I hadn't been there. Singed perhaps, but safe.
Patrick Rothfuss
Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.
Jonathan Haidt
Please open please if there's any justice in this world.
Maggie Stiefvater
For now, I look to God, for I know He will respond to my questions. For I believe, in the deepest part of my heart, that He shall truly bring us into a frame of mind where we may hear His greatest responses . . . Perhaps not the final answers, but at the very least, the next response we need.
Alexandra Silber
Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
James C. Scott
The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.
Louis Zukofsky
one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”).
Tullian Tchividjian
The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginning teacher asks, "How am I doing?" and the experienced teacher asks, How are the children doing?
Esmé Raji Codell
I hear something in her words that's right, but it's hard to believe her right now.
Veronica Roth
While looking at a website for liposuction, I learned that it was a six-to eight-week recovery period, the clincher being that, during that time, I would under no circumstances be able to use street drugs. Obviously I had to think of a more realistic approach.
Chelsea Handler
We need to forgive ourselves and everyone else for NOT being perfect.
Linda Masemore Pirrung
It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.
Willa Cather
Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.
John Crowley
try not just to become a person of success but rather a person of value.
Angie Fox
A dream is just as good, and will go as far as an action.
Anthony Liccione
How many humans over thousands of years have stood thus with their horses, seeing in them the lines of universal perfection, the majesty of grace and power, feeling stronger and more beautiful themselves for their contact with the magical power of such a steed? Such is the lure of the horse. In a world in which grace is neither synonymous nor usually compatible with power, the horse has remained an ancient symbol of strength and elegance, an icon of a majestic essence that exists far outside mere human beings. Because of the space that lies between us — only the cruelest amongst us ever truly conquers a horse — there is magic. “ — Margot Page
Margot Page
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
Bob Dylan
The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.
Alan W. Watts
Don't you want me to kiss you goodbye, sweetie?""Kiss a cow farm boy
Nora Roberts
My anger feels hot and bilious but I keep it bottled until it doubles back and I'm mad at myself.
Gayle Forman
Everyone needs to have support from people who care about them, but ultimately if we don’t work hard and do our part, those dreams are nothing but wishes, fantasy.
Cindy Ray Hale
Step out the front door like a ghostinto the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white, and in between the moon and you, the angels get a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right. I walk in the air, between the rain, through myself and back again where? I don't know.
Counting Crows
In the midst of the darkness of loss, I found light. Admittedly, in those first weeks, it might have been but a single small spark I sensed deep inside of me, but that spark guided me in the twisted, dark journey of grief. As I stumbled over the roots of hopelessness and despair, that light grew to illuminate my path, a path I sometimes felt very alone on. At some point in the journey I’d turned around, and there was God.That is grace.
Mary Potter Kenyon
People who think nothing could go wrong are usually disappointed.
Lemony Snicket
Love has no distance or barrier, it's instantaneous.
Debasish Mridha
Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.
Paula Vogel
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
Rebecca Solnit
Don’t allow past experiences to be forgotten.Hold them close.
John-Talmage Mathis
When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.
Darnell Lamont Walker
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Greatness is finding your natural talent, fueling it with passion, planting it in well-nourished soil, and toiling in the garden until it breaks through the earth and reaches for the stars.
Janet Autherine
Only men would think of cutting themselves to determine who the packleader is. Idiots.
Christopher Paolini
When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.
Mark Twain
Strive to be active rather than lethargic—determined rather than wavering or lazy.
Susan C.Young
It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
Richard Feynman
Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.
John Zerzan
It seems to me that since I've had children I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while but when I did write I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler
Draw me October on the window with rain.
Bryanna Reid
Channelling is your higher self streaming through in a version your limited mind can accept. There is no such thing as a separate entity, only the perception of it. You are all of it!
Erin Fall Haskell
I don't think you feel much of anything anymore.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
I arrived, I saw humans and I saw through their faces. Nothing ever changes but the light in their eyes. For I too have buried my demons today, without knowing what might remain beneath the face of tomorrow.
Robert M. Drake
Past boldness is no assurance of future boldness. Boldness demands continual reliance on God's spirit.
Andy Stanley
Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.
Aaron Swartz
Trying to figure some people out would be like trying to put an elephant in a blender.
Adam LiVecchi
If you remain calm in the midst of great chaos, it is the surest guarantee that it will eventually subside.
Julie Andrews Edwards
The ten-year-old shifter wore long flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt, his blond hair sticking up everywhere in the most adorable way. "No, I'm thirsty. I didn't mean to both you --""You're not bothering us," Teresa interjected. Ryan didn't seem to want to let her go, but she didn't care. She needed distance from this male if she wanted to think straight. "I just stopped by to ..." Her brain chose that moment to malfunction. She couldn't even think of a decent lie."To kiss Ryan?" the boy asked, all innocence.
Katie Reus
There is some fiction, in all fact; and some fact, in all fiction.
T. Scott McLeod
Let me make sure I have this straight. The cavalry just now rode into town and it's a Czech Gypsy porn-star zombie killer. Have I got that right?
Richard Kadrey