Quotes by American Authors - Page 21

I asked Mama was it a sin to do what I done, and she said no, it was the same as David slaying Goliath, it was only to save Ulyssa and the others, not because of meanness that I did it. I would do it again, too. I am not sorry, but this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed.
Nancy E. Turner
On the perfect night there is nothing more transcendent or terrifying than boxing. It's the ultimate representation of the guilty pleasure.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Jesus isn't suffering day after day for your sin. He sits triumphantly at the right hand of God and has won the final and decisive victory for you. If constant lamenting over your sin could actually help you atone for it, then it would be a noble act. However, since there is nothing to be added to your salvation and your agony contributes nothing to your salvation or sanctification, then you are free to walk through life with confidence in your forgiveness. Godly sorrow for sin does not lead to self-condemnation and attempts to atone for your sins through acts of penance. Godly sorrow leads to repentance, which leads us to the cross. There we see, once again, the beautiful sufficiency of our marvelous Savior. Godly sorrow leads us on to a big party, another glorious celebration of the truth of the gospel.
Barbara R. Duguid
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
Vladimir Nabokov
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did. I don't.
Veronica Roth
The world has always teemed with a wide variety of spiritual thought and many differing journeys of the heart. But too often the world has used these differences as a weapon. How much agony has been wrought by what should be a thing of beauty - religious passion?
Steve Goodier
Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.
Willie Nelson
Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.
Rob Bignell
A good writer should be able to communicate to the reader, 'I know your life. I know what you have truly experienced. It’s not right or wrong. It’s survival. It’s making mistakes, and trying to redeem yourself. It’s imperfections, and trying to make yourself better. It’s outrages, and crimes, and insults, which often are not righted, which you have to fix yourself, in your own mind, in your own heart, so that you are not poisoned'.
Sergio Troncoso
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
Richard Wright
Dying is the last thing I will ever do.
John Barrymore
Rolling flat onto his back, Drake shuddered. Then he inhaled deeply. He stared up at the night sky. "We're going to win," he said, his voice calmer, less strained. "This is nothing. Keep going. They can't stop us. Jason, give Rachel the necklace. Tell her . . . tell her I'm sorry. Tell her . . . I wanted . . . to show her . . . my little valley. Tell her I tried."His voice was growing weak. Farfalee smoothed a hand over his brow. "Shhh," she whispered. "Be still, Drake. You can rest now. You did it. Rest. We'll take it from here.""Failie," he whispered, his hand twitching toward the back of his neck with little jerks. "Where's my seed?" His head tipped sideways. The breath went out of him.
Brandon Mull
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was going out with a rifle in his hand.
Kelly Moran
There are no stars, no moon, only knots, only the promise of death. Drums cry out in the abyss and then fade with everything else. Even the shadows fade and all that is left is death. We are all dead, we just haven't figured it out yet.
Courtney M. Privett
A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.
Atul Gawande
Ian " she said quietly "I'd rather die than go back to you." "Be careful what you ask for you may get what you want.
Amanda Stephan
Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.
Lemony Snicket
DON'T YOU DARE DIE ON ME, JEZEBEL! DON'T YOU DARE! Or I'll follow you to the next world and KILL you.
L.J. Smith
The Constitution itself, the DNA of the country, can be altered by the collective will of the people, making America a self-evolving and self-writing program.
Bryant McGill
Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.
Jerry Herron
All people want to belong to some sort of hierarchy. Allow me to explain. The rich want to be the richest; the poor want to be the smartest; those who are both rich and smart want to be the better persons; the better persons want to go to heaven; those who are in heaven will look down upon those who are in hell... there is always some kind of hierarchy desired by everyone; even by those who claim the opposite of this. So how do you find true divinity? Divinity is found in those who reach down low; because it is those who are above who must reach down low, while it is those who are below who must constantly reach for what is above! And this is divinity. What is divine, is what will have a curiosity in what is below. There is no fear of becoming "tainted"; because what is lesser can never really taint what is greater. it is what is greater that is able to transform what is lesser. The alchemist must first find the mud, pick it up, before she is able to transform it into diamond. She must first reach into the swamp, in order to pull out roses.
C. JoyBell C.
My cat is an ungrateful brat. -Nellie McKay
Larry Smith
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone.
H.P. Lovecraft
When a single cat let loose a war cry, it was an unsettling sound. When two cats suddenly wailed at each other in a similar fashion, it was downright unne
Jim Butcher
One upside of the heat. Kind of cool to see a cat pant.
Jonah Goldberg
My darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws and the tail the same. Moreover, his tail is comparatively short, so his croup has something of a little dog, or rather, a kangaroo, and that’s its colour, too. And that special silkiness of short fur, and some very tender white tints on its folds, and wonderful clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and a pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet – it’s unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water.
