Quotes by American Authors - Page 3297

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
W.H. Auden
The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.
Timothy B. Tyson
The media—stenographers to power.
Amy Goodman
Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels.If you stand back far enough it looks good.Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original.Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope.And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.
Vera Nazarian
It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?
Scott Spencer
The teachers complain that the students today are all lazy, ignorant, and stupid. But the truth is that you're smarter than they are. You're not even old enough to drive and you already know that none of this matters.
Charles Benoit
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
Richard M. Rorty
So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?""I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere.""Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.
Arthur Phillips
When you love someone, they deserve to know the truth
Lorna Seilstad
It's not an easy thing to tell a true story.
Allen Morris Jones
There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
Thornton Wilder
No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.
David Darling
..we all do it. We talk about people we don't like until they become famous. Then we love 'em.
Daniel Black
Davy once asked me if I thought it was better to be a has-been than a never was, but maybe it doesn't make much of a difference. In the end, people are just people, and the only things that matter are whether they are good or bad, loving or unloving, loved or unloved.
Todd Strasser
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
Walter Lippmann
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
Jack Kerouac
Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies...
Emily Dickinson
Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.
Stephen King
Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.
Dean Koontz
Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.
Norman G. Finkelstein
Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.
Dorothy Dix
Nothing can stop a lie whose fashion has come...
Thomas Williams
If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?
Michael Duncan
Anyway, back to the crush. Sorry to shift gears so fast, but we both know why we're here. I mean, if I wanted to discuss the existential angst of motherhood I'd be writing in a journal. Diaries are for the down and dirty, the stuff you don't want people to ever find out about you. Journals are the things you leave open around the house, hoping a literary agent will wander in, read it and declare you the next genius of your age.
Lani Diane Rich
Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist
Thomas Pynchon
My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.
Alice Hoffman
Truths are as much a matter of questions as answers.
Ozzie Zehner
Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.
Deb Caletti
No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.
Jodi Picoult
Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.
Ernest Hemingway
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.
Philip Roth
It is much easier to believe lies than the truth." "Why?" asked Janna. "Because lies are manufactured to satisfy the emotions. A mother would rather believe her pretty girl lazy than accept the fact that she's a dumb cluck. Germans would rather believe they were stabbed in the back than that they lost a fair fight. And anyone would rather blame someone else for his misfortunes. The truth is hard. Don't fool with it unless you realize that.
Hilda van Stockum
The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn't chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.
George Pelecanos
It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Katherine Dunn
When you recognize or experience the truth about yourself you automatically feel love, because love is a quality of your true consciousness and true ideas.
Tae Yun Kim
You have to believe what you're saying if you're going to convince me. I just can't break that rule, even if I want to.
Ashly Lorenzana
In God's eyes, a man who teaches one truth and nothing else is more righteous than a man who teaches a million truths and one lie.
Criss Jami
If you're explaining, you're losing.
Ronald Reagan
Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects...the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se...I don't believe in this 'gifted few' concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.
Charles Eames
If something is wrong, it matters not if a thousand men are for it; you must still oppose it. If something is just, no amount of popular outcry should stay you from your course.
Terry Goodkind
Women were created gullible. It they weren't no babies would be born.
Dakota Dawn
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
Edward Abbey
Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.
James Cameron
When boy likes you, you say no thank you. You don't kick him on the ground.
Jenny Han
Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.
Dean Koontz
Why does she have to be such a...such a...""Go on," I said. "The truth is never cussing, Son.""Such a bitch!
Stephen King
Any actor who tells you that they have become the people they play, unless they’re clearly diagnosed as a schizophrenic, is bullshitting you.
Gary Oldman
The worst thing about talk ... is that there's no way to lay it to rest. Every fresh breeze brings a new speculation.
Susan Wittig Albert
There's nothing more aggravating in the world than the midnight sniffling of the person you've decided to hate.
Shannon Hale
Certain people will be upset when you speak the truth. They might get mad. They might get really mad. That's because they are still living the lie you've exposed. Stay strong. Speak truth. Do not allow yourself to get pulled back into their lie just to make others happy and yourself miserable. You are free. Stay free.
Toni Sorenson
I point out truths when I see them, Brightlord Sadeas. Each man has his place. Mine is to make insults. Yours is to be in-sluts.
Brandon Sanderson
Scarlet watched a leaf fall to the ground, lying dead amoung the other leaves on the forest floor. "A brief life seems pointless."Tristan thought for a moment. "Isn't that what life is, though? A brief opportunity to exist? A short gift?
Chelsea Fine
The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.
Mark Haskell Smith
I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.
Tim LaHaye
Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?
Jodi Picoult
It is our action that determines the viability of our dream.
Steve Maraboli
Since the beginning of the world, a prayer is a prayer and a curse is a curse-- no matter the people-- no matter the language-- Man has given a thousand different namesto his god, but look into the face of each one-- long enough-- hard enough-- You will find one truth.
Mike Mignola
One way or another, I think we are all destined to learn the same lessons in life. Universal truths are universal truths. They cannot be changed.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Lots of men think that women should tell the truth, explain their feelings. These men should use their wishes more wisely. (Prepare To Die!, p.27)
Paul Tobin