Quotes by American Authors - Page 3406

The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.
Charles M. Schulz
Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.
Harvey Pekar
I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them...to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.
Horton Foote
It is not the length of life, but the depth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.
Steve Maraboli
Take responsibility of your own happiness, never put it in other people’s hands.
Roy T. Bennett
Believe in Your HeartBelieve in your heart that you're meant to live a life full of passion, purpose, magic and miracles.
Roy T. Bennett
Acts of Kindness:A random act of kindness, no matter how small, can make a tremendous impact on someone else's life.
Roy T. Bennett
Laugh, even when you feel too sick or too worn out or tired. Smile, even when you're trying not to cry and the tears are blurring your vision. Sing, even when people stare at you and tell you your voice is crappy. Trust, even when your heart begs you not to. Twirl, even when your mind makes no sense of what you see. Frolick, even when you are made fun of. Kiss, even when others are watching. Sleep, even when you're afraid of what the dreams might bring. Run, even when it feels like you can't run any more.And, always, remember, even when the memories pinch your heart. Because the pain of all your experience is what makes you the person you are now. And without your experience---you are an empty page, a blank notebook, a missing lyric. What makes you brave is your willingness to live through your terrible life and hold your head up high the next day. So don't live life in fear. Because you are stronger now, after all the crap has happened, than you ever were back before it started.
Alysha Speer
Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand
Hayley Williams
Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
Woody Allen
I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....
Erica Jong
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
Helen Keller
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
Anaïs Nin
We are all different. Don’t judge, understand instead.
Roy T. Bennett
When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.
John Green
If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present.
Roy T. Bennett
make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.
Jon Krakauer
Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.
Roy T. Bennett
Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough
Oprah Winfrey
Cry. Forgive. Learn. Move on. Let your tears water the seeds of your future happiness.
Steve Maraboli
I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.
Bill Watterson
How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.
Harvey Fierstein
There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
Khaled Hosseini
No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.This is all practice.
Chuck Palahniuk
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
Mitch Albom
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
Sylvia Plath
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Eleanor Roosevelt
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Anaïs Nin
You can have it all. Just not all at once.
Oprah Winfrey
If people refuse to look at you in a new light and they can only see you for what you were, only see you for the mistakes you've made, if they don't realize that you are not your mistakes, then they have to go.
Steve Maraboli
If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
Frank Zappa
People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
Nicholas Sparks
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
John Green
In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong Kingston
The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.
Stephanie Perkins
I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.
C. JoyBell C.
Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.
Steve Maraboli
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
Barbara Kingsolver
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
Chuck Palahniuk
You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.
C. JoyBell C.
Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.
Jodi Picoult
It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.
Sarah Dessen
No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.
Jay Asher
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anaïs Nin
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
Emily Dickinson
I've got nothing to do today but smile.
Paul Simon
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain
To say goodbye is to die a little.
Raymond Chandler
Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Natalie Babbitt
Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?
Audrey Niffenegger
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.
Jonathan Safran Foer
This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.
Chuck Palahniuk
That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.
Sarah Dessen