Quotes by American Authors - Page 277

We were never supposed to worship time like we worship the sun and the light it brings.The only gift that time brings us, as human beings, is a signal that our life here on Earth is not permanent, it is fleeting.
Courtney Beck
Truth flows from universal law, not personal views.
John Agno
Musicians, like golfers, have to put their minds in the right place – trusting, confident, enjoying the pressure, being in present. And so forth. Otherwise, no amount of practice or “Time management” will make them better. The same is true in all professions: if you’re stuck in the Training Mindset, evaluating yourself, or thinking in the past or future, you will not perform up to your potential. You will waste a lot of time, be an inefficient performer, and likely assume you need to manage your time better. In reality you need to manage your thinking better.
John Eliot
You must excuse my gruff conduct,” the watchdog said, after they’d been driving for some time, “but you see it’s traditional for watchdogs to be ferocious.
Norton Juster
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Yale Richmond
You can't make up for lost time. You can only do better in the future.
Ashley Ormon
Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?
Sylvia Plath
You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide. And if you don't decide, others will decide for you.
Tony Morgan
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot." -
Michael Altshuler
there are no houses to wife. only window seats to occupy when the weather needs changing & waters to flow past our ankles on Sundays as we fish.
Darnell Lamont Walker
The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.
Thornton Wilder
One wife, you're happy, two and you're tired, three and they'll hate each other, four and they'll hate you.
Patrick Rothfuss
With all due respect," Christopher muttered, "this conversation is leading nowhere. At least one of you should point out that Beatrix deserves a better man.""That's what I said about my wife," Leo remarked. "Which is why I married her before she could find one.
Lisa Kleypas
My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress.
Frances O'Roark Dowell
Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?
Anne Tyler
They saw her husband, this giant of a man in God’s Kingdom, this man, that for over fifteen years was their example of what a great man and husband looked like, walking up to his weeping wife, gently embracing her, soothing her, lifting and holding her soul up high while she released her own pains and worries from the last two days, feeling him, leaning into him, and submitting her pain and fears to her husband out of her love and trust. His strength was shown in his softness. He was made strong in his wife’s pain. He was her man of God
Lee Goff
What kind of husband would I be if I bet against my own marriage?'I smiled. 'The stupid kind. Didn't you listen to your dad when he told you not to bet against me?
Jamie McGuire
The doctor's wife ate two apples a day, just to be safe. But her husband kept coming home.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
We don’t treat each other very well, I suppose. Even from the start. It was as though we had the seven-year itch the day we met. The day she went into a coma, I heard her telling her friend Shelley that I was useless, that I leave my socks hanging on every doorknob in the house. At weddings we roll our eyes at the burgeoning love around us, the vows that we know will morph into new kinds of promises: I vow not to kiss you when you’re trying to read. I will tolerate you in sickness and ignore you in health. I promise to let you watch that stupid news show about celebrities, since you’re so disenchanted with your own life.Joanie and I were urged by her brother, Barry, to subject ourselves to counseling as a decent couple would. Barry is a man of the couch, a believer in weekly therapy, affirmations, and pulse points. Once he tried to show us exercises he’d been doing in session with his girlfriend. We were instructed to trade reasons, abstract or specific, why we stayed with each other. I started off by saying that Joanie would get drunk and pretend I was someone else and do this neat thing with her tongue. Joanie said tax breaks. Barry cried. Openly. His second wife had recently left him for someone who understood that a man didn’t do volunteer work.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the east ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was fun. She made me laugh. I'd forgotten that. And she laughed, From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
Gillian Flynn
Why, could the good man not impose his will, control his wife? asked Mrs. Carew, who always made much of masculine authority in her talk with friends but ruled the roost at home.
Leonard Tourney
I love my wife but I spend a lot of time with grace and mercy
Shon Hyneman
The closer a husband is to God, the closer he will grow to his wife.
Jim George
In my day, husbands and wives showed each other a suitable level of indifference.
Ashlyn Macnamara
Marriage is a team effort. Grow closer to each other as you grow closer to God.
Jim George
And so, as quietly as he had lived, he slipped out of town, leaving only a note behind:Well, that's that. I'm off, and if you don't believe I'm leaving, just count the days I'm gone. When you hear the phone not ringing, it'll be me that's not calling. Goodbye, old girl, and good luck.Yours truly,Earl AdcockP.S. I'm not deaf.
Fannie Flagg
Even God forgives stupidity. So many married people, heaven would be a ghost town otherwise.
Yatin Patel
I had wanted to get married, but I realized now that I never wanted to be a 'wife.
Jill Bialosky
Jeff watched her come, the whole time. He never noticed her mincing, hesitant steps on treacherous heels. He was simply swept up in the ancient ceremony. And discovering, as untold millions of young men had discovered before him, that there is nothing in the world as beautiful as his bride approaching.
