Quotes by American Authors - Page 71

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.
William A. Dembski
When it comes to society and human consciousness, Darwinism still exists in its primal message.
Kat Lahr
A husband's work as provider will be so difficult that it can only be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit and a transformed life.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
And now I am here, as alone as I've ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it's suppose to be. This is not how my life is suppose to turn out.
Gayle Forman
States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
We travel to learn and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it think some thoughts better than we think catch some inspiration from heights above our own.
Maria Mitchell
Aunt Mercy put down her tiles, one at a time. I-T-C-H-I-N.Aunt Grace leaned closer to the board, squinting. "Mercy Lynne, you're cheatin' again! What kinda word is that? Use it in a sentence.""I'm itchin' ta have some a that white cake.""That's not how you spell it." At least one of them could spell. Aunt Grace pulled one of the tiles off the board. "There's no T in itchin'." Or not.
Margaret Stohl
Self is that which dies...Spirit is that which lives...forever.
Joan Walsh Anglund
Arabella tilted her head, and Theodore couldn't help himself. Her lips were right in front of him, and he needed to claim them. He settled his lips over hers and the world melted away.
Jen Turano
I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
William Faulkner
Man invents war. Man discovers peace. He invents war from without. He discovers peace from within. War man throws. Peace man sows. The smile of war is the flood of human blood. The smile of peace is the love, below, above.
Sri Chinmoy
Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind. They're here, too.
Mitch Albom
The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot.
Criss Jami
What is it about Paris that I just can’t keep my hands off of you?” I ask him in between kisses.“It has nothing to do with Paris and everything to do with my raw sexuality, baby. I’m fucking irresistible,” he growls just before he shoves his tongue down my th
Ella Dominguez
Does rejecting feminism mean rejecting women's equality? No, because that's not what feminism is about. Rejecting feminism means recognizing that women don't need feminism to make them equal to men because they already are equal--just not the same.
Suzanne Venker
Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!
Margaret Landon
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)
Thomas Merton
When you meet someone so different from yourself, in a good way, you don't even have to kiss to have fireworks go off. It's like fireworks in your heart all the time. I always wondered, do opposites really attract? Now I know for sure they do. I'd grown up going to the library as often as most people go to the grocery store. Jackson didn't need to read about exciting people or places. He went out and found them, or created excitement himself if there wasn't any to be found. The things I like are pretty simple. Burning CDs around themes, like Songs to Get You Groove On and Tunes to Fix a Broken Heart; watching movies; baking cookies; and swimming. It's like I was a salad with a light vinaigrette, and Jackson was a platter of seafood Cajun pasta. Alone, we were good. Together, we were fantastic.
Lisa Schroeder
Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.
Walter Dean Myers
They said words they did not mean, and their conversations seemed to follow all kinds of rules—rules that no one has ever explained to Oscar.
Anne Ursu
For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice.
Judith Spencer
Results? Why man I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
If you look at all the variables in nature that are saidto determine human “sex,” you can’t possibly find one that will unequivocally split the species into two. Each of the so-called criteria of sexedness is itself a continuum—including chromosomal variables, genital and gonadal variations,reproductive capacities, endocrinological proportions, and any other criterion you could think of. Any or all of these different variables may line up in any number of ways, and all of the variables may vary independently of one another.
John Stoltenberg
What is on that memory stick, if you don’t mind me asking?”She was following him back into his apartment when he asked, and realized she still clutched it.“Something I never want to see again.
Pixie Lynn Whitfield
Sometimes I get so caught up in my own problems that I forget how amazing the world is.
Wendelin Van Draanen
A man always has two reasons for what he does--a good one, and the real one.
J.P. Morgan
I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
Toni Morrison
And I wanted to put my fist through your pretty, pampered face." Galen"As I recall, you did. And then you kicked me in the ass and sent me sprawling, pampered face first, into a pile of horseshit." Styxx"And you said not a word about it to anyone. You got up, took your training sword, and faced me as if you landed in a bed of poppies. All the while, shit dripping down you."Galen
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Ask yourself, does this person make me feel good about myself? Do I feel safe, strong and free with this person? Those are the questions you need to ask....You have to be strong to truly be open.
April Sinclair
Don't ever get to the point where you can't be taught because life is a classroom and everyone owns a pen.
Shannon L. Alder
The strength of a country derives from the educational levels of the individuals in that nation.
Debasish Mridha
So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.
Carl Sagan
My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch.....Laura Acosta
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what about it....You know how you said it wasn't a true measure of humanity since there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls...Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are.
Libba Bray
Life is difficult.
M. Scott Peck
Expect progress, not perfection.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
Despite their exhaustion and worries, Miner and Ennek made love that night, tracing fingers and tongues over one another's marks and scars. Their bodies were like books, Ennek thought, and their stories could be read inch by inch. He hoped fervently for happy endings.
Kim Fielding
... although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world. [p. 13]
Shirley Hazzard
Why can't we say 'When!' about money the way we say 'When!' about coffee?
Lionel Fisher
When a man plans, a woman laughs.
David Wong
Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Albert Einstein
We laughed a lot and I grew warmer still, lovely and warm. I do realize that some of that warmth was due to the wine, but there was much more to it than that. There are two distinct aspects to Communion wine: one aspect is the wine itself, the other is the idea of communion. Wine is certainly warming, but communion is a great deal more so.
Franny Billingsley
Like the sun, start each day with a smile.
Debasish Mridha
And now here I was in McDonald's again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald's is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.'Do you want fries with that?' the young man serving me asked.I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: 'No. That's why I didn't ask for fries, you see.''We're just told to ask like,' he said.'When I want fries, generally I say something like, "I would like some fries, too, please." That's the system I use.''We're just told to ask like,' he repeated.'Do you need to know the other things I don't want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.''We're just told to ask like,' he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.I realized that I probably wasn't quite ready for McDonald's yet.
Bill Bryson
He knew there were no forevers and there was always a way out, yet he lost his way, lost his balance.
Loretta Chase
We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others
Harry Truman
There was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.
Daryl Gregory
My dear husband Thomas has informed me that I can't walk without natural hip action. The more I slow to adjust my walk, the more my hips determine to swing of their own accord.
Heather Day Gilbert
Sometimes you just have to choose to let things go, to move on.
Anna Todd
Harriet resisted, until Tara pulled out the big move...the combination "lean-against nuzzle, with a slight lick and an adoring glance." In dog-land the move had a degree of difficulty of nine point seven, and as far as I know, there is no known defense against it.
David Rosenfelt
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
Stephen King
I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest.
Budd Schulberg
Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.''Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.'So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.
Jennifer duBois
I don't know whyI've got so much hopepinned to someone who will never call me home.
Clementine von Radics
My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.
Sarah Manguso
She had power over the most magnificent forces on Earth, but she still didn’t feel like she had power over the most important thing of all—her own heart.
Josephine Angelini
Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
E.L.Doctorow
What if your art could provide everything you ever needed or wanted in life?
Patti Digh
Follow through. You’d be surprised how many people don’t do that. If you have to stay up all night to get it done,n then do that. If you consistently see that you cannot actually get things done in the time frame you committed to, stop over committing.
Amber Hurdle
Speaking the truth is for losers and egomaniacs.
Dennis Perrin