Quotes by American Authors - Page 21

You cannot sodomize a Sacrament and expect God to say, 'Well done.
E.A. Bucchianeri
It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or who you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.
Barack Obama
Amazing how eye and skin color come in many shades yet many think sexuality is just gay or straight.
DaShanne Stokes
scrub oak trees. Kieran was leaning against him, pinning him to the tree, and they were kissing. Cristina hesitated a moment, blood rising into her face, but it was clear Mark wasn’t being touched against his will. Mark’s hands were tangled in Kieran’s hair, and he was kissing him as fiercely as if he were starving. Their bodies were pressed together tightly; nevertheless, Kieran clutched at Mark’s waist, his hands moving restlessly, desperately, as if he could pull Mark closer still. They slid up, pushing Mark’s jacket off his shoulders, stroking the skin at the edge of his collar. He made a low keening sound, like a cry of grief, deep in his throat, and broke away. He was staring at Mark, his gaze as hungry as it was hopeless. Never had a faerie looked so human to Cristina as Kieran did then. Mark looked back at him, eyes wide, shining in the moonlight. A shared look of love and longing and terrible sadness. It was too much. It had already been too much: Cristina knew she shouldn’t have been watching them but she hadn’t been able to stop, mingled shock and fascination rooting her to the spot. And desire. There was desire, too. Whether for Mark, or for both of them, or just for the idea of wanting someone so much, she wasn’t sure. She moved back, her heart pounding, about to pull the
Cassandra Clare
Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?
James St. James
If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.
Dustin Lance Black
An increasing number of people are taking advantage of having a leg up on their competition by branding themselves as "the expert" in their particular niche. Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the long and short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility builders, not to mention door openers. Books are the reason that authors command large speaking and consulting fees.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
You're asking the cyborg fugitive and the wild animal to be the welcoming committee? That's adorable.
Marissa Meyer
People always try to make self-published authors feel insignificant. I have more respect for self-published authors, because I know the adversity they faced. They didn't just write a manuscript, query letter, and blam book deal. These authors had to do it the difficult way. There is no publisher, or agents, investing time, and money into making their book. Just the indie author's manuscript, own currency, and persistence.
Mary Sage Nguyen
It's a sad day when your iPhone becomes a horcrux, witches hunt your soul and you have to seek the resurrection stone just to find yourself. I was hardly Harry Potter. There was no lightening bolt on my forehead, but if you knew my life you would have met a storm.
Shannon L. Alder
Going by Dr. Marriott's description, Zoe imagined it to be small and elegant as she peered into dozens of shelves, rummaging through the contents. There were globes and charts and atlases, pocket watches and hand-painted Indian silk, gold-plated cutlery, litter coffers of spice, inlaid combs, silver fasteners, trinket boxes, blown-glass figurines, turn-of-the-century postcards with foreign stamps, and portraits of Victorian authors in elaborate frames. But nowhere did she discover a stone of any kind, with or without runes.
Christine Brodien-Jones
Author visits are a fun way to engage kids, and encourage reading!
Carmela Dutra
If you are working with authors, you are accepting a great responsibility and must tread very carefully. The author's work is a part of herself, a creative endeavor she has poured her heart and soul into. Protecting and nurturing that work and the author is part of the job of a publisher.
Terena Scott
War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honor before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtues superior to andreia, to manly valor.
Steven Pressfield
It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.
Thomas Jefferson
We often find that People who claim virtue are the ones to lack it the most.
Charlyn Khater
Men may be the head of the house, but the women are the neck, and they can turn the head any way they want.
Debra Ollivier
There’s something different about when a female directs versus a male. The level of maturity, mutual respect, and energy that you get from a female director is so different. I’ve worked with male directors who aren’t good, and no one says anything about it, but then we had one female director who was kind of all over the place and everyone complained. It’s so gendered. I feel safer when working with a female director because I know it’s from a female gaze.
Rowan Blanchard
Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Individuals who have learned to endure and persevere through the storms of hardships are those who can dance in the rain during a storm.
Ellen J. Barrier
Love songs or poetry?Ambrose: Love songs–you get the best of both, poetry set to music.And you can't dance to poetry.
Amy Harmon
Be like a peacock and dance with all of your beauty.
Debasish Mridha
The garden flourished that summer because Magnus's mother was determined to feed her family despite the depredations of the distant war. In the fall, there were beans and tomatoes and pickles to can, and jar after jar of applesauce. Mama's hives yielded fresh honey, and then willow skeps were winterized. The bees would not come out until the air warmed and the sun appeared.
Susan Wiggs
Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Mother: What more can we be?Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.
Arthur Miller
If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.
Richard Rohr
What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113
Miles Harvey
The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up.
William Elwood Byerly
Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt."You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth.
Rick Riordan
If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.
Van Jones
...the Northern Rockies region is a rapidly changing part of the United States. Ironically, in many areas today's number-one threat is not clear-cutting, overgrazing, or destructive mining practices. It is something more insidious. Well-meaning people, many of them former visitors who were seduced into moving to the glorious region, are loving it to death.
Michael McCoy
Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
Derrick Jensen
We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.
Russell Gold
Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it's princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don't want to head down
Russell Gold
Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?
Russell Gold
Seems like people always want to think they're doomed. It brings them some kind of black comfort, I guess.Nate
C.J. Box
In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.
Ronald Geigle
Take the time to get it right. There'll be gas tomorrow night
Russell Gold
I don't fear fracking. I fear carbon
Russell Gold
In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?
Adam Minter
Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression.
Steven Magee
People who have metal implants should be familiar with the symptoms of radio wave sickness and should keep their environment free of wireless radiation producing products.
Steven Magee
The fish, whose tail was nipped, separated itself from the group and began to appear sickly, most likely from stress, Coal reasoned. He refused to be this fish, or the belly up fish, or the blue fish gasping for air. Rather, he resolved to be the other fish, the one who found purpose and meaning despite the unnatural environment, despite depending upon keepers for survival.
Jesikah Sundin
The scandal with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is how it managed to obtain a construction permit to build a manned telescope in a known biologically toxic environment to workers. How many more people need to die, get injured or develop long term very high altitude sickness that will last a lifetime?
Steven Magee
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
Gloria Steinem
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
Steven Magee
When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.
Steven Magee
When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.
Steven Magee
I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them.
Neil Young
Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.
Joseph LaConte
Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).
Mark Leibovich
I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).
Ron Brackin
I'm nostalgic for a better tomorrow.
Brian Spellman
I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.
Jodi Picoult
On the other hand, when we disown our beliefs, we lose touch with ourselves. We no longer know who we are or what we believe and neither does anyone else.
Patty Houser
It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Never has God given waivers to family members, just because they had bad leaders. In Jonah's time, the entire family of Israel had become unacceptable, but never has any Israelite administration been without some injustice, intolerance and alienation from God--much less today's earthly family. Even during the celebrated reign of Solomon, Solomon was multiplying wives and horses--against God's written counsel. It has always been so.Regardless, Israel was one family. They were expected to stick together whether they were in exile, or at home living in abundance. No deserters, or pious arm-folders were allowed. As Jonah discovered, no quitters were allowed. (page vi)
Michael Ben Zehabe
I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.
Ron Suskind
Loyalty is not loyalty unless one clings to it in the face of adversity.
Lisa Tawn Bergren
People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.
Steven Pinker