Quotes by American Authors - Page 3313

Sometimes what we want isn't what we need.
Gena Showalter
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
Brené Brown
What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.
Helen Keller
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
Chuck Palahniuk
I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
Suzanne Collins
I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?
Laurie Halse Anderson
Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
Malcolm X
I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.
Scott Westerfeld
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.
Elvis Presley
Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
IRVIN D.YALOM
We don't get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.
Kami Garcia
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul.
José N Harris
The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
Pema Chödrön
How hurtful it can be to deny one's true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.
June Ahern
You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.
John Waters
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Flannery O'Connor
Does truth have a moral?
Rick Riordan
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
Robin Hobb
In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.
Czesław Miłosz
Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.
Leila Sales
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
Brent Weeks
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
A.W. Tozer
Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
Sue Monk Kidd
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
Audre Lorde
I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.
Tahereh Mafi
Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.
Criss Jami
With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.
Sara Gruen
Nothing is ever certain.
Alice Sebold
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
Hunter S. Thompson
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.
Ray Bradbury
The best lies were always mixed with truth.
Sarah J Maas
You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.
Veronica Roth
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
Mark Twain
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.
Abraham Lincoln
Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
John Steinbeck
Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.
Karen Marie Moning
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
Dorothy Allison
The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies
Jodi Picoult
Wanting to be liked can get in the way of truth.
Delia Ephron
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
Carl Sagan
It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent her life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.
Ally Carter
If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.
Terry Goodkind
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
Walt Whitman
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West
I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.
J.D. Salinger
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
Maya Angelou
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T.S Eliot
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.
Lemony Snicket
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.
George R.R. Martin
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran
Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
Katherine Boo
It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.
Lemony Snicket