Quotes by American Authors - Page 219

What is most personal is most universal.
Carl R. Rogers
Grayson noticed me next to the lockers. He pointed at me then held his arms out magnanimously. “You’re welcome, new girl,” he said. “I just saved you from having to find a nice way to say no to the leg dragger.
Laura Anderson Kurk
I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.
Laura Anderson Kurk
All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form
The Cruxshadows
There is within me a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction ...
James Hurst
And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.
Catherynne M. Valente
There is no redemption in a cruel man's love.
Nenia Campbell
Ordinary men wonder why those of only average intelligence so often rise to the highest levels of power, while highly intelligent people generally do not. They fail to understand that reaching the highest levels of power has nothing to do with admired attributes such as intelligence and competence. The predominant characteristic of those who rise to the highest levels of power is a total disregard for the consequences – including death – that will befall thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of human beings if it is deemed necessary to attain his (or her) goals. Generally speaking, it is this total disregard for humanity that has distinguished ‘rulers’ throughout history.
Dave Champion
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant McGill
It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty.“Why is it important?” Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley treats Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It starts with asides and looks and put-downs. There are so many great examples from Shakespeare—when Goneril torments King Lear or the way Iago speaks to Othello. And what I love about Dickens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
Will Schwalbe
We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually normal behavior.
Shannon L. Alder
Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.
Tana French
You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty.
Gloria Naylor
Also, I'm angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?
Stephen King
The only thing crueler than a cage sosmall that a bird can’t fly is a cage solarge that a bird thinks it can fly.
Caroline Kepnes
Such a brute should underneath all his braggart tricks, his viciousness, his vileness, be a coward. But I am convinced that he was not. Because even cowardice requires a certain degree of sensitivity, and a certain value for life.
Warren Eyster
My mother always says that indifference is the greatest cruelty.
Mark T. Mustian
I always take credit for my acts of cruelty. To do otherwise is cowardice.
Neal Shusterman
God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him."Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way.""You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people.""Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.
Edward Hoagland
There is an undercurrent of savagery in the human psyche. Anyone who forgets this and doesn’t guard against it, risks being swept away by it.
Lance Conrad
...some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt
Stephen King
I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.
Peter S Beagle
She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down.
Shannon L. Alder
Sometimes it's a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.
Amy Engel
The only thing worse than cruelty is delegated cruelty.
Matthew Scully
I'm afraid it's not nonsense," Genghis said, shaking his turbaned head and continuing his story. "As I was saying before the little girl interrupted me, the baby didn't dash off with the other orphans. She just sat there like a sack of flour. So I walked over to her and gave her a kick to get her moving.""Excellent idea!" Nero said. "What a wonderful story this is! And then what happened?""Well, at first it seemed like I'd kicked a big hole in the baby," Genghis said, his eyes shining, "which seemed lucky, because Sunny was a terrible athlete and it would have been a blessing to put her out of her misery."Nero clapped his hands. "I know just what you mean, Genghis," he said. "She's a terrible secretary as well.""But she did all that stapling," Mr. Remora protested. "Shut up and let the coach finish his story," Nero said."But when I looked down," Genghis continued, "I saw that I hadn't kicked a hole in a baby. I'd kicked a hole in a bag of flour! I'd been tricked!""That's terrible!" Nero cried.
Lemony Snicket
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.
Brené Brown
If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.Can we tell a new story?
Jonathan Safran Foer
In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.
Robert Jordan
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois
Tennessee Williams
Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.
Kristin Cashore
Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.
Tennessee Williams
A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.If only I could remember ...
Lynda Fisher
Each person leaves a legacy -- a single, small piece of herself, which makes richer each individual life and the collective life of humanity as a whole.
John Nichols
What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.
Randy Alcorn
Everyone leaves a legacy, whether they want to or not. The question is, “What kind of legacy will you leave?
Dillon Burroughs
It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.
Isaac Marion
Live today the way you want to be remembered tomorrow.
Dillon Burroughs
Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....
Barack Obama
We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.
George R.R. Martin
Leaf felt buried beneath the remains of their prior life, the ashes coating every part of who he thought he was in this community.
Jesikah Sundin
The scenic route was a paved graveyard of dreams, but Fillion hoped his would rise from the ashes, marking the moment when he would finally own his life.
Jesikah Sundin
Multi-colored lights flashed and glared on the wet road and cast eerie reflections, reminiscent of artistic surrealism. Fillion imagined that his distress and anger swirled and moved with the refracted lights, creating an urban masterpiece of demented fury.
Jesikah Sundin
Their leafy whispers delighted her, and she promised her confidentiality by gently touching the trunks of both trees. They had held her secrets close to their hearts, she could do no less.
Jesikah Sundin
Secrets upon secrets were weaving into a strange and mysterious fabric that would ultimately clothe his future.
Jesikah Sundin
As the leaves randomly fell, she contemplated how they sacrificially gave up their essence to sustain new life. Or was it the tree’s sacrifice? Each leaf was a part of Gaia’s play. Their final act: to decompose so a new level of soil could be made, an earthen writing tablet for the next layer of history to be recorded. One generation became the groundwork for the next. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nothing was exempt, not even the leaves.
Jesikah Sundin
The things you do for yourself are gone when you're gone, but the things you do for others become legacy.What do you wanna be remembered as?
Ziad K. Abdelnour
If you want to leave a legacy...leave it now, every day of your life, not just after you are gone or only as a result of a narrowly defined way of contributing. With every thought, word, and deed you leave something behind. You get to choose whether you leave a legacy of impossibility or possibility, of denigration, or celebration, of unkindness, or kindness, of judgment, or acceptance, of struggles or grace, of discouragement or encouragement, of frailty or strength, of tears of laughter, of fear or love. What is n your heart to leave as a legacy, in this moment...and now this one?
Cathy Drew. Poet
Every Moment of your life is a new Page in your Book. Some Sentences you can’t change, even whole Pages. But you decide how your Book ends.
John M. Eaton
I preserve my worldin journals so my children can eat without me
Nikki Skies
We have an infinite ability to make an impact but we have a finite time here to make a difference and to leave some sort of legacy
Thomas Narofsky
Juggling and balancing effectively required that we make clear, legacy-driven choices about what we're trying to keep in the air and how we sequence our movements down the beam. Because the ultimate grade in life is not based on how far and fast we've walked the beam or how many things we’ve juggled—it’s based on how much we've enjoyed the exercise.
Eric C. Sinoway
A legacy is not about what you did while you were there it is what happens when you are gone
Darrell Waltrip
Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.
David Halberstam
The bonsai grower knows that if she can give life to a product that lives forever and perpetually adds value to the lives of others, she has not only a success but a legacy.
Steven Berglas
The questions that we must ask ourselves, and that our historians and our children will ask of us, are these: How will what we create compare with what we inherited? Will we add to our tradition or will we subtract from it? Will we enrich it or will we deplete it?
Leon Wieseltier
The past lives through us. We are its legacy.
Marty Rubin
The kind of legacy you leave will only reflect the kind of life you lived.
Andrena Sawyer
vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment.
David Brooks