Quotes by American Authors - Page 266

You want what you can’t have. Again, is it worth it? Does it hurt your heart or does it hurt your balls?”~ grandpa RayExcerpt From: Boheme, Kade. “Trouble & the Wallflower" Kade Boehme, 2014-03-03T20:38:08+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
Kade Boehme
A loner by nature and an introvert... i am a twinkling star, burning bright amidst a cloudless night. As such, i tend to fade in and out of people's lives. This aspect of me is often misunderstood as rejection or a lack of love and caring. In reality, the only way i can survive as an introvert, is to drop from the sky, from time-to-time, recharging within the energizing landscape of my inner-universe. To love me, is to let me me have the space i need to illuminate the sky. I can't be taken hostage or held captive. Inner-light is what gives my star its twinkle.
Jaeda DeWalt
Lowell’s best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed finernails and the clearer it became that this big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind.
L.J. Davis
He twirled a finger, the universal symbol for roll down your window -- universal despite the fact that no one had manually rolled down a window in twenty years.
Daryl Gregory
We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Chuck Palahniuk
He tried to be a good man, to do the right things, to make the world a little better than it had been before he had put his stamp upon it. You could be generous with the love you gave, with the care you took with others. You could follow all the command- ments that made sense to you and still the world could sideswipe you. There was no cause and effect. There was no karma. The truth was that he wasn't so sure he understood how the world worked anymore.
Caroline Leavitt
In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so competent that we cannot even truly predict where is will lead us.
R.A. Salvatore
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.
Rick Yancey
It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said, something odd in his voice. “It’s funny how some people show they love people with dramatic proclamations and huge displays and romantic gestures…but for some people, it’s in the small things. Like the small things you do for him.
Cole McCade
When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.
Wally Lamb
Deep down I think I may be just like everyone else. And do you know what, Harry?""No sir.""That bothers me.
Joe R. Lansdale
The map is not the territory," Snicket's chaperon advises him. "That's an expression which means the world does not match the picture in our heads.
Lemony Snicket
The north of peacebuilding is best articulated as finding our way toward becoming and being local and global human communities characterized by respect, dignity, fairness, cooperation, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. To understand this north, to read such a compass, requires that we recognize and develop our moral imagination far more intentionally.
John Paul Lederach
Everything's impossible until somebody does it.
Bruce Wayne
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosopher to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so helplessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what us, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home.
Herman Melville
We live in a 'two-hundred-year present'.
John Paul Lederach
I have a feeling that you're riding for some terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started...
J.D. Salinger
Friendship Quote of the Week:"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together"…Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President and World Leader
Woodrow Wilson
The constant talking didn't bother her, for cats use their voices to say 'here I am, where are you?' and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation.
Kij Johnson
You dare quarrel with me Doerwyne?She wrinkled her nose. "It's not quarreling to express an opinion'""Women don't have opinions.""Then I must be a man, because I have plenty.
Georgia Fox
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action,
Lena Dunham
I am not interested in what is pleasant. I'm interested in what's useful.
Jessica Cluess
We are entrusting thousands of strangers with our innermost thoughts and feelings, and then we're expecting them to be careful with those feelings. As much as we want it to be, the Internet is not a safe space. It is not a place where we can lay our burdens down and heal. Why? Because there are too many people there who do not give an ounce of a shit about our well-being. They do not deserve our rawness, and they will not treat it with care.
Luvvie Ajayi
When I venture to point out the unfairness of this, I am reminded of the second item on my list. Apparently the only acceptable destiny for a young female mem​b​er of the house of Windsor is to marry into another of the royal houses that still seem to litter Europe, even though there are precious few reigning monarchs these days. it seems that even a very minor Windsor like myself is a desirable commodity for those wishing a tenuous alliance with Britain at this unsettled time. I am constantly being reminded that is is my duty to make a good match with some half-lunatic, buck-toothed, chinless, spinele​s​s​​​, and utterly awful European royal, thus cementing ties with a potential enemy. My cousin Alex did this, poor thing. I have learned from her tragic example.
Rhys Bowen
The main thing we can learn from The Lord of the Rings is that we who are in a position to save the world (by which I mean all of us) do so primarily to save our friends.
Mark Eddy Smith
The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.
Pete Earley
She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
Edith Wharton
Such is the lot of the narcissist's child, to inherit her parent's umbrage over the world's indifference.
Ann Packer
A diamond is just a rock. A really expensive rock.
C.V. Hunt
...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
Herman Melville
He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested.
H.G. Bissinger
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes.
Joseph Heller
To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.
Joel T. McGrath
An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.
Lindsay Buroker
from the beginning, through themiddle years and up to theend:too bad, too bad, too bad.
Charles Bukowski
As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?
Tina Fey
Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.
George R.R. Martin
A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.
Jennifer Egan
Your pain made you strong. It made youpassionate and alive. It made us both who we are. -Cade
Cora Carmack
Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.
Laura Hillenbrand
The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.
Sean Carroll
...just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives.
Steve Martin
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean.
Sarah Dessen
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Saul Bellow
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
Larry Niven
I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.
David Sedaris
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Zora Neale Hurston
He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been br
Brandon Sanderson
That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I've met some who hated the army and others who wanted to make it a career. I've met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done,we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise.
Nicholas Sparks
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.
Nicholas Sparks
I've learned, that not all worth is measured by price. I've found so many gems that didn't cost me much!
C. JoyBell C.
I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Cheryl Strayed
Toni, I barely know you, but I canna see anything remotely unworthy about you. any man would be blessed and honored to receive yer love." (Ian MacPhie)
Kerrelyn Sparks
I felt the water rising enough to touch my Vans. She was worth ruing a pair of shoes over.
Nyrae Dawn
Sometimes I didn’t think the world was worth it.Saving.Sometimes I didn’t think I was worth it either.
Kami Garcia
Whenever you appreciate a certain thing you become conscious of its real quality, and whenever you become conscious of the quality of anything, you begin to develop that quality in yourself. When we appreciate the worth of a person, we tend to impress the idea of that worth in our own minds, and thereby cause the same effect to be produced, in a measure, in ourselves.
Christian D. Larson