Quotes by American Authors - Page 253

The purpose of life is to know, and to recreate, Who You Are.
Neale Donald Walsch
When God chooses you to deliver a message, to have a purpose, no one and nothing can reverse the course of His plan.
Carlos Wallace
I have songs to write and songs to sing and planes to fly and I want to see my old yellow truck again.
Jennifer Niven
I want to make my mark,' he says.But what target, I wonder, are you going to hit?
Cecil Castellucci
It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
Robert M. Pirsig
To empty the heart does not mean to not love. On the contrary, true love, as God intented it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment. The process of first emptying the heart can be found in the beginning half of the shahada (declaration of faith).
Yasmin Mogahed
Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see. To be the playthings of tyrants. But you...you were born to fight tyranny.
Seth Grahame-Smith
Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
Ursula K Le Guin
The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.
Khaled Hosseini
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.
Robert F. Kennedy
This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.
Michael Cunningham
The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.
Dave Eggers
Mortality is one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed. After a long and fruitful life, we are able to rest.
Nancy Straight
It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me...
MacDonald Harris
It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.
Patricia Briggs
I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.
Giulio Tononi
Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.
Rafael Campo
Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled players and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.
Connie Willis
I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.
Jennifer duBois
I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.
Annie Dillard
How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?
Malcolm X
Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.
Bruce Sterling
You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.
Rick Yancey
In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
John F Kennedy
Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all.
Michael Perry
Malady of mortality
Anne Rice
Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.
Robert M. Edsel
In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.
Lewis Nordan
Without time, you have only the bottomless, shapeless mire of eternity....Time is what gives life significance.
J.R. Ward
I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.
Anne Rice
Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.
Daniel Abraham
The things that frighten us most are those that remind us of our fragile existence
Sumiko Saulson
I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.
Cassandra Kemper
Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.
Tennessee Williams
[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.
Sonia Sotomayor
She's thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she'll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.
David James Poissant
I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.
Gene Wolfe
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I'd just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that's the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we're like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn't any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.
Craig Johnson
The vast and terrible depth."“Of course,” he said.“The inexhaustibility.”“I understand.”“The whole huge nameless thing.”“Yes, absolutely.”“The massive darkness.”“Certainly, certainly.”“The whole terrible endless hugeness.”“I know exactly what you mean.
Don DeLillo
If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive.
Moxie Mezcal
And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.
Stephen Greco
he had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.
Mary Doria Russell
But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
Ernest Hemingway
Bugle"Black beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.
Tod Marshall
Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do," Dunbar told him. "Why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?
Joseph Heller
I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time.
Ruth Ozeki
Be Mindful of Death" (Memento Mori)
Peter Swanson
It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong." He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. "And this was wrong.
Jim Butcher
Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh.
David Brooks
It's good to remember…So you know you need to do now,So you know that you ain't got forever just right now,Good to remember death man.
Tarell Alvin McCraney
Death like style is the removal of rubbish.
Will Durant
I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.
Walt Whitman
Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.
Roy Scranton
Ere the horne'd owl hoot Once and twice and thrice there shall Go among the blind brown worms News of thy great burial; When the pomp is passed away, 'Here's a King,' the worms shall say.
Adelaide Crapsey
The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.
Sherry Turkle
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Harold Bloom
I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.
Geraldine Brooks
To die trying is the proudest humans thing.
Robert A. Heinlein
We reach the end of our lives long before we reach the end of ourselves.
Marty Rubin