Eric Flint
Those monumental anniversary celebrations aren’t what ultimately determine the actual direction of our marriage. Rather, it’s the here and now. It’s those daily decisions we make individually and together that influence how our relationship actually fares in the long run
Ashleigh Slater
But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.
Yiyun Li
On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley's wife] sent a telegram to his son, Matthew, urging him to come at once. At ten in the morning, an almost inaudible Aldous asked for paper and scribbled "If I go" and then some directions about his will. It was his first admission that he might die ...Around noon he asked for a pad of paper and scribbledLSD-try itintermuscular100mmIn a letter circulated to Aldous's friends, Laura Huxley described what followed: 'You know very well the uneasiness in the medical mind about this drug. But no 'authority', not even an army of authorities, could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous's room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give the shot- maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, 'No, I must do this.'An hour later she gave Huxley a second 100mm. Then she began to talk, bending close to his ear, whispering, 'light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love … You are going toward Maria's [Huxley's first wife, who had died many years earlier] love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.'All struggle ceased. The breathing became slower and slower and slower until, 'like a piece of music just finishing so gently in sempre piu piano, dolcamente,' at twenty past five in the afternoon, Aldous Huxley died.
Jay Stevens
In a funny way, Dad was always a bow-tie wearer, always a little more traditional than you might imagine. Because even though he had blue hair and tattoos and wore leather jackets and worked in a record store, he wanted to marry Mom back at a time when the rest of their friends were still having drunken one-night stands. "Girlfriend is such a stupid word," he said. "I couldn't stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her "wife"'.
Gayle Forman
I know you're the only pistol champion we have, but I'd rather they no see enough of you to hit. You're also the only wife I have...""You're so sweet.'"...at the moment.
Clive Cussler
There is so much more to marriage than who makes the money. Some of the hardest parts don't come with a paycheck.
Michelle M. Pillow
Refrigerators are good for keeping homemade moonshine less gross. Freezers are good for keeping rattlesnakes less angry. Garages are good to hide in when your wife finds either.
Jenny Lawson
A man who wears a sword knows to hold the love of his wife and family dear, for at any time he may not see another day of it.
Aleksandra Layland
A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife, but no man can own both.
George R.R. Martin
We gave the woman for her trouble a generous fee, with which she was highly pleased, and proceeded to put it in the bed under her sleeping husband's head. We laughingly told her not to put it there as he might get it, and it was money she had earned herself. She appreciated the joke, though it was told mostly by gestures, but seemed to have true ideas of the matrimonial relation, and was nothing loath to trust her all with him. page. 116
Helen Josephine Sanborn
A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete
John Steinbeck
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours - they are in your care, and you must be faithful.
Catherynne M. Valente
Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job
Malcolm X
He set the suitcases in the back then tossed her the keys. "You drive."She repressed a smile as she climbed behind the wheel. "With each passing day, your reasons for wanting a wife become clearer.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Miss. My. Wife.
Julia Quinn
She hadbecome so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like theair he breathed--necessary but scarcely noticed.
o.henry
Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.
Will Durant
Leo resisted the urge to throw a grenade in Frank's face. "I suppose I should know who Pelops was?""He was a prince, won his wife in a chariot race. Supposedly he started the Olympic games in honor of that."Hazel sniffed. "How romantic. 'Nice wife you have, Prince Pelops.' 'Thanks. I won her in a chariot race.
Rick Riordan
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.
John Scalzi
Why?” she whispered. “Why should I dance with you?”“Because I love you. Because I love you so much I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it go differently this time.”... "Because we should be a married couple, because I never wanted to not be married to you. Because all these men out here dancing with their wives can’t possibly love them as much as I love you. Because for me, there is only one woman, and I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re it.
Erin McCarthy
Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
Cormac McCarthy
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Thomas Wolfe
He tousled Baby's hair, then looked up at Tiger Lily. "The woods have rules." He put Baby down gingerly in his trough with his bottle. "But the rules are ugly.""It's nature," she said, thoughtfully."I have a lot of disagreements with nature," he said, looking confused, and his downy brow wrinkled over his eyes.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
That's life. Life is the ultimate game, and its rules were made to be broken
Nenia Campbell
I'd made a long list of exceptions to cover the area between "ignoring her completely" and "abducting her at knifepoint.
Dan Wells
I play by the rules even when there aren’t any.
Stacy Kramer
1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure
Henry Miller
I didn't write the rules, why should i follow them?
W. Eugene Smth
Despite the best of intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes.
Dov Seidman
Human beings are natural problem solvers and enjoy the challenge of puzzles. We will always invent new loopholes, and no rule can govern all the cracks.
Dov Seidman