Quotes by American Authors - Page 267

Just because it won't last doesn't mean it isn't worth something.
Nina de Gramont
Your enormous soul had so many choices of who it could show up as. It chose you.
Jacob Nordby
Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.
John Green
Don't Wait on Someone to Love You, Love Yourself...Embrace your Worth
Travess
I understand the logic behind removing toxic people from one’s life. But I also understand that many who are “toxic” are acting out of a painful past… and that to marginalize someone who’s not known much love is to validate that they don’t matter. To live in the world we desire – a world of good people, safe places – requires less fence-building and more heart-building. It requires valuing the worth of all people and loving the hurt as much as possible.
Renata Bowers
My uncle always said that it was the sword in a man's hand that determined his worth, not the one between his legs.
George R.R. Martin
Don't ask whether it's going to be easy. Ask whether it's going to be worth it.
Michael Josephson
The biggest battles you face in love are the battle to know your worth and the battle to know when your boundaries need to be protected.
Shannon L. Alder
You once told me some lives are worth more than others. How many deaths before the scales tipout of our favor?”She had no answer.
Kiersten White
Self-worth and net worth are not the same.
Rick Warren
Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.
Koren Zailckas
You are worth infinitely more than you could possibly imagine.
Seth Adam Smith
You’re looking for real love in a ‘right now’ culture. And, many people might mistake you for just a ‘right now’ person. But, don’t let that fool you. You deserve the real love, the forever love. It might not be ‘right now’, but it’ll be the right love. And, it’ll be worth the wait.
Liz Newman
You don’t have to stop fighting for others, you just have to remember to fight for yourself too.
Liz Newman
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
Ernest Becker
Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.
Carl Sandburg
He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. "Here." I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. "See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.
Charles Martin
Be patient, child!” said the Music. “But she will forget me.” “Do not worry, child. I am there. I shall not forget.”And she stared out at the planets and gentle stars and the galaxies and became forlorn for she had known a special love.“The Universe is so large, just look at it!” she cried. “Believe.” The Music sang.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bare the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.
John Green
Reincarnation?”He shrugged. “I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s real. But I’ve never seen anything that disproves it either. I believe the afterlife is better than what we have here—and it would take something extraordinary to make someone willing to come back.
Patricia Briggs
The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held. On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily laying down.
Woody Allen
I suppose that now would be the time to ask for forgiveness for all the things I've done, but I'm sure my list would never be complete. I also don't believe that whatever comes after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions...I don't believe that what comes after depends on anything I do at all.
Veronica Roth
...We die, we turn, we are reborn as we deserve to be reborn, based on our doings in this world." Will looked down at his bitten nails. "I will probably be reborn as a slug that someone salts.
Cassandra Clare
The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.
John K. Brown
I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn’t afraid anymore.
John K. Brown
The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
John Updike
There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.
Dorothy Day
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.
John K. Brown
Natural law has decreed it so. Isn't death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn.
Thomm Quackenbush
In Western culture, the 'miracles' referenced in scripture seem to have been relegated to the past as if to imply that they were reserved exclusively for certain historical periods.
Mark Ireland
Many people profess a belief in the existence of a spiritual realm, often aligning with their religious training or background. (Recent surveys indicate that, on average, between 48 percent and 59 percent of Europeans claim to believe in an afterlife, while between 72 percent and 74 percent of people in the United States assert a belief in life after death.) But when confronted with the loss of a child, a spouse, or another deeply loved person, one may find that his or her belief set is deeply challenged, and some suffer a crisis of faith.
Mark Ireland
For some, reassessing concepts about truth and reality can be a scary proposition.
Mark Ireland
Reductionism argues that we can learn what 'makes things tick' by looking more closely at matter, examining the underlying units. There are at least two problems with this approach. First, reductionism assumes that only observable, material items are 'real,' even though the vacuum of space is known to contain vast amount of inaccessible, 'invisible' energy. Subatomic particles go in and out of observable 'existence,' and science does not know 'where' they go when they are not manifesting here. Second, this path of reasoning ignores a major quandary encountered in the realm of quantum physics. When examining matter more closely--diving down from the molecular level to the subatomic--a point is soon reached where there is virtually nothing present, at least not an obvious 'material something.
