Quotes by American Authors - Page 3387

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.
Jodi Picoult
The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.
Marie Lu
I pull my foot back again, but Four's hands clamp around my arms, and he pulls me away from her with irresistible force. I breathe through gritted teeth, staring at Molly's blood-covered face, the color deep and rich and beautiful, in a way. She groans, and I hear a gurgling in her throat, watch blood trickle from her lips. "You won," Four mutters. "Stop." I wipe the sweat from my forehead. He stares at me. His eyes too wide; they look alarmed. "I think you should leave," he says. "Take a walk." I'm fine," I say. "I'm fine now," I say again, this time for myself.I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did.I don't.
Veronica Roth
All good children's stories are the same: young creature breaks rules, has incredible adventure, then returns home with the knowledge that aforementioned rules are there for a reason.Of course, the actual message to the careful reader is: break rules as often as you can, because who the hell doesn't want to have an adventure?
Brian K. Vaughan
No one is without troubles, without personal hardships and genuine challenges.  That fact may not be obvious because most people don't advertise their woes and heartaches.  But nobody, not even the purest heart, escapes life without suffering battle scars.
Richelle E. Goodrich
life and love are very precious when both are in full bloom.
Louisa May Alcott
Sometimes you just have those days where everything goes wrong. But sometimes, and totally unexpectedly, something can go right.
Leila Sales
Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.
Suzanne Collins
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
Oliver Sacks
Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
Alice Sebold
Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit either.
Elizabeth Zimmermann
Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?
Bill Watterson
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Cormac McCarthy
I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
Stephen King
Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.
Stephen Colbert
The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.
Jonathan Larson
You know my name, not my story. You've heard what I've done, but not what I've been through.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Rock 'n' roll is not red carpets and MySpace friends, rock'n'roll is dangerous and should piss people off
Gerard Way
Hope is such a beautiful word, but it often seems very fragile. Life is still being needlessly hurt and destroyed.
Michael Jackson
Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,Help us to seeThat without the dust the rainbowWould not be.
Langston Hughes
Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.
Glen Cook
Real change is difficult at the beginning, but gorgeous at the end. Change begins the moment you get the courage and step outside your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Roy T. Bennett
The more you talk about them, the more important they will feel. The more you listen to them, the more important you will make them feel.
Roy T. Bennett
I am so grateful for my troubles. As I reflect back on my life, I have come to realize that my greatest triumphs have been born of my greatest troubles.
Steve Maraboli
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
Ernest Hemingway
HOBBES:Virtue needs some cheaper thrills.
Bill Watterson
I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving.
Deb Caletti
Guilt reminds me of a stray cat. You chase it away and yet, it comes back when you least expect it. If you let yourself feel pity for it and feed the thing, it parks its ugly, puny, lonely-for-attention butt on your doormat and won't go away. Scat kitty cat, scat. I don't need you sitting around here like that.
Lisa Schroeder
It's impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.
Christopher Paolini
Anything that you learn becomes your wealth, a wealth that cannot be taken away from you; whether you learn it in a building called school or in the school of life. To learn something new is a timeless pleasure and a valuable treasure. And not all things that you learn are taught to you, but many things that you learn you realize you have taught yourself.
C. JoyBell C.
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen
A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
Gabrielle Zevin
I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
Madonna
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
Frank Herbert
Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
Parker J. Palmer
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...
Sylvia Plath
The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
Anthony Robbins
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Cormac McCarthy
I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.
Holly Black
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
Oliver Sacks
The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.
Chuck Palahniuk
Happiness is a state of mind, a choice, a way of living; it is not something to be achieved, it is something to be experienced.
Steve Maraboli
Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life.
Suzanne Collins
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
John Irving
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz
And now I am here, as alone as I've ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it's suppose to be. This is not how my life is suppose to turn out.
Gayle Forman
Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.
Sloane Crosley
We just had a near-life experience!
Chuck Palahniuk
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are.
Jim Butcher
Life is not fair get used to used to it
Bill Gates
But all I could think of was how when nothing made sense and hadn't for ages, you just have to grab onto anything you feel sure of.
Sarah Dessen
Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race.There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne....Womanhood stands for all that is pure and clean and noble. She who does not make the world better for having lived in it has failed to be all that a woman should be.
Mabel Hale
It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.
S.E. Hinton
They say that not matter how old you become, when you are with your siblings, you revert back to childhood.
Karen White
It takes no more time to see the good side of life than to see the bad.
Jimmy Buffett
Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.
Elizabeth Gilbert
People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.
Jonathan Safran Foer