Quotes by American Authors - Page 19

his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,
David Halberstam
Anyone can act strategically, it doesn’t take much to make a plan. The skill of a general is his or her ability to react strategically when plans fail.
Lance Conrad
[Schulz] came to see that the better part of his shyness was really vanity, or self-centeredness. "Shyness is an illusion," he would say, late in life. "If you get out and do something and talk to people, you don't have to be shy. Shyness is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.
David Michaelis
It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.
Hugh Howey
The pinecone is a fearsome tool of destruction!-Bacchus
Rick Riordan
Visions from the gods are gifts alone for those who wander.
Roman Payne
But too much love is poison, especially when that love is not returned
Rick Riordan
What sort of gods make rats and plagues and dwarfs?
George R.R. Martin
Never say never,” he said urgently, rolling back on top of her and using all of his unusually heavy mass to press her deep into the cocoon of her little girl bed. “The gods love to toy with people who use absolutes.
Josephine Angelini
And Phoebe and Sebastian went their separate ways, to the blacksmith shop and the library, after several backward glances that weren't coordinated enough to allow either to know that the other one was looking.
Jean Ferris
I rolled my eyes. "For defending my honor, you dullard."He yanked me beneath a shadowed awning. I had a moment's panic when I thought he'd spotted trouble, but then his arms were around me and his lips were pressed to mine.When he finally drew back, my cheeks were warm and my legs had gone wobbly."Just to be clear," he said, "I'm not really interested in defending your honor.""Understood," I managed, hoping I didn't sound too ridiculously breathless.
Leigh Bardugo
And, corny as it may sound, I do cherish the bond between me and the audience, the minority that follows my stuff and always makes me glad it's us against the world.
Bill Maher
That red spot!” she says with alarm.“That’s a freckle!”“It wasn’t there before...” she says as she inspects her entire arm.“It’s cute.”“It’s not cute.”“Then it’s mine,” I say. “If you don’t like it, it’s mine. I’ll call it Brady.”“My freckle?”“Yes.”“You’re naming my freckle after yourself?” she says. “And you think I have issues?”“It’s like a star. People buy stars in the constellation and name them after people al the time. As gifts.”“So then are you buying my freckle? Because I don’t know if you can afford my freckle. My freckles don’t come cheap, you know.”“I’ve already claimed it,” I declare. “It’s not up for discussion anymore. Just eat your ice cream. And don’t spill any on Brady.
Caprice Crane
We were lovers,' he says dramatically. 'I was very convincing.' Livia giggles and reaches up to stroke his hair. Hank pretends not to notice Livia's hand as it crawls across his cheek, and it turns into a game. Her fingers pet his lips as he mumbles through them, 'What part do you want?
Rachel M. Wilson
She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient.
Barbara Kingsolver
Jaime gave her [Brienne] a hard smile. "See, wench? We know each other too well.
George R.R. Martin
So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.
Thomas M. Disch
The toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin.
Thomas M. Disch
You hold substance in my psyche
Sarahbeth Purcell
Whenever Percy stopped by to see [Annabeth], she was so lost in thought that the conversation went something like this:Percy: 'Hey, how's it going?'Annabeth: 'Uh, no thanks.'Percy: 'Okay...have you eaten anything today?'Annabeth: 'I think Leo is on duty. Ask him.'Percy: 'So, my hair is on fire.'Annabeth: 'Okay, in a while.
Rick Riordan
As he wasforced to tell his father more than once, “I said I’d fight for my mother’sthrone. I never said I’d die for it.” Then he’d add, simply to annoy the oldbastard into one of his frothy temper tantrums, “Don’t you think I’m toopretty to die?
G.A. Aiken
But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.
Michael Chabon
Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a frequent choice... The father's wish, indeed his right, to continue to receive female nurturance, whatever the circumstances, is accepted without question.
Judith Lewis Herman
A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. She stamped her little foot at me."He pointed down to her toes as if she were a child yet.Then he straightened his shoulders. "But I sent her back to the nursery, where she belonged, and told her to play with her dolls instead. As everyone knows, a female on a hunt is a distraction at best and bad luck at worse."Which explained why Beatrice went into the woods with her hound alone, George thought. She looked now as though she had gone to some other place where she could not hear her father's words and thus could not be hurt by them. George wondered how often she was forced to go to that place.Did King Helm not see how much she was like him? It seemed she was rejected for any sign of femininity yet also rejected for not showing enough femininity, How could she win?
Mette Ivie Harrison
Just take me with you. Please.I cant.Please, Papa.I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
Cormac McCarthy
influence flows across networks up to three degrees away. What your friends’ friends eat or do or think will influence what you eat or do or think—but further connections will not.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
You don't have to be a person of influence to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.
Scott Adams
I am your opus.
