Quotes by American Authors - Page 15

Hey, can I see that sword you were using?"I showed him Riptide, and explained how it turned from a pen into a sword just by uncapping it."Cool! Does it ever run out of ink?""Um, well, I don't actually write with it.""Are you really the son of Poseidon?""Well, yeah.""Can you surf really well, then?"I looked at Grover, who was trying hard not to laugh."Jeez, Nico," I said. "I've never really tried."He went on asking questions. Did I fight a lot with Thalia, since she was a daughter of Zeus? (I didn't answer that one.) If Annabeth's mother was Athena, the goddess of wisdom, then why didn't Annabeth know better than to fall off a cliff? (I tried not to strangle Nico for asking that one.) Was Annabeth my girlfriend? (At this point, I was ready to stick the kid in a meat-flavored sack and throw him to the wolves.)
Rick Riordan
Do you love her?' she asked him.'Always have,' he said.'Then why in the world would you leave her alone?
Suzanne Palmieri
There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.
Curtis Bill Pepper
She holds herself with such reserve. She smiles, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes, even in the company of the girls she's chosen to eat with. Why?I have no clue, and I really don't want to spend my time worrying about it. But my brain pushes at the question anyway.Why are people aloof?Because they don't want to let others in.Why don't they want to let others in?Well, sometimes because they're shy, and sometimes because they're convinced of their own superiority.But those aren't the only reasons. Sometimes it's because thay have something to hide.
Lauren Myracle
Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.
J. Christopher Herold
Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.
John Updike
He said to the cardinal, "I'm a peasant, not instructed in the ways of heaven. But I have never broken my word. And you, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, with all your holy garments and crosses of Jesus, lied to me like a heathen Moor. Your sacred office alone will not save your life.
Mario Puzo
Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.
James Baldwin
All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
Alice Walker
Patty: I'll be the good guy.Shermy: I'll be the bad guy.Patty: What are you going to be, Charlie Brown?Charlie Brown: I'll be sort of in-between; I'll be a hypocrite!
Charles M. Schulz
In the days following the crash, an axiom as old as the Republic came into play once more. In good times Wall Street wanted Washington to leave it alone. In bad times it wanted Washington to act.
Haynes Johnson
The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.
John Mark Green
Hypocrisy annoys me, people need to look into mirrors. Let me hold a mirror in front of your face.
C. JoyBell C.
The real moments that changed the world are when church members miss the meaning of a whole sermon, and take no accountability for the testimonies they damage, by being self-righteous.
Shannon L. Alder
What do you know about insurance fraud?”I knew discussions of it were not likely to lead to sex.
Roberta Pearce
Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles’ heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.
Kilroy J. Oldster
What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing
Willem Lange
There should be no crying in copyediting.
Carol Fisher Saller
He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.
Kevin Brockmeier
Looking silly can be very powerful. People who are committing and taking risks become the king and queen of my prom. People are their most beautiful when they are laughing, crying, dancing, playing, telling the truth and being chased in a fun way.
Amy Poehler
Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.
Mike Bond
Death gets a bad rap. People think that euthanasia is putting their pets “down” when it really is lifting us up. In the first moment, when we come back to earth, we remember the comfort of the Heaven we came from and this is why we cry when we are born. When we are born in Heaven we come in laughing not crying! In birth we have the passage and then the pain. In death we have the pain and then the passage.
Kate McGahan
What did I discover during my solo—besides learning to unwrap my energy bar ahead of time? That you ask yourself a lot of questions when you're alone on a bike for that long. One question more than others: Why the heck am I doing this? When I was done, I think I had found the answer: For the satisfaction that comes with pushing your body to the breaking point and conquering the unknown.
Matt Long
I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.
Pat Conroy
It’s amazing how two thin pieces of clothing can hold such deep memories. Laughter, pain, victory, defeat, friendship, fatigue, elation… they’re all there, but only to the person who’s worn the uniform
Wendelin Van Draanen
I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.
Colson Whitehead
This message is brought to you by the BCBS [Booty Call Broadcasting System]. If you are back in town, get your wet ass over here." (The Hook Up, 42%)
Kristen Callihan
An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense—no—but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I am bewildering you a little. Just enough to help you forget what you came to believe, so that you can remember what you’ve always known.