Vladimir Nabokov
As if on cue, a line of silhouettes emerged from behind a desert scrub—shapes that moved like cats. They wandered through the landscape of corpses, touching each with a gentle nudge. They grew closer, and it became clear that Chuluum was leading the other cats on their sorrowful homage, giving the fallen librarians the honor they deserved.
Rahma Krambo
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to.Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.
T.S Eliot
The only thing a cat worries about is what's happening right now. As we tell the kittens, you can only wash one paw at a time.
Lloyd Alexander
Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another’s individuality.
Susan Forward
It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
Clement Alexander Price
Somewhere along the way people became afraid to be single. To be unmarried, separate from others and lost their individuality searching for it in society’s view of relationships.
Sanjo Jendayi
So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was alone, a parade of one.
Jerry Spinelli
So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was along, a parade of one.
Jerry Spinelli
And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.
Sinclair Lewis
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
The wisdom to be on the throne of one’s life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we’d be wise to consider how we handle the paint.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Perhaps we are not really sinners in the hands of an angry God, after all. Perhaps we are all more like seedlings in the hands of a wise gardener.
Seth Adam Smith
He blew himself up.”“Get out! You mean like guts all over the place?”“Not all over the place,” I said. “He was pretty well contained, all things considered.
Janet Evanovich
The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn't real
Heather James
He could never care about you. He sees you in the same way they see all of us: ruthless, cruel and power hungry." He laughed callously. "I guess we're about to prove them right.
Heather James
I loved him, more than anything else in the world and that when he was away it was hard to breath and that I couldn't go through a single second without thinking about him.
Heather James
When I was commissioning a brand new solar photovoltaic utility site, I came across metal tubes installed into the fuseholders that were marked up as 100 amp fuses on the diagram. Needless to say, it had already gone on fire.
Steven Magee
Bast looked at him incredulously."The whole world is burning down,"he said."Open your eyes.
Patrick Rothfuss
RYLAN!"I feel Ivy's palm on my chest and, with a powerful shove, she pushes me back, away from fire, danger, and death. In that moment after the tree plunges, I see Ivy for a single second as I fall. In those emerald eyes is a look of complete calm, undying gratitude, and powerful, protective love.The tree crashes down, the sound echoing in my head.For an eternal moment, I sit there on my butt, staring at the spot where Ivy was standing. I'm numb, only registering the slightest changes; the wind dying down, the rain lessening.What just happened?Desperately, I look side to side, praying that Ivy jumped to the side and what I saw was just an illusion made up by my panicked mind.But Ivy's nowhere. And there's an arm sticking out from under the trunk."IVY!"I sprint to the fallen tree. The smoldering wood stings my hand when I grab the trunk, but I grit my teeth and bear it. Pulling with all my might, I throw the remains of the tree aside.Ivy's lying there, her eyes closed and her lower half on fire."No..." I fall to my knees and yank off my sweatshirt to try and smother the flames, but they burn strong, and soon the fabric's on fire. I toss it away, not knowing where it lands as I'm unable to tear my eyes off the most gut-wrenching sight of my life. My hands go to my head and my shouting grows even louder. "No, no, no!"This can't be happening. She can't be—
Colleen Boyd
Pressure knocks at my doorA clock ticks and demands its dueThe lava burns from the floorBut not in a game like it used to.So little time to figure it all outSo many distractions to prevent successI’m in a dark forest with no path or routeBut this internal fire knows no rest.
Justin Wetch
Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.
Laura Anne Gilman
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
Tennessee Williams
his stubble was cut smooth. he smelled of aftershave, dry deodorant and sex-tarnished bedsheets. those eyes--grey, strong, inlaid beneath a firm brow that displayed such hate and SUCH love--they seduced her every time... but not tonight.
Jake Vander-Ark
...Again she did not seem to hear, still looking into Cale’s eyes. Then slowly, hopelessly, she dropped her gaze. “I understand,” she said. It was that, of course, that pierced him as if she had stabbed him through the heart. To him it was the sound of lost faith and it was unendurable. He felt he’d become a kind of god in her eyes, and it was simply impossible to give up her adoration.
Paul Hoffman
If the eyes are the window to the soul, then Edward's in trouble 'cause no one is home.
Laurell K. Hamilton
It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos."Give me your left eye," said the king of the trolls, "and I'll tell you." Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. "Now tell
John Gardner
What the eyes had seen could not be erased.
Frank Herbert
Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt.
Rick Yancey
Or maybe they just accept that it's wrong in God's eyes, although not in their own, and they'll worry about sorting it out later.
Craig Groeschel
If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.
Jeannette Walls
The sharpest minds often ruin their lives by overthinking the next step, while the dull win the race with eyes closed.
Bethany Brookbank