Quotes by American Authors - Page 699

It was hard to listen to her all the time without getting to say anything back
Stephen Chbosky
Success is living what you believe.
Teresa Collins
You cannot avoid what you fear because what you fear is inside of you.
Bryant McGill
God created places and things in the Old Testament to teach us about Jesus in the New Testament. These pictures are so simple, even a child can understand them. God graciously babbled at us so we can learn complex truths.
Todd Friel
It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.
Ludwig von Mises
The Buddha is like space, with no inherent nature; appearing in the world to benefit the living, his features and refinements are like reflections.
Thomas Cleary
Real love has little to do with falling. It's a climb up the rocky face of a mountain, hard work, and most people are too selfish or too scared to bother. Very few reach the critical point in their relationship that summons the attention of the light and the dark, that place where they will make a commitment to love no matter what obstacles-or temptations- appear in their path.
Stacey Jay
It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
Dave Barry
We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lot's to eat.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.
Phil Knight
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most valuable commodity of the 21st century will be undivided attention.
Phil Cooke
If not you, who? If not now, when? The worst thing well-meaning people can do is simply let things remain as they are.
Christine Pope
We have a right to decide how we want our bodies to look and feel, but unfortunately we do not exercise these rights. Instead, we tend to drift along, victims of our own ignorance of the fact that we can have what we want, if we are willing to take that first step toward developing the self-discipline to govern our thoughts.
Holly Mosier
I recognized Meg’s swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture. A picture of Meg holding a picture of me. The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot.
Laura Anderson Kurk
If you have a poverty of heart then you are the poorest among the poor.
Bryant McGill
No more is your master a god, Nobility, but he wants offerings from all. When Black God claims us, who will be punished for giving worship and power to a false god? The prince? Or Banjiku?
Tamora Pierce
Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.
Henry Miller
Smart people that like good health spend several hours outdoors daily in the shade of trees.
Steven Magee
We're all captives, in one way or another . . .
Jaye Frances
Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?
Patti Digh
The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?""Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!""I guess that explains their rich military history, then.
Howard Tayler
The Libertarian Party convention wasn’t much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled 'Women of Liberty.' All of the speakers were women, and all of the topics boiled down to 'Effectively Communicating Libertarian Ideas to Women' — in other words, 'How to talk to girls.' Looking around at the nearly entirely white male audience, it wasn’t hard to see why they chose this tack.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Charles Bukowski
You're safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it's always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it's still a lie. You're never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. Otherwise, you're just a walking corpse. You're a zombie.
Rick Yancey
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
Anne Rice
Every morning is a big, bright, window that opens just for you to fill your life with the light of joy.
Debasish Mridha
The fault in our stars is the inability to see that the world falls in love with fantasy, fairytales and magic in movies. Even religion asks us to believe in the most unlikely of situations. However, despite all the great movies we love, we choose to see so many real life spiritual experiences as delusion, mania, psychosis or wishful thinking. Our society gives great devotion to the arts. However, they solve so many problems with realism, rather than giving into the possibilty of God's plan for a person, that doesn't involve their theological views about how God helps write his children's stories.
Shannon L. Alder
The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.
Ross Cheit
Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
Henry David Thoreau
Do you mean disrespectful? Blasphemous?" he asks. " Like Jesus, Jesus, bo-beesus, banana fanana fo-feesus, mo meesus...blasphemous to Jesus?" I just stand there like an idiot, not sure what to say to this strange man. He seems more of a wise guy than a wise man. After all, he just Name-Gamed a Third of the Trinity.
Misty Paquette / Misty Provencher
Adams was in a hurry and ordered his horse drawn carriage to wait for him in front of his house. The horses were spooked before he got in the carriage, and the carriage was destroyed in an accident. Pondering what could have happened to him , Adams retreated to Psalm 20's injunctions against trusting in chariots and horses.