Martha Beck
I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control." Logan continued, "You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ...the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.-Senator John Logan, 1883
Dee Brown
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.
John Steinbeck
Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.
A.E. Samaan
I have always preferred the contemplative to the active life. I prefer the freedom to see matters from several viewpoints, to appreciate ironies, and indeed to change my opinion as I learn something new. To be politically active means to surrender this freedom. I say nothing against activism for others. It is only through the committed that necessary changes come. But each to his own path. [A Cautious Case for Socialism, Dissent Magazine, 1978]
Kenneth J Arrow
All Nazi champions insist again and again that Marxism and Bolshevism are the quintessence of the Jewish mind, and that it is the great historic mission of Nazism to root out this pest. It is true that this attitude did not prevent the German nationalists either from coöperating with the German communists in undermining the Weimar Republic, or from training their black guards in Russian artillery and aviation camps in the years 1923–1933, or— in the period from August, 1939, until June, 1941—from entering into a close political and military complicity with Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, public opinion supports the view that Nazism and Bolshevism are philosophies—Weltanschauungen—implacably opposed to each other.
Ludwig von Mises
Socialists claim to be in favor of equitable redistribution of income and wealth, but who determines what is equitable and does the actual redistribution?
Dinesh D'Souza
When deciding whether or not to go for your dream, remember that you don't need a bigger net, you just need bigger wings.
Sheri Fink
By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more.
Peggi Speers
Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.
Barack Obama
I just can’t think of anybody abusing an animal; nor of allowing it to stay around, sick, hurt or hungry. I think that an animal is but a point short of human; and, having a skin varying but slightly from our own, will know as much pain from a whipping as would a human child. A blow upon any animal, if I am within sight, is almost as a blow upon my own body. You would think that, with that vast gap which Mankind is continually placing back of him in his onward march in improving this big world, Man would think, a bit, of his pals of hoof, horn and claw.
Ernest Vincent Wright
Minutes remain the same length whether they are held against the span of years or minutes themselves. Yet, when minutes are held against themselves, they seem so terribly brief. Therefore, we’d be wise to celebrate life before minutes are all that’s left.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
Chuck Klosterman
This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts.”- Eminem“Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful.”- Guru (Gang Starr)“You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead.”- Mary J. Blige“Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!”- K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci)“The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine.”- Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)“You didn’t wear your glasses and you haven’t carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?”- Bushwick Bill“Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep ‘yo balance.”- Erykah Badu“Can I see that pen?”- Bobby Brown“What else do you want to know? Talk to me.”- Aaliyah
Harris Rosen
Everyone should have a hippie painter anarchist in their lives. It's the guys in silvered aviators with guns that you've got to be wary of.
John Sandford
Wait. You work for me?""I prefer to think of it as managing your incompetence.
Jim Butcher
The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.
John Bloomfield Jervis
Great leaders catch and correct problems while they’re still small and able to be managed without a lot of hassle. If ignored too long, small problems will morph into much bigger issues that will require more time and effort and at a high cost, causing a great deal of disruption and stress.
Beth Ramsay
This fits in with what I saw in staff in astronomical facilities and was reporting to the management team: 10-14% Oxygen: Emotional upset, abnormal fatigue, disturbed respiration.
Steven Magee
If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.
Tom DeMarco
It’s not the people you fire who make your life miserable. It’s the people you don’t.
Dick Grote
She knew she could answer it. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other even when every step hurt. And she knew there was pain in the journey, but there was also great beauty. She’d seen it standing on rooftops and in green eyes and in the smallest, ugliest rock. She would find the answer.
Veronica Rossi
In algorithms, as in life, persistence usually pays off.
Steven S. Skiena
As the tides of life rise and fall, life is constant, like the waves crashing upon the shore. Persistence is the key in high and low times…
James A. Murphy
People stagger, but they pick up a tattered thread and wind it back onto a spool.
Donia Bijan
Push until you can push no more, and then, push some more.
Kevin Abdulrahman
I'm going to be frank, Max...""Of course. All cards on the table." But he gave me a poker smile.
Alfred Alcorn
But it was like a dance across a field strewn with razors, and I bled with every step I took.
Ann Aguirre
We are all but symbols of some greater thing—totems of ourselves--subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.
S. Kelley Harrell
Dark-bright fire lit eyes
Audre Lorde