Quotes by American Authors - Page 722

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.
Connie Willis
And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep.
Jack Kerouac
As Grams treaded water, she tapped my forehead. 'What's in here, Poppy, is scarier than anything you'll encounter in the depths of the ocean. An imagination is a powerful thing.
Shelley Coriell
Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.
Julie Lythcott-Haims
I want everything with you, America. I want the holidays and the birthdays, the busy season and lazy weekends. I want peanut butter fingertips on my desk. I want inside jokes and fights and everything. I want a life with you.
Kiera Cass
You become a man when you marry not just for love but to be a partner with your wife. To be the best man you can be with her, and when you fall short, to admit your shortcomings and to constantly strive to be a great man to your wife.
Carew Papritz
It was easy to conclude: The night was young and alive, in its ever so subtle way.
Lauren Lola
I have to believe it’s right to be a warm voice, a companion if I can be, as soon as ever I find a friend.
Betsy Cornwell
Weed etiquette rule - whoever rolls the joint, gets the first hit.
Kenya Wright
the first place smelled like work, so I took the second
Charles Bukowski
I had never seen the end of day and the beginning of the night greet each other. We were caught in the loveliness between the two. A House Like a Lotus
Madeleine L'Engle
You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
God surpasses our dreams when we reach past our personal plans and agenda to grab the hand of Christ and walk the path he chose for us.  He is obligated to keep us dissatisfied until we come to him and his plan for complete satisfaction.
Beth Moore
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.
Maxwell Maltz
There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.
Anthony Marra
For this cause…for this privilege…you were born—to shine lights into the world for God.
Elizabeth George
As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.
Hannah Arendt
That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.
Catherine Lacey
Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.
Tara Brach
Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.
Kathryn Stockett
I want to feel the rush of death, the high of utter nothingness, the fragility of my own mortality. Let it slip through my fingers like sand and when it's gone for good, I'll be none the wiser.
Kayla Krantz
When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say.
Maggie Kuhn
All roads out of hell lead home.
Shannon L. Alder
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.
Jon Krakauer
[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
Clay Shirky
they should let some people into the library by prescription only
Chuck Palahniuk
Visualize yourself at your best. Be determined to earn the proud badge of excellence. By working hard and practicing, one day you will earn its golden title.
Mark F. LaMoure
You can't achieve anything deeply satisfying without a drawn-out process leading up to it- and yet process demands a goal. You can't love one without at least appreciating the other.
Chris Guillebeau
I like life. It's something to do. Somewhere on this globe every 10 seconds there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson
When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, "I don't hate you."She called me an effing liar and said, "Hate makes the world go around. Envy, lust and hate.""I stopped hating anyone the day when I realized hating can't restore to me anything that's lost.
Dean Koontz
Katherine stared intently at the cold, hard steel. She knew it would be loaded and that, if need be, there was extra ammunition in the back of the drawer. She would not be one of those girls, the ones who sit idly by and wait for the answers to come to them.
Gwenn Wright
It takes a village to raise a child.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
Ben Lerner
Do you prefer fermented or distilled?This is a trick question. It doesn’t matter how much you like wine, because wine is social and writing is anti-social. This is a writer’s interview, writing is a lonely job, and spirits are the lubricant of the lonely. You might say all drinking is supposed to be social but there’s a difference, at one in the morning while you’re hunched over your computer, between opening up a bottle of Chardonnay and pouring two-fingers of bourbon into a tumbler. A gin martini, of course, splits the difference nicely, keeping you from feeling like a deadline reporter with a smoldering cigarette while still reminding you that your job is to be interesting for a living. Anyone who suggests you can make a martini with vodka, by the way, is probably in need of electroconvulsive therapy.
Stuart Connelly
How would your life be different if…You pretended those around you were deaf to your words? Let today be the day…You let your actions speak and communicate your feelings and intentions.
Steve Maraboli
An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.
Irving Stone
If you have love, it doesn’t matter what you don’t have.
Debasish Mridha
If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
A Permeable Life is about what presses out from the heart, what comes in at a slant and what shimmers below the surface of things. To live permeably is to be open-hearted and audacious, to risk showing up as our truest self, and embracing a willingness to be astonished.
Carrie Newcomer
Victims blame, managers maintain, and leaders change.
Orrin Woodward
stand often in the company of dreamers: they tickle your common sense & believe you can achieve things which are impossible.
Mary Anne Radmacher
But hey, if there’s one bright side to your dying, it’s that you aren’t around to tell me things I don’t like hearing. I’m sorry. That was a dickhead thing to say. I need a condom for my mouth.
Adam Silvera
During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude.
John Steinbeck
Love is an attraction but not a reaction.
Debasish Mridha
Healing cannot occur by refusing to listen to the truth, unsettling as it may be.
Slade Combs
What we call human is nothing but a dance of trillions of well organized, interconnected, interesting, and magical molecules.
Debasish Mridha
Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when, where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits--not for but on the customer--alert, watchful, attentive, with no agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted. 'My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.' (Ps. 62:5 KJV) In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace.
Elisabeth Elliot
Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?
Heather Chaplin
Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.
Hunter S. Thompson
There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth.
Alice Sebold
Many people will never read a Bible, but they will read you.
Ricky Maye
Every bride is beautiful. It’s like newborn babies or puppies. They can’t help it.
Emme Rollins
Anyone who thought death warmed over didn't look good, had never seen this guy.
Donna Augustine
We have to change our thoughts before things can change.
Debasish Mridha
Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight—a lunar eclipse, a new moon. A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn't cold.
Stephenie Meyer
In fact, it has been said that when you have sex with someone, you are actually having sex with everyone who ever slept with that individual.
James C. Dobson
I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
Thomas Jefferson
I need sex for a clear complexion but I'd rather do it for love.
Joan Crawford
A mother’s love is like an everlasting bed of roses, that continues to blossom. A mother’s love bears strength, comfort, healing and warmth. Her beauty is compared to a sunny day that shines upon each rose petal and inspires hope.
Ellen J. Barrier
She laughed, and the sound pierced his heart.
Carolyn Jewel