Mark Ireland
First, I have culled evidence that physical death is not the end of the road for any of us. I know this message is critical because I've seen people consumed by fear of death or suffering unbearable grief after losing a loved one. Some can draw into a shell, ceasing all efforts to reach their potential, or even give up on life.
Mark Ireland
Some contemporary mediums dislike the term 'psychic' because they feel it carries a negative connotation, leading people to associations with crystal balls, tea-leaf reading, fortune-telling, or other stereotypes.
Mark Ireland
Perhaps the day will come when Western science is able to confirm the existence of immaterial forces and realms. Compelling research in the field of parapsychology indirectly points to this possibility, yet most people in mainstream science can't bring themselves to consider the implications.
Mark Ireland
People can fall into habitual programmed patterns of thinking, underpinned by long-held beliefs and blind acceptance of conventional wisdom. Lying beneath such surface thoughts are mental cues that operate on the subconscious level, compelling people to act in certain ways, yielding conclusions that fit within their pre-existing biases. Many people are unaware that these processes are even occurring.
Mark Ireland
We don’t see the life after life as it truly is, because in our eyes it conforms to our mechanics of nature.
Scott Lynch
Through discussions, reading, contemplation, and practice I've come to recognize the importance of subtle feelings and symbols. By paying attention to subtle energy, typically in the form of thoughts and feelings, we began to tap into our inner capacity to commune with those we've loved and lost, as well as other streams of consciousness and information.
Mark Ireland
It has been suggested that the color of an aura can reveal characteristics about the generating source.
Mark Ireland
I also don't believe that whatever come after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions-that sounds too much like an Erudite afterlife to me, all accuracy and no feeling.
Veronica Roth
Death is only frightening from the near side.
Jim Butcher
Test.” Hades’ lovely mouth twisted bitterly around the word, as if he could read Helen’s thoughts and agreed with her. “If life is a test, then who do you think grades it?”“You?” she guessed.
Josephine Angelini
Death isn't the end of your life, you know. Your body is a lock. Death is the key. The key turns... and you're free. To be anywhere. Everywhere. Two places at once. Nowhere. Part of the background hum of the universe.
Joe Hill
If the afterlife really is a big war,” Kaladin said, “then I hope I end up in Damnation. At least there I might be able to get a wink or two of sleep.
Brandon Sanderson
Never take another human being to the third life, because we don't know how to go.
Orson Scott Card
If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.
Marilynne Robinson
In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?
Marilynne Robinson
What's afterlife?" Asher asked, sincerely, indicating a trio of passing shoppers laden with brightly colored bags, who turned up their noses. "There's only life.
David Edison
I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.'Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witness to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!
Anne Rice
I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.
Kent Haruf
Faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.
Stephen King
I think that's shameful, even if it's just a story, to propose an afterlife for evil... Any afterlife notion is a manipulation and a sop. It's shameful the way the unionists and the pagans both keep talking up hell for intimidation and the airy Other Land for reward.
Gregory Maguire
If there is an after, I hope it's not dark. And I hope you can remember. I'd hate to wander around in the dark forever, not knowing who I was or what I was doin' here, or not even knowing that I'd ever had anything different.
Richard Bachman
I'm sorry," Leon said. "I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they're flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won't be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that's the truth. If you believe in the truth--well, Phil, that's the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.
Philip K Dick
Now is the time to create living relationships with our loved ones who have died.
Lynn Rollins Stull
We are not forgotten by those we have loved, and they do visit us more times than we consciously know. I hope my story provides some comfort to those who have experienced the loss of someone they love deeply.“Paula Lenz’s book shows how the deepest grief can unlock the greatest spiritual treasures. The story of how the death of her beloved brother Don also provided her — and us — with inconvertible evidence of life after death should convince any skeptic that we live after we die. Driving into Infinity will take you on a riveting journey of self-discovery.” -Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.,Author of Lessons from the Light
Paula Lenz
At first it's pretty cool: the limitless fruit of knowledge hanging low in your path. Then you realize it's the only thing to eat around here.
Rajiv Joseph
We had enough quite enough snobbery in this world without exporting it to the hereafter.
Rick Riordan