Quotes by American Authors - Page 3392

We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.
Patrick Ness
We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.
Ken Levine
My hope still is to leave the world a bit better than when I got here.
Jim Henson
If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.
Marvin Gaye
I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, Be more active, Show up more often.
Brian Tracy
People are the most difficult thing in the world to change
Gena Showalter
You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.
Woody Allen
A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world.
J.D. Stroube
Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.
Lana Del Rey
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Red Haircrow
CALVIN:As usual goodness hardly puts up a fight.
Bill Watterson
If you don't learn to laugh at life it'll surely kill you, that I know.
Brom
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Aleksandar Hemon
CALVIN:When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.
Bill Watterson
When all else fails, there's always delusion.
Conan O'Brien
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
Patrick Ness
To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
Anita Shreve
Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward.
Mitch Albom
There are two things we should always be 1. raw and 2. ready. When you are raw, you are always ready and when you are ready you usually realize that you are raw. Waiting for perfection is not an answer, one cannot say "I will be ready when I am perfect" because then you will never be ready, rather one must say "I am raw and I am ready just like this right now, how and who I am.
C. JoyBell C.
Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die.
Suzanne Collins
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
Tom Robbins
People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller
There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.
Isaac Marion
Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
H.P. Lovecraft
Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the mext moment
Oprah Winfrey
Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.
Robert Brault
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell. I wonder what will someday bring back Dex and our few months together. Maybe the sound of Dido's voice. Maybe the scent of the Aveda shampoo I've been using all summer.
Emily Giffin
I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.
Lana Del Rey
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Joseph Heller
You know, life fractures us all into little pieces. It harms us, but it's how we glue those fractures back together that make us stronger.
Carrie Jones
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.
Nick Flynn
Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.
Leo Babauta
I wonder if I'll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we're living or no life at all.
Susan Beth Pfeffer
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
David McCullough
The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers.
Brian Tracy
Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.
Yoko Ono
If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.
Thomas Merton
We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.
Brad Meltzer
Opening up to the wrong person is like putting ammo in their hands.
Lisa Kleypas
I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.
Holly Black
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The only real limitation on your abilities is the level of your desires. If you want it badly enough, there are no limits on what you can achieve.
Brian Tracy
For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.I fought with my knuckles white as stars,and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart,and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,but I could never make dying beautiful.The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free.I suppose I love this life,in spite of my clenched fist.I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,like a prayer on a dying man's lips,like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take meSometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,but you still have to call it a birthday.You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the wordsWe're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music,the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open.The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.I know the heartbeat of his mother.Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own,and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
Andrea Gibson
Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.
Lana Del Rey
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Our most significant opportunities will be found in times of greatest difficulty.
Thomas S. Monson
If you believe you can, you might. If you know you can, you will.
Steve Maraboli
I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.
Ava Dellaira
Life is only precious because it ends, kid. Take it from a god. You mortals don't know how lucky you are
Rick Riordan
She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.
Lisa Genova
The Young Man came to the Old Man seeking counsel.I broke something, Old Man.How badly is it broken?It's in a million little pieces.I'm afraid I can't help you.Why?There's nothing you can do.Why?It can't be fixed.Why?It's broken beyond repair. It's in a million little pieces.
James Frey
I can't. You can't rewrite the past.
Jay Asher
I will be stronger than my sadness.
Jasmine Warga
Keep your promises and be consistent. Be the kind of person others can trust.
Roy T. Bennett
One of the best ways to influence people is to make them feel important. Most people enjoy those rare moments when others make them feel important. It is one of the deepest human desires.
Roy T. Bennett
It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself. Believe in yourself, your abilities and your own potential. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. You are worthy of all that you dream of and hope for.
Roy T. Bennett
The way I define happiness is being the creator of your experience, choosing to take pleasure in what you have, right now, regardless of the circumstances, while being the best you that you can be.
Leo Babauta
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg