Quotes by American Authors - Page 688

Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperatures they measure our fear.
Jean Zimmerman
Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.
Lorrie Moore
I consider myself fortunate that I spent three years working at 7,775 feet before spending five years working at 13,796 feet on the summit of Mauna Kea. I can only wonder how much more severe my long term very high altitude sickness could have been without the initial adaptation to the lower altitude.
Steven Magee
You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.
Richard Jeni
Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
Rebecca Solnit
I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.
Ruth Reichl
God never leads us to do anything that is contrary to the Bible.
Billy Graham
People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
Charles Bukowski
Experience is the opposite of education.
Ashly Lorenzana
I don’t think I heard the same ending you did. Maybe you should tell it again.
Elle Lothlorien
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Chuck Palahniuk
Our perception is our window to the world, and we need to wipe the dust off of our window often so we can continue to see through it clearly.
Joseph P. Kauffman
He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody.
Michael Crichton
Food. Small talk. Maybe I say something that makes you grin. Maybe you say something that makes me giggle. Maybe the food is crap, so we drink too much wine. Maybe the full moon beckons us to the beach where we walk in the shadows of the night ... just maybe for one night we feel human.
Jewel E. Ann
People don't vanish from one's life they come back in disguise.
Yiyun Li
We best learn patience by practicing it.
Jim Elliot
You know, I've always thought scars were beautiful. Really. They remind me of my Saviour. You know, without scars, Jesus would look like any other man. His scars proved his love for you and me. He became marred and disfigured by choice, because of his love.
J.E.B. Spredemann
Revolution must take place within one's own mind.
Lionel Suggs
Complacency kills. Paranoia is the reason I’m still alive.
D.J. Molles
The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny.
Calvin Coolidge
You two are children almost grown. Your hearts have not hardened to the realities of the world. Your dreams have not fallen through your fingers. You still know hope.
Laura Lam
each morning we’re born againof yesterday nothing remainswhat’s left began today
Anselm Hollo
Cornered mothers pray for strange things.
Nadia Hashimi
That’s the difference between good military commanders and good politicians, John Geary. You’ve shown me that a good military commander spends the lives of their people reluctantly and with regret, but does spend them when necessary. The good politician does the same thing with principles. There aren’t any fine burials for sacrificed principles, though.
Jack Campbell
Babies are never suicidal. Hard lives, not hard boiled eggs do that.
Brian Spellman
I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it.
André Aciman
[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
Michael Chabon
A candle without a spark, a sky without a sun, the look people get when they cease to be people, start being bodies.
Sarah Raasch
His tone dripping condescension, Lothaire crooned, “Ah children, it’s not yet story time.” He closed his eyes and turned away, saying over his shoulder, “To anyone who contemplates even nearing me while I sleep: I will garrote you with your own viscera.
Kresley Cole
Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.
Samuel Noah Kramer
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
Susan Sontag
I'm glad I'm not good compared to God, because if I was, He wouldn't be much of a god.
R.M. ArceJaeger
So many will try to destroy me. So many, over and over, coming in periods of greatness. But in this period, I cannot be broken: GAGAKLEIN.
Lady Gaga
It's critical to God that we think about how we live, how we spend the present time with which we're gifted each day.
Craig Groeschel
My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do.
Tavi Gevinson
Love is never perfect, big brother. It's what you make of the imperfections in it that makes the ride worthwhile.
Jay Crownover
I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.
Frank McCourt
Sometimes he wondered if he did these things just to test himself. To see if the feelings had gone. But they had not. When he saw her, he wanted to be with her; when he was with her, he ached to touch her; when he touched even her hand, he wanted to embrace her. He wanted to feel her against him the way he had in the attic. He wanted to know the taste of her skin and the smell of her hair. He wanted to make her laugh. He wanted to sit and listen to her talk about books until his ears fell off. But all these things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
Cassandra Clare
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Ray Bradbury
To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn’t tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who’d be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say where’s all that racket comin from?Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn’t help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist.
Carolyn Jourdan
It isn't drugs addicts have to give up. It's misery.
Marty Rubin
Be careful of him Dai, whether you agree with me or not that boy is a time bomb just waiting to explode, and when he does he’s going hit everyone in his way including you . . . or especially you.-- Benjirou Uie warning Dai about Kane from "Game Boys
Rochelle H. Ragnarok
7amThey said that I’d forget you,and I knew it wasn’t true.But sometimes I wake up now,and my heart’s no longer blue.I press the Keurig button,dancing across the room—Sometimes it’s nearly seven,before I’ve thought of you.And though we sleep together,all night side by side,one day I’ll have my coffeewithout you in my mind.
Coco J. Ginger
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I'll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it's more likely I'll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty.... It's not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
Lucia Berlin
She was the most alone person he had ever met - so intent on staying forever breathtaking that she could never let any of life's glories take her own breath away.
Jenny Wingfield
He's unconventionally attractive and yet coincidentally everything I've ever wanted.
Crystal Woods
It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.
Caroline Hanson
Sophie and Agatha locked eyes one last time but neither screamed for the other.Once true loves, the two girls now pulled apart like strangers, each in the arms of a boy, Good with Good, Evil with Evil...Both of their wishes granted.
Soman Chainani
I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious."
Vince Lombardi Jr.
I believe the devil exists in those little, seemingly unnoticeable moments when we choose to value our own insecurities over the service of others.
Chris Matakas
Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole
Roger Caras
Anyone who wants to join the GLEE CLUB, gets to join.
Will Shuster
Unanimity makes me itchy. It almost always hides a grave. I started digging.
Ben Ehrenreich
A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself
Frances Ward Weller
He felt as if he has heard similar stories before. The wimp at school had grown to become stronger than the bully. And by some devious twist of fate, he would pop back into your life years later and take his revenge in the most unimaginable ways, and make sure that you suffer as much, or more, than he ever did before.
Vann Chow
Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.
Charlie Jane Anders
What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.
John Updike
The essential difference with Builders is that they've found something to do that matters to them and are therefore so passionately engaged, they rise above the personality baggage that would otherwise hold them down. Whatever they are doing has so much meaning to them that the cause itself provides charisma and they plug into it as if it was electrical current.
Jerry Porras
I am happy with you." It was only a half-lie. In truth, being with him made me happier than anything. But it was a bittersweet happiness because from this moment on, it would be overshadowed with the wait and wonder of when and how our relationship would dissolve.
Alicia Kobishop
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.
Joyce Carol Oates