Sylvia Plath
Have you heard of the Children of Mae?”“The cult?” She knew of a religious group whose members went door to door, preaching the benefits of self-discipline—abstinence, celibacy or monogamy, vegetarianism—pretty much anything fun was prohibited. They had never come to Vesper’s house because her father was a butcher and probably pretty low on their list of possible converts.
Colleen Chen
This life has no meaning to me now. Do not grieve for me, my dear. Up until the moment I lost her, I had a wonderful life. These moments now are the ones that are hard. I’m eager to depart this world and rejoin her in the next. Then, and only then, will I finally be at peace.
Rose Wynters
The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.
John Darnielle
Good-bye and hello, as always.
Roger Zelazny
They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt's city, until a sudden wave of water blinded his wipers and drove him along with everyone else to the curb, where the crackling radio reported an old man had just now been swept from his backyard by a cloudburst, the latest in a series deluging Tulsa. Clinging there to the side of the hill, no hand brake, Claude rode out the storm, stuffing blankets into the cracks under the doors, watching overhead drips as best he could with the babyseat. When the car next in front crept away from the curb, Claude followed as far as a gas station. There he wondered aloud what lay ahead, but the attendant couldn't say, having swum to work just five minutes ago. Now as Claude pulled away the rain suddenly ceased, it seemed from exhaustion, and for the next hundred miles he spun his dial to catch the latest reports: that old man was still missing, he had last been seen floating downhill toward the river, he had been found, he was dead, he was dying, he was still missing... Claude turned off the radio, for he was beyond range of Tulsa, and Joplin had not heard the news yet. He raced in silence toward the night which he knew already had begun not far ahead.
Douglas Woolf
English rain feels obligatory, like paperwork. It dampens already damn days and slicks the stones.
Maureen Johnson
During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm—soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain—like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming good will, belying the expected tension of the coming days.
Cate Campbell Beatty
Time falls on us, like rain, it falls like rain until we drown in it, and sometimes, it's like the drains overflow, and time just - pools up, it seeps, it gathers in the corners.
Michael Montoure
If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine
John Green
Nana always said the rain was Nature's way of adding sparkle to the outdoors.
Evangeline Duran Fuentes
Heavy rains and a good book. A perfect extravagance.
Carew Papritz
If wool shrinks when you wash it, why don't sheep get smaller when it rains?
Ron Brackin
Very gently. Like there are eggshells on your pedals, and you don’t want to break them. That’s how you drive in the rain.
Garth Stein
It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.
Jerry Spinelli
Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides.
Victoria Kahler
Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.
Truman Capote
The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.
Kristen Henderson
Anna Wintour hadn't been to any of McQueen's shows, and McQueen didn't like it. McQueen said American Vogue could borrow the dress only if they flew it to New York and back, in its own seat, with an escort. It was a fuck-you and they took it, and the dress was shot by Richard Avedon. "Fashion people haven't got any brains," McQueen said.
Maureen Callahan
Whenever I see people with their collars up, I'm tempted to point it out to them like you would for someone who has a food stain on their shirt or food in their teeth, as if to say, 'Your fashion sense is so offensive I'm assuming it's some sort of accident you'll want to fix.
Stephan Pastis
I know the fashion is that everything is fair game [for comedy material] but I don't believe that.
Craig Ferguson
Every morning in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or anyone to impress, I'd take great care in picking out my outfit and hover in front of a business card-size mirror to apply my lip gloss and check my eyebrows. I also felt I had a strong case for bringing a little black dress on expeditions. Village parties spring up more often than you might expect, and despite never having been a Girl Scout, I like to be prepared.
Mireya Mayor
I believe a family can be like that sports team. A successful family wins as a team. But if its members are intent upon winning their own individual battles with one another, the team loses. A winning solution is to work out the differences and, when it’s over, let it be over. Then they can get back in the game as a team.
Steve Goodier
The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wile beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief....In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.p. 11
Peter Maass
Conflict connects us to life, just as life connects us to conflict.
Bryant McGill
The lack of conflict is precisely the cause of one of the biggest problems that meetings have: they are boring
Patrick Lencioni
He looked upon this verdant, blossoming spring, a spring Joanna would never see, he looked upon a field of brilliant blue flowers- the bluebells Joanna had so loved- and at that moment he'd willingly have bartered all his tomorrows for but one yesterday.
Sharon Kay Penman
My mother buys a handful of wishing beans, which just seem to be white, dry beans with no specific magickal import. She will parse these out over the months when she feels her family members most need a wish. She can believe in wishes, since it is the familiar magic of wells, birthdays, and first stars.
Thomm Quackenbush
For years Melody had been making the same wish on every birthday candle, eyelash, wishbone, and shooting star that came her way, and now it had finally come true.
Sarah Weeks
Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.
Lemony Snicket
She used to tell me that a full moon was when mysterious things happen and wishes come true.
Shannon A. Thompson
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Mircea Eliade