Quotes by American Authors - Page 3230

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
Charles Baxter
When I take a break, even just a brief one, the creative energy flows in. Only then do I have anything of value to share with others. Once I recognized this, I stopped feeling guilty about taking time for myself.
Holly Mosier
I look at the hundreds of algebra problems facing me in the next three days.And here I thought I’d figured out the equation to my happiness.
Elizabeth Eulberg
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
Elizabeth Gilbert
You will have fewer regrets in life if you start focusing and taking responsiblity for where you are and where you want to be.
Deborah Day
The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books
Theodore Roosevelt
An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.
Christopher Isherwood
Stop pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Your life can only change to the degree that you accept responsibility for it.
Steve Maraboli
Never been more truthful then right now, looking at you fixes everything.
Holly Hood
Si quieres que tus deseos duren, tienes que pedir algo que te haga feliz y no la felicidad.
Jackson Pearce
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
Dale Carnegie
Loving my son, building my son, touching my son, playing with my son, being with my son… these aren’t tasks that only super dads can perform. These are tasks that every dad should perform. Always. Without fail.
Dan Pearce
I am who I am because the tears of my past have watered the magnificence of my present.
Steve Maraboli
Hope is a dream of which we long to have. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you can't hope for something because hope brings joy and joy brings happiness and its all tied up in a big ball of love.
Peace Gypsy
When your sense of self and happiness comes from within and isn't a roller coaster ride dependent on others or circumstances, you approach life differently. You make better choices. You draw to you the people and situations that matter. The others, they fall away.
Kamal Ravikant
You know what I love? The spaces between I love you. The tap of your fork against the plate and how my cup of wine clicks against our table. The scratchy voice coming from the radio in the other room. The quiet sound of your hand reaching across the table and whispering over mine. How your voice sounds like your mouth on the back of my neck. The soft murmur of our easy conversation.Between these quiet Tuesday night routines, following every comma and right after every pause for breath, is I, love, and you. In the middle of every I love you is a sink full of dishes, whisper of socked feet tangled in white sheets, and gentle kisses against curved cheeks. We lyric ourselves into the laundry that needs to be finished, into the ends of every smile that follows me repeating your name. We write ourselves into the grocery bags we need to carry, the cracks running up our rented walls, the sides of the bed we choose to drag up the sails of heavy eyed dreams.Like the spaces between our fingers, in the spaces between I, love, and you, we wait.The in-betweens have always been my favorite.
Marlen Komar
We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.
Pema Chödrön
And me, standing under the splintered night, catching fractured glimpses into the black behind the black, hearing the prayers of stars, the angry whispers of the dark summer night.Its voice cracks,on your name.My eyes close,on your name.
Marlen Komar
There is no higher happiness than peace.
Jack Kornfield
If you behave in a manner that poisons your relationship, don’t be surprised when it dies.
Steve Maraboli
In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Be thankful for a breath of fresh air to be alive and well. Allow love and happiness to penetrate throughout your mind and soul. Take time to relax and live in the moment, the now, the present. Enjoy today.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The more material we lose, the less we have. The less we have, the more we win.
Anthony Liccione
she slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn't feelalone.
Charles Bukowski
I am responsible for my own existence and happiness.
Nathaniel Branden
In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death.
A. Edward Newton
When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.
Roman Payne
Because what’s lifeWithout happinessAnd where’s happinessWithout risk
Dennis Sharpe
I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.
Willa Cather
If you stand right at the edge of the night sky, some place where one o’clock leaves to meet two, the breeze will carry your words up to the stars. And they’ll swallow your secrets until its time to hand them over to the truths in the sky- the ones that draw maps in the black. They carve their answers into the backs of my hands, the grooves of the words running deep in my palms.
Marlen Komar
Gratitude was never meant to be an excuse for giving up on the obstacles God has put before you. Some of the most magical things he can bring us require faith and a lot of planning.
Shannon L. Alder
The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")
Gertrude Atherton
Emmy has embarked on her journey to enrich the world with smiles. They are free, healthy, and often, very contagious.
Emmy Swain
Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.
Richard Rodríguez
It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.
Laura Lippman
Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a simple thing. Maybe it's as simple as the salty taste of pork, and the vast deal of chewing in it, and how, when the chew is gone, you can still scrape at the bone with your bottom teeth and suck at the marrow.
Franny Billingsley
The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.
Richard Ford
It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Thornton Wilder
There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.
Kristin Kimball
At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep.
Paul Bowles
Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.
Rabih Alameddine
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.
Ray Bradbury
As we drove off into the moonless night, raindrops danced through our headlights like the fireflies of my childhood. I silently cursed the frailty of happiness and doubted whether it ever existed for me. I could remember happier times, though, and those memories fluttered about my mind like fireflies, beckoning with their elusive splendor. But chasing memories held no more promise than catching fireflies. The pursued feelings either vanished or lost their magic upon examination, hardly the green-glowing beauty seen at a distance. So I looked ahead of me and dreamed on into the darkness, hoping to one day find someone who would love me.
Scott Gaille
Happiness: the feeling of being alive.
Marty Rubin
Not matter what your sacred or religious book is, it's not how well you know the book, it's how well you're in alignment with the author.
Steve Maraboli
it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
Mary Karr
Julia was as happy as Betsy was, almost. One nice thing about Julia was that she rejoiced in other people's luck.
Maud Hart Lovelace
Enjoy the rainbow while it lasts and don't chase it when it's gone.
Marty Rubin
I am happy.I have something to accomplish, create, and achieve.I am happy.
Vera Nazarian
Nothing succeeds like indifference to success.
Marty Rubin
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.
Emma Goldman
Happiness is an illusion, Natalie. It doesn't actually exist.""Of course it does," I said. "It's what you feel when you're not sad.""That's unconsciousness. And I'm pretty sure that I'm miserable when I am unconscious, too.
Lee Goldberg
#1487: Hug a cow.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Many people are so poor that the only thing they have is money. Cultivate your spiritual growth.
Rodolfo Costa
When you are in a room with Kurtis, whether its one or a hundred he is the only person that matters.
Dee Remy
The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings. The world is full of happiness, and plenty to go round, if you are only willing to take the kind that comes your way.
Jean Webster
Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.
Madeleine L'Engle
Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.
Steve Maraboli
There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.
Josh Billings