Quotes by American Authors - Page 230

A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.
Mark Lawrence
A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.
Carol Shields
In life and love, there are no impossibilities.
Camille Lucy
It is all new and all the same. A hundred years. A day. Ten thousand moons. For them, each day indeed is brand new, full of possibility, the unknown: a wonderland.
Lorna Jane Cook
It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
Gregory Maguire
My dad said that the impossible is only impossible if you don’t even try. So I want to try.
Ashley Poston
All things lie dark in possibility.
William Saroyan
As long as you’re trying to be someone else, or putting on some act or behavior someone else taught you, you have no possibility of truly reaching people. The most valuable thing you have to give people is yourself. No matter what you think you’re selling, what you’re really offering is you.” (p.92)
Bob Burg and John David Mann
Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.
Vladimir Nabokov
Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?
Brian Evenson
We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.
Will Eisner
Anything at all is possible. Some things are unlikely. Some things will never happen. But they always could, at any time.
Ashly Lorenzana
It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.
Mark Twain
Do not think it impossible just because it has never happened.- Friar Tuck
Stephen R. Lawhead
I dwell in possibility…
Emily Dickinson
...I only told you about it because I thought I might get a laugh out of you for once even if it wasn't the truth, Jessie. Things don't have to be true to talk about 'em, you know.
Marsha Norman
He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter—the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.
Helen Simonson
Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).
Christopher Hitchens
[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.
Rick Moody
But before she tells you anything." I glared at him suspiciously."your seed..."Tsaeb winced."What the hell are you talking about?""your...well, your seed. You know, you have to knock her up.
J.A. Redmerski
The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.
Robert Charles Wilson
Just because you talk about it or advocate for one position doesn't mean you care more. Just because someone doesn't talk about it and advocates a different position doesn't mean they care less.
Donna Lynn Hope
Every person has something meaningful to say in the conversation of life.
Bryant McGill
what a sad pair we are," she said. "Surely we can manage a conversation on a topic other than our respective terrible evenings.
Julia Quinn
I don't believe that." She seems like suck a force,this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she had the chance. "I honestly don't remember," she sighs "I don't think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp." she clasps her hands comically to her chest and breaths in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. "I probably didn't. For all my dreams and fancies, I can't recall being...what would you call it? Perky?
Kendare Blake
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an ssertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.
Neal Stephenson
Are you really going back there with me?" I ask."Hell yes I am. Your wish is finally coming true. I will see your vagina. Plus, I really want to see the look on that woman's face when she gets a peek at your plethora of pubes. Your copious curls, your abundant bush, the wild mane that if it sees a spark will start a forest fire," she states."Are you finished?" I ask irritably."I think so. But give me five minutes and I might be able to get one more in.
Tara Sivec
Weird people don't care if they're weird. They are the most entertaining to converse with because nothing is off-limits.
Donna Lynn Hope
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
J.D. Salinger
She said one thing and I said another and the next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation.
Hank Moody
Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.
Ved Mehta
one wonders how much real conversation there is when one party does not, in many districts, have to contend for the votes of minorities, and the other can only elevate minorities into positions of power when the political wind is blowing in its direction.
Garrance Franke-Ruta
With some people there is easy conversation and not enough time in one meal to get out everything you want to tell her--all the things you didn't know you'd been holding in until you're suddenly confessing to Facebook-stalking ex-boyfriends and how nerdy you are for coveting the iPad--and with others there is that subtle but heavy weight of constantly trying to think of what you might say next to avoid an uncomfortable silence.
Rachel Bertsche
There was no necessity for either to have the last word. For the first word became the only word of their romantic conversation.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
Michael Chabon
CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.
Terry Tempest Williams
They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.
Chelsea Cain
It's all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.
Richard Armour
I’veenjoyed our conversation, knight. It’s been nice talking to someonewho can—”“Create full and complete sentences?”That grin returned and, for a moment, his heart actually stoppedbeating. “No, it was nice to finally meet someone whose arrogance isonly rivaled by the arrogance of the gods.
G.A. Aiken
I was kidding. Even I'm not that promiscuous. You guru people have no sense of humor.”“I'm not a guru people, and I happen to have a very well developed sense of humor. Why else would I still be talking to you?
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.
Madeleine L'Engle
My phone buzzes. It’s from Karou: a list of conversation openers that I won’t be needing. —a) Hi. I’m Zuzana. I’m actually a marionette brought to life by the Blue Fairy, and the only way I can gain a soul is if a human falls in love with me. Help a puppet out? —b) Hi. I’m Zuzana. The touch of my lips imparts immortality. Just sayin’. —c) Hi. I’m Zuzana. I think I might like you.
Laini Taylor
Jack Kennedy brought an "intense concentration" and a "gently teasing humor" to the dinner table, along with what Katherine Graham called his habit of "vacuum cleaning your brain.
Sally Bedell Smith
We humans always seem to take a manipulative posture. No matter what the particulars of the situation, or the subject matter, we prepare ourselves to say whatever we want in order to prevail in the conversation. Each of us seeks to find some way to control and thus to remain on top in the encounter. If we are successful, or our viewpoint prevails, then rather than feel weak, we receive a psychological boost.
James Redfield
Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.
Ben Marcus
I didn't intend to go in that direction but strange things happen when the lights go out.
Donna Lynn Hope
The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversation, seek to always agree--everybody agrees and agrees and that's considered basic social libation.
John McWhorter
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
Talking with three people deeply is better than talking with thirty people superficially.
Todd Stocker
He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue.
Lorrie Moore
Past conversations were slowly realigning in Blue's head, taking on new shades of meaning as they did.
Maggie Stiefvater
One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.
Henry James
At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.
Meghan Daum
Three-Step Method for Making Stronger Connections: Take the Triangle Talk approach to connecting and reaching agreement with others: You, Me, Us. First refer to their interest, then yours - and then note how your interests coincide. This approach enables diverse people to gain traction sooner toward a common goal.
Kare Anderson
Why is it women can never let a man have any fun, they just want to fuss about something.” “They’re practical” Austin said, shaking off some of the water droplets from his hair. “We live in the moment and they think about what’s coming. If they didn’t keep us in check, we’d fuck up the planet”.
Dannika Dark
They said words they did not mean, and their conversations seemed to follow all kinds of rules—rules that no one has ever explained to Oscar.
Anne Ursu
Durkon: You're only saying that because you don't want the world t
Rich Burlew
Can I get your cell phone number so we can text like normal antisocial human beings, since we are both too fucked up to have a conversation?
J.P. Barnaby
It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We've grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.
Louisa Hall
It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.
Sarah Orne Jewett