Quotes by American Authors - Page 3295

Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that the huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language.
Chris Hedges
Art does not exist only to entertain -- but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth.
Barbra Streisand
Fact and fiction are different truths.
Patricia MacLachlan
From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.
Donna J. Haraway
I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.
R.C. Sproul
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
Catherynne M. Valente
Come to close?No one wants to come to close.If it's done for them,they accept it,even while they condemn it.Why not?But no one wants to know what it's like.Turn a blind eye.Maybe it will go away.
Iris Johansen
True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.
Tiffany Madison
There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.
Jonathan Safran Foer
He leaned back, appalled at himself. She was a ***damn dose of truth serum. Things were falling out of his mouth as though his ability to sensor had short-circuited.
Laura Spinella
Usually, if you think something's wrong, it probably is...
Jayce O'Neal
An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
William James
Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.
Robin Wasserman
And it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Who you gonna believe, bitch? Me? or your lying eyes?
Richard Pryor
I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.
Vera Nazarian
All we know is what we're told.
Ashly Lorenzana
Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.
Alexander Schmemann
How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.
Isabel Allende
Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.
Criss Jami
The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.
Mike Norton
…In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.
Dan Brown
The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.
Megan Chance
The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change.
Neil Postman
Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.
Erin McKean
Memorizing someone else’s explanation of the truth isn’t the same as seeing the truth for yourself. It is what it is—the memorization of second-hand knowledge. It is not your experience. It is not your knowledge. And no matter how much material is learned by rote, and no matter how eloquently we can speak about the memorized information, we’re clinging to a description of something that’s not ours. What’s more, the description is never the item itself. By holding onto our impression of certain descriptions, we frequently are unable to see the real thing when it’s right before our eyes. We are conditioned by memorizing and believing concepts—the truth of which we’ve never genuinely seen for ourselves.
H.E. Davey
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Thomas Pynchon
Truth is in our blood. It is the essennce of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we loose some of that perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope.
Daniel Mackler
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
Stephen King
The distance between your knowledge of truth and your obedience is called lack of integrity. And the amount of negative behavior--or lack of integrity--a person exhibits is directly proportional to their amount of pain." - Tara Leigh's therapist (p.118)
Tara Leigh Cobble
I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.
Chögyam Trungpa
Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.
Garth Stein
When enough insane people scream in harmony that they really are healthy, they can actually start to believe themselves. Or put even more simply: people with overlapping delusions get along wonderfully.
Daniel Mackler
When many voices are speaking at once, listen to the one most quiet and gentle. That’s the one worth listening to. ~ Miranda* ~
Miranda Linda Weisz
That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.
Tim Tharp
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Alison Bechdel
Your kids pissing you off is an inborn instinct. It's nature's way of getting you to kick them out when they turn 18!Okaaay. ~sigh~ Due to the times, you can kick them out between the ages of 28-38. Can someone please dramatically reduce the cost of housing, already?~SHEESH~
Dakota Dawn
A PRIME TRUTH - MAN IS SELFISH(Name of chapter)
William J. Federer
Real success in the kingdom of God is not about being strong and looking good and knowing all the right answers. It's about continually yielding oneself to Jesus and determining to take purposeful little steps of obedience, and the ragged reality that it's all about God and His grace at work in us.
Mary Beth Chapman
In what you say of another, apply the test of kindness, necessity and truth, and let nothing pass your lips without a 2/3 majority.
Liz Armbruster
Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true name? to respond when called.Ever wonder why?.
Vera Nazarian
A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.
Roger Ebert
God Is, Lucifer is a devil, and there is a Hell.
E.A. Bucchianeri
I'm sorry Elena. I know that you want to help, but put yourself in her shoes, everything that happened tonight was to save you and that's OK because she loves you so much. But somehow she's always the one who gets hurt.
L.J. Smith
Being honest in a relationship is at times exceedingly difficult and painful. Yet the moment a person evades the truth, central fibers of the self pull away and the person initiates a process of deception - a way of manipulating the other person by preventing the person from discovering "real thoughts and real feelings
Clark Mustakas
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Eugene T. Gendlin
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.
Robert James Waller
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves
Arthur Miller
Whenever you don't know someone and you overhear their problems they always sound so trivial.
Dallas Athent
When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I tell you the truth, a man may not make himself king; only the blessing of him who holds the kingship can elevate a man to that high place. For sovereignty is a sacred trust that may not be bartered or sold; still less may it be stolen or taken by force.
Stephen R. Lawhead
Things difficult - almost to impossibility - can always be accomplished. Write that upon your tablets, for it is a valuable truth.
E.D.E.N. Southworth
What seems real one moment is fiction the nextand gone out of existence the moment after that.Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,and change our only constancy.
David Budbill
Never confuse a hunger for knowledge with a thirst for truth.
Marty Rubin
For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.
Nelson Algren
Ah, it is impossible.""No, it is only very difficult - so very difficult that I shall be sure to accomplish it!
E.D.E.N. Southworth
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.
Chuck Palahniuk