Quotes by American Authors - Page 77

That's not the end of the world! This is the time to cut loose! To really learn about everything! To learn about guys, to really get to know them! Really find out what goes on in the world! You just have to let yourself fly for once, without constantly thinking about what you left behind on the ground! You're a genius. Everybody knows that. I'm being sincere, Charlotte. Totally. Now there's other things to learn, and this is the perfect time to do it. Take a chance! That's one reason people go to college! It's not the only reason, but it's a big reason.
Tom Wolfe
Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.
William Deresiewicz
Bad leather, Viking gods should be naked.
Amy Sumida
Act, not for results, just for action.Give, not for appreciation, just to help.Be kind, not for something in return, just to love.
Debasish Mridha
How do you keep all the balls you got dancing in the air from crashing down on your fucking head, Rousseau?""Centuries of practice?
Heather R. Blair
At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.
Anaïs Nin
What kind of a day was it? A day like all others, that alters and illuminates our times. And you were there.
Harvey Pekar
„We didn’t anticipate that the formula would trigger such a violent response. In the future, you’ll only receive the unprocessed raw materials.”“So it’s because I’m young.”“No,” he said. “It’s because you’re young and you refuse to acknowledge what you are. What it means. What it promises. You’re fighting your condition, and that makes it almost impossible for you to control yourself. You need to admit it to yourself, Michael. You’ll never be human again.
Rachel Caine
A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens 'em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.
Jonathan Auxier
Nature is a strong brand name. Everybody knew that. First thing, Nomenclature 101. Slap Natural on the package, you were golden. Those words on the package promise ease from metropolitan care, modern worries. And out here, if you opened things up, underneath the cellophane, what did you find inside? That fruit has splendid packaging, it has solid consumer awareness and is an animal favorite. Its seeds will be deposited in spoor miles away and its market dominance will increase. Splendid and beautiful petals are great advertising--the insects buzz and hop from all points every weekend to hit this flower-bed mall. Natural selection was market forces. In business, in the woods: what is necessary to the world will last.
Colson Whitehead
The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.
Steven Pinker
I'm single because I was born that way.
Mae West
As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe the possibility exists.
William Salter
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
To be moral, an act must be free.
Murray N. Rothbard
If your culture is how you do business internally, your brand is what people believe about you externally.
Amber Hurdle
The wealth of a nation consists not in its mass of material things but in its system. The natural resources of South America are not inferior to those of the United States but the wealth of the two regions is vastly different. The land of India is far richer than that of Japan but the comparative wealth of the two nations is reversed.
George Brockway
And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again.
Francine Prose
Church is not meant to be fun. It's meant to be formative.
Matt Chandler
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin
In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)
Wendell Berry
The worst thing about being unhappy is not being strong enough to leave the situation.
Ron Baratono
We shouldn't be seeking the respect of an unjust system that will not respect us on the basis of our humanity alone.
Mychal Denzel Smith
ACTS OF LOVELove is not a wordOr a thought.It is the name forAn actionThat breathes from its light.What do you DOIn Love's name?And is it only doneOutside In the light?Or with an innerFlameIlluminatingLove'sTRUEName?I want to know.Are your actionsDone by remoteOr withSOUL?And when you sayYou love someone,Does a light go offInside at all?What haveYOUDoneIn theName ofLOVE?Because,Really,I want to know.
Suzy Kassem
A bully hides his fears with fake bravado. That is the opposite of self-assertiveness.
Nathaniel Branden
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
It hardly mattered. She was tired of waiting for him to acknowledge who he was. Tired of donning a false mask of gaiety when she was so much more—felt so much more—beneath. No one had ever noticed her mask. No one but him. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t make the first move, then damn it, she would.
Elizabeth Hoyt
In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.
Patrick Somerville
We weren't really friends yet, just knowers of each other's secret stuff.
M. Beth Bloom
Abilene possessed greater vision, perhaps because it possessed little else.
H.W. Brands
Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other.
William T. Vollmann
Beauty is a behavior. As is ugliness.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Why can a man not act himself be himself and think for himself? It seems to me that naturalness alone is power that a borrowed word is weaker than our own weakness however small we may be.
Maria Mitchell
Honest men cannot be expected to anticipate the actions of scoundrels.
Mary Street
Going to the woods is going home.
John Muir
These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from 'Frog and Toad,' and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB's studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts—a second heart, a second brain—to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.
Hanya Yanagihara
Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
John Lawler
Negativity is never an option
Steve López
Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.
Robin McLaurin Williams
Why isn't there a commandment to "honor thy children" or at least one to "not abuse thy children"? The notion that we must honor our parents causes many people to bury their real feelings and set aside their own needs in order to have a relationship with people they would otherwise not associate with. Parents, like anyone else, need to earn respect and honor, and honoring parents who are negative and abusive is not only impossible but extremely self-abusive. Perhaps, as with anything else, honoring our parents starts with honoring ourselves. For many adult children, honoring themselves means not having anything to do with one or both of their parents.
Beverly Engel
If mainstream culture thinks gender roles are unimportant, church culture makes them too important.
Katelyn Beaty
My best advice is to be yourself. Unless you’re psychotic, then you might want to try a different tactic.
Gwen Hayes
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Sally Berger
The only way to move forward is to focus on the good in your life and the good that you are doing for others and yourself. My past has shown me things in life, others and myself that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but I can choose to pick up the pieces and build a beautiful life for myself and help others to do the same.
Brittany Burgunder
In a setting of formal education, one would imagine that abstract thought would be encouraged, and that questioning obvious errors within the current system wouldn’t be frowned upon. Wrong again; these cunts are out to protect their pocket books and paradigms.
Scott Parker
And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.
Jess Walter
The Sun Going SouthIn late sunshine I wander troubled.Restless I wander in autumn sunlight.Too many changes, partings, and deaths.Doors have closed that were always open.Trees that held the sky up are cut down.So much that I alone remember!This creek runs dry among its stones.Souls of the dead, come drink this water!Come into this side valley with me,a restless old woman, unseemly,troubled, walking on dry grass, dry stones.
Ursula K Le Guin
When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.
Bell Hooks
The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.
Bill Bryson
The men history declares heroes are merely heroes because they failed to survive their benevolent acts.
Felix O. Hartmann
It is a rare goal that has only one path.
Carma Spence
The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel.
Brenna Yovanoff
I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.
David Rakoff
The best horror novels open up, "It was beautiful summer day and the smell of flowers emanated throughout the air.
Justin Alcala
So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. They are more than ready to find their most cherished opinions contradicted by reality.
Robert Greene (Author) Joost Elffers (Author)
The first thing I am going to tell my successor is, don't trust the military men – even on military matters." JFK
David Talbot
The playboy is not necessarily a man who has many girlfriends, or a man who has many women, or a man who has slept with many women. That is old. But there is a new breed of the playboy and he is the man who remains single in attempts to make every woman feel as if he belongs to her, he remains a virgin in order to make every woman feel like she will be the first one, and in the end he may choose a very unattractive woman to adorn his side, so that in all circumstances, he will shine as the more beautiful one. This is the new breed of playboy. And it is a very evil one.
C. JoyBell C.
Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me
Mark Doty
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson