Quotes by American Authors - Page 3376

All I can be is me- whoever that is.
Bob Dylan
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
Albert Einstein
So many things are possible as long as you don't know they are impossible.
Mildred D. Taylor
I sustain myself with the love of family.
Maya Angelou
Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it's at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.
Sam Levenson
I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
Oprah Winfrey
The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.
Leo Buscaglia
Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
Elizabeth Gilbert
I'm unpredictable, I never know where I'm going until I get there, I'm so random, I'm always growing, learning, changing, I'm never the same person twice. But one thing you can be sure of about me; is I will always do exactly what I want to do.
C. JoyBell C.
Life before Death.Strength before Weakness.Journey before Destination.
Brandon Sanderson
The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.
John F Kennedy
But remember, boy, that a kind act can sometimes be as powerful as a sword.
Rick Riordan
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Stephen King
It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.
Frank Warren
All The Woulda-Coulda-ShouldasLayin' In The Sun,Talkin' 'Bout The ThingsThey Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda Done...But All Those Woulda-Coulda-ShouldasAll Ran Away And HidFrom One Little Did.
Shel Silverstein
Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
Khaled Hosseini
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
Chuck Palahniuk
The best discoveries always happened to the people who weren't looking for them.
Morgan Matson
If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.
Taylor Swift
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.
Harlan Ellison
Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
Malcolm X
No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.
Madonna
Fake it 'till you make it.
Gayle Forman
A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep.
Walt Disney Company
Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
Ronald Reagan
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,it is still a beautiful world.Be cheerful.Strive to be happy.
Max Ehrmann
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
Ray Bradbury
Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other
Veronica Roth
Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after. Such moments are tests of courage, of strength.
Sabaa Tahir
Without fear there cannot be courage.
Christopher Paolini
Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
Napoleon Hill
Never dull your shine for somebody else.
Tyra Banks
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.
Mae West
There's more to life than dating the boy on the football team.
Taylor Swift
A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
Jodi Picoult
Getting something and having the wits to use it...those are two different things.
Rick Riordan
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
What you have to decide... is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it? Listen, the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody. So dont be afraid. Be alive.
Sarah Dessen
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.
Adrienne Rich
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Mark Twain
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
Albert Einstein
You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there's no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it's the only one left in the world!
C. JoyBell C.
I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - pg 20-21
Elizabeth Gilbert
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden
If your feet are firmly planted on the ground you'll never be able to dance.
Iris Johansen
Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.
Joss Whedon
There is a way to be good again...
Khaled Hosseini
Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
Harper Lee
If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.
Gene Stratton-Porter
Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.
Abraham Lincoln
But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.
Rick Yancey
My heart is warm with the friends I make,And better friends I'll not be knowing,Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,No matter where it's going.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever