Quotes by American Authors - Page 693

It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would tell young journalists to be brave and go against the tide. When everyone else is relying on the internet, you should not; when nobody's walking, you should walk; when few people are reading profound books, you should read. ... rather than seeking a plusher life you should pursue some hardship. Eat simple food. When everyone's going for quick results, pursue things of lasting value. Don't follow the crowd; go in the opposite direction. If others are fast, be slow. -- Jin Yongquan
Judy Polumbaum
Giving back to my community is great, but I must never forget to give back to God in the solitude of prayer.
Laura Domino
Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.
Anne Rice
Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.
Philip K Dick
Be your own lamp, seek no other refuge but yourself, Let truth be your light." ~Buddha
Buddha Monk
Realized dreams often turn into nightmares.
Lera Auerbach
Man's command of the language is most important. Next to kissing it's the most exciting form of communication.
Oren Arnold
When I’m away from you I am lost.But when I’m with you, I am lost in you.
Eliza Freed
Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.
James Patterson
There was a new simplicity to what I did, a door that had opened before me to worlds I had not imagined. From where I sat, if you watched carefully you could marvel at it, like the impossible birth of a cottonseed or the slow rise of a wooden house: the steady construction of a man, built brick by brick from the shadow of a boy.
Michael Johnston
Dreams do come true for those who dare to believe in themselves.
Bryant McGill
I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.
Rachel Corrie
A mind with questions is a mind open to understanding.
Colleen Houck
The visions scared me. And I was scared to tell anyone about them. I didn’t want them to think I was a freak. Maybe I was. That scared me, too.
Michelle K. Pickett
The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
You disappoint me, Cassandra. Your legends paint you differently," Daemon said softly, his voice thick with malevolence."I'm a Priestess serving at this Altar," she said, working to keep her voice steady. "You're mistaken, if you think--"He laughed softly. She stepped back from the sound and found herself pressed against the counter. "Do you think I can't tell the difference between a Priestess and a Queen? And the Jewels, my dear, name you for what you are."She bent her head slightly in acknowledgment. "So I'm Cassandra. What do you want, Prince?
Anne Bishop
There is absolutely no substitute for the best. Good food cannot be made of inferior ingredients masked with high flavor. It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.
James Beard
God. He was an eye-gasm if she ever saw one.
Kelly Moran
If you build a wall to separate people, there will be those who find a way around the wall, or over it, or under it, or through it. We humans are not meant to be contained, and neither are our thoughts.
Teresa R. Funke
My dad is shagging your aunt, probably right now. That makes us almost family.
Jennifer Ashley
Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.
Louisa May Alcott
If you want to know a man, dig in his firepit...Basically, it meant that you could judge a lot about a man's life by what he thew away - or by what he was willing to burn in order to stay warm.
Brandon Sanderson
Life is an adventure in forgiveness
Norman Cousins
Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
Wendell Phillips
Thanks, Mom. Thanks for making me try out for this play.'I think I might have just made being a mother totally worthwhile for her.I will try to never forget her face...Mom's got tears in her eyes and she's smiling. It's an amazing look.I have to remember how powerful it can be to say thank you.Especially to the people you live with.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
Richard Mitchell
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.
Orville Wright
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.
Henry David Thoreau
The nature of Nature is change.
Sharon Weil
Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed.
Douglas Wilson
People expected something for nothing, that’s why they did nothing so beautifully these days.
Holly Hood
Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.
William Stafford
Jenifer always taught me that starting a job was one thing―—and admirable―—but that following through and completing―—well, that’s where the bravery is.
Valerie Estess
You naked in my bed is even more unbelievably beautiful than I thought it would be... and trust me I've thought about it. A lot.
Abbi Glines
You're like a fish. You want to evolve, to climb onto the land, but the ocean won't let go of you so easily. The currents of your past would sooner destroy you than let you go free.
Michael Goorjian
This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.
Lalita Tademy
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
Joseph Campbell
I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?
Maggie Stiefvater
In my imagination, I can feel your presence. I can feel the warmth of your passionate hug. I can hear your sweet voice. I can hear the song of your beating heart.
Debasish Mridha
When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
Tennessee Williams
I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife. 'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'...the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again...
Lauren Groff
If, in the end, you have not chosen Jesus Christ it will not matter what you have chosen.
Neal A Maxwell
I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday
Leigh Byrne
All that's needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public - move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalize them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into the streets where they've never dared set foot, a tale that throws back the sheets from acts never shown and voices never heard. A tale that fearlessly points the finger at those who are to blame...
Michael Farber
Don't worry, darling. I'll look out for myself. And I've reached an age when I have no problem telling someone to fuck off.
Sherry Thomas
Did I hurt your feelings again? Sorry. When this is all over I'll send some flowers to your inner child.
Richard Kadrey
It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of observation and experience.
Robert G. Ingersoll
If your life is not an adventure then you are not truly alive.
Toni Sorenson
You saved my life.I trust you until you give me a reason to do otherwise
Kristen Painter
Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.
Bonnie Friedman
Believe me, the loss of hope is far worse than the loss of limbs.
Nick Vujicic
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that o
William Faulkner
Don't make yourself so special," the dwarf said with a snort. "As if getting lost was some trick that only women knew. I've known men who could get lost in their own bedrooms. The only difference is that men with no sense of direction don't brag about it, the way women do.
Gerald Morris
But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
Bill Bryson
If it doesn't do you any good, dump it. Take some action, push that lever, flush it away, and don't look back. Take small steps everyday of your life, and start taking control of what you say when you talk to yourself.
Dave Pelzer
God’s supernatural self-control is available to us when we walk by the Spirit.
Elizabeth George
Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.
Sylvia Plath
Living in the land of, "What if....?" leads to emotional paralysis. It sets the stage for doom and gloom thinking. It prevents us from experiencing the beauty of the present moment. Happiness resides in the here and now. It can not thrive in a prison of the past or in the worry of future outcomes that may or may not, happen. We need to trust that we have the divine wisdom within ourselves and through the support of others, to climb the treacherous terrain this human existence brings. It is worth the struggle. The view from the top is extraordinary. Onward and upward!
Jaeda DeWalt