Paul C. Nagel
A digital wall of masks stared back at him. His finger rolled the mouse in a slow downward scroll.t"Okay, you bastard. Where are you?
Lisa Kessler
Anxiety is that range of distress which attends willing what cannot be willed.
Leslie H. Farber
Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.
Rudy Rucker
he had kidded with us that if we didn't let go at the proper moment, he would slap our hands with a stick, and we had all laughed because who would be silly enough to hang on when they should let go?
Dee-Williams
Never agree to a job interview in which the interviewer has seen you naked.
Susan Mallery
I look up, and Jackson's eyes find mine. For a second, it almost feels like we're about to race into the hole to join you. Being buried alive has got to be better than whatever comes next.
Adam Silvera
So you raise up a few generations of young girls, telling them that they should step to the back of the bus, ingrain that in their psyche, preach it to them from the pulpit, hold up as ideal examples women doing precisely that, and in a few years, you can step back; you need say no more. Your work is done, because you have carefully created a herd of women who know and even begrudgingly accept that their place is secondary, just outside the limelight, clapping for and cheering on the important people who were never taught to put others first.
Susan Campbell
Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked.
Christopher McDougall
The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.
Erich Segal
We can't have freedom unless we have freedom. And that means freedom to speak our minds.
Jean Lee Latham
In the end, people will not be judged by the darkness they lived in, but by the light they rejected.
Anthony Liccione
Isolde took a swig. "It doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Your government just gave you two months to get knocked up." She held up the bottle, her face dull and red. "Cheers." "You better get your fill of the booze now, then," said Xochi. "You'll be drinking for two pretty soon.
Dan Wells
I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. (His 19-year-old daughter.) I cannot possibly do both.
Theodore Roosevelt
Kiss the lips upon me once, and I shall never tell.
Chrissy Moon
Do you ever get the feeling that when you show someone your affection for them, you are assaulting them? Like you should probably leave them alone? Your affection, no matter how sincere, does not necessarily mean a damn thing to the person you are giving it to. Love can corner you. When you intrude on someone with your affection, you might find yourself trying to knock a strong door down with your shoulder. Either you break the door or you break yourself. Something almost always gets broken. In my mind it runs like this: I’m going to like you, whether you like it or not. I’ll wear you down until you relent and swallow this big lie I have for you. Don’t move. Don’t live. I love you.
Henry Rollins
The horror was this: the others.
Anne Rice
There is adventure in finding compelling stories and exploring complex issues in challenging environments, but there is also a responsibility to tell those stories accurately and objectively.
K. Lee Lerner
Best to introduce yourself to patience now, so that it might find you when you call upon it later.
Tahereh Mafi
Great change doesn't come with official endorsement.
Patti Digh
What are you doing?”Celaena lifted another piece of paper. “If His Pirateness can’t be bothered to clean for us, then I don’t see why I can’t have a look.”“He’ll be here any second,” Sam hissed. She picked up a flattened map, examining the dots and markings along the coastline of their continent. Something small and round gleamed beneath the map, and she slipped it into her pocket before Sam could notice.“Oh, hush,” she said, opening the hutch on the wall adjacent to the desk. “With these creaky floors, we’ll hear him a mile off.” The hutch was crammed with rolled scrolls, quills, the odd coin, and some very old, very expensive-looking brandy. She pulled out a bottle, swirling the amber liquid in the sunlight streaming through the tiny porthole window. “Care for a drink?
Sarah J Maas
It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else
Inga Muscio
All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.
Patricia Lockwood
I must learn to be as the bear in a cage with the stick that pokes it always, through the bars. The bear acts as if the stick is made of air, and takes no notice of it, even when it is sharpened and draws blood. I must do the same.
Ned Hayes
You never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and fucking yourself everlastingly.
James Agee
Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.
Daron Acemoglu
The child, unhampered, does not waste time.
Caroline Pratt
The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period."(VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.)
Charles L. Bailey Jr.
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
Erica Jong