Quotes by American Authors - Page 3188

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
Donna Tartt
And that's what love is, I suppose. The one thing that is most worth hoping for, and the one thing that's most surprising when it lands. Because it's better. It exceeds hope, makes hope nearsighted.
Jessica Soffer
For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.
Criss Jami
Then every man would be as a god, you see. The result of this, of course, would be that there would no longer be any gods, only men. We would give them knowledge of the sciences and the arts, which we possess, and in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better—for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized.
Roger Zelazny
...maybe she's a slut because she's lonely, she's sad, she's hoping someone or something will make the lonely and sad go away.It won't, of course. It never does. But nonetheless, there's not a girl who's more hopeful than a slut, more optimistic. She may give in but she doesn't give up. She keeps looking, she keeps hoping, she's always waiting for that someone who will say it: I love you, too.
Diana Joseph
Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs.My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.
Forrest J. Ackerman
Why wait? So precious is this life—this gift—this temporary blindness. Burn and drown and embrace the false dark, then grasp the unthinkable height of resulting joy. For in the end, in the light of truth when the flesh is cast off, there is nothing but this.
Jennifer DeLucy
I know that your soul is on life support and that you feel lost and like you’re completely spinning out of control, but you’re finding yourself — here, tonight… even in this darkness.
Jennifer Elisabeth
Through Christ, the sting of death is but a gentle pinch to the soul; and the mourn is light. Perhaps, someday, in that glorious place, free of sin, we shall meet again.
Criss Jami
hope had become despair, protestors had become terrorists, love had become sex, music had become noise, and us had become me.
Susan R. Sloan
... omniscience about life and death is not within a physician's purview. A doctor should never write off a person a priori.
Jerome Groopman
I had learned that every patient has the right to hope, despite long odds, and it was my role to help nurture that hope.
Jerome Groopman
But if you ask me what I remember (about 1945), I will say it was the year Franklin D. Roosevelt died and I got one of his flowers. I will tell you that yellow rose give me the courage to do the right thing even if it was hard. I will say it was the time in my life when I learned all of us is fragile as a mimosa blossom. But the miracle of all is, When push comes to shove, we can be just as tough as Hickory. It mostly hurts at first. After a while it starts to feel better.
Joyce Moyer Hostetter
He can't have gone, he said "Christ know he can't have gone. He's making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and her remembers something of it." The he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.
Ernest Hemingway
If I were a character in one of my books, I'd be the optimistic one, believing the best and urging others to do the same.
Stacy Hawkins Adams
Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.
Margaret George
Past and Present I know well; each is a friend and sometimes an enemy to me. But it is the quiet, beckoning Future, an absolute stranger, with whom I have fallen madly in love.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Impending doom, it was a familiar sweater, we all wore it and as scratchy as it felt against our skin, we kept it on.
Holly Hood
There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.
Elizabeth Berg
You think you're paying your dollar for a chance at the $6.2 million jackpot on Saturday, but really you're paying for the pleasure of the car ride home, deciding which credit card to pay off first and where your kid will suddenly be able to go to college.
Kelly Braffet
Faith without a measure of doubt ain't worth a brass farthin'.
Howard Frank Mosher
Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.
Whittaker Chambers
We can ast for comfort and hope and patience and courage . . . and we’ll git what we ast for. They ain’t no gar’ntee thet we ain’t go’n have no troubles and ain’t go’n die. But shore as frogs croak and cows bellow, God’ll forgive us if’n we ast Him to.
Olive Ann Burns
Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.
Adam Levin
when you live forever and don't age, it gives you time to hope
Laurell K. Hamilton
Please don't take my wings...
Randall Wallace
(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air --(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --(The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional "act of faith")) but in the present. After all. hope.)
Joanna Russ
Should the king in exile pretend he is happy there?Should he not seek his own country?His miseries are his ally; they urge him on. Let them grow, if need be. But do not forsake the secret of life; do not despise those kingly desires. We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it’s not worth it.
John Eldredge
A King and Queen cannot support a crown with eyes looking down. Their universe expands as far as you can see.
T.F. Hodge
If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.
Michael Sims
In closing, I hope everything helps show that I wouldn’t be a fade-out or a person who turns to think to drink or dope when things get tough. I believe that anything is possible if you have the combination of love for what you’re doing and the will to sit down and not get up until it’s done….
Kaye Gibbons
The strong lines of the woman's face bespoke hard-won wisdom and courage, and somehow that made watching her more difficult. If such a woman could be defeated by Elantris, what hope was there for Raoden?
Brandon Sanderson
We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.
Scot McKnight
Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.
Jodi Picoult
Healing Follows Forgiveness
Pat Bluth
She knew then that white was more than a color: It was a cold, pale shade of understanding that seems to take all of your hope away.
Vannetta Chapman
The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender.
Howard Zinn
There are two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally wanted, it was still worth doing. A rainy day is better than no day. A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad.
Rachel Simon
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition--broken mirrors and so forth--hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.
Benjamin Wood
I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, too, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
Patrick Ness
Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.
John F Kennedy
When you know that everything matters—that every move counts as much as any other—you will begin living a life of permanent purpose.
Andy Andrews
Life is not kind. Who are you trying to kid, Kendall?” He sighed.
Holly Hood
Rafe made people find something in themselves...(he) made me dream, he saw what I could hope to be, and helped me hope it. He did that to everyone he knew - especially the ones he knew the best." - Danny
Randall Wallace
No matter how hard it is, or how hard it gets, don't ever, ever, ever lose hope!
Jim Yackel
The child was slender as fleeting hope.
William Peter Blatty
Her shoes were comfortable. They reflected her hope for the evening.
William Peter Blatty
To get where you want to be, you must first know where you are.
Deborah Day
It would still be a long way until she was completely free, but the door had been cracked open and a smidgen of hope broke through the darkness.
J.E.B. Spredemann
Every goal first started as something in our mind. You have it all within you!
Deborah Day
What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.
Dean Koontz
Even if times got bad, he would never again deny himself the possibility that the future might be happy even if the present was painful. He would allow himself dreams.
Suzanne Collins
The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
Steven L. Peck
The devil, darkness, and death may swagger and boast, the pangs of life will sting for a while longer, but don't worry; the forces of evil are breathing their last. Not to worry...He's risen!
Charles R. Swindoll
We must always remember that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts. That where there is no vision, people perish. That hope and faith count, and that without charity there can be nothing good. That by daring to live dangerously, we are learning to live generously. And that by believing in the inherent goodness of man, we may ... 'stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.
John Gilbert Winant
And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
Arthur Golden
Accept that what you see is what you'll get. Once your relationship becomes firmly established, your partner's personality and the way in which [he or] she treats you will most likely be what your future together will look like. Staying with a partner whom you hope will change usually results in disappointment.
Mary C. Lamia
My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet…is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.
Taylor Swift
Maybe what River had meant was that time itself was like a river, moving steadily forward, and you got to be in a new river every day, every hour. All my life I'd felt like a lake. A lake where everyhting was contained, forever. All my experiences, all the different people I'd been, everything I'd had, everything I'd lost...I carried them around with me, all the time
Cate Tiernan
He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.
Nathaniel Hawthorne