Quotes by American Authors - Page 37

He stopped, finally, and smiled. “Honestly? With this thing I think I could get my jerk-off muscles so well-developed that I could rub out a spooge with one pump! If that’s not worth $19.95, I don’t know what is.
Debra Anastasia
Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benefit of the sinner. One might read Christ's answer to his disciples' question regarding why a man had been born blind - 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him' (John 9:3) - either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if - setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as superstitious, stochastic, and secondary - we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
David Bentley Hart
He’s evil in a can.
John Jackson Miller
Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.
Criss Jami
If you do not understand the Golden Rule, which is the most important law in the universe, then you are in trouble. All other rules in your holy books combined — are not as valuable as the ONE Golden Rule. Take two minutes to learn the most crucial law in life. Killing another human comes with the highest penalty, regardless of how you justify it. All life is sacred.
Suzy Kassem
Confrontation is not bad. Goodness is supposed to confront evil.
Fred Shuttlesworth
He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.
Rick Riordan
Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.
Christopher Hitchens
If evil had a laugh, she thought it would sound like his.
Nenia Campbell
The daggers of silence last longer than anything ever spoken.
Shannon L. Alder
The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun…
Jim Morrison
But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.
Zoë Heller
If we were always given a choice as to every path presented us in life, a multitude of roads leading to priceless treasures would forever go untraveled.Be grateful for your adversities. From toil and triumph evolves a life worth li
Richelle E. Goodrich
And the geography of the thing--the geography of them--was completely and hopelessly wrong.
Jennifer E. Smith
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Stephen King
He had the strangest feeling come over him, which he'd never before known. Like he was meeting his best friend, for the first time. It was recognition mixed with relief...but also some amount of joy. Like, "Oh, there you are! It's so great to meet you finally! I've missed you!
Elizabeth Gannon
Warner. A white bird with streaks of gold like a crown atop its head. A fair - skinned boy with gold hair, the leader of Sector 45. It was always him. All along . The link.
Tahereh Mafi
That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.
Anna Godbersen
We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.
Dean Koontz
Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
We are no longer under the 'Law', but rather the Grace of God in Christ."~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
If it wasn’t for all those silver wings spread out to help you on your journey, you would’a been dead or someplace screamin’ in a nut house a long time ago.
Aberjhani
God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace.
Frederick Buechner
God is gracious to always give a warning before He sends judgment.
Jim George
Grace will meet you in the valley, and her song will carry you home on the wind to another sky filled with ethereal beauty unfolding and love everlasting.
Shannon L. Alder
I think timing is better left up to God to decide then religious leaders. I once met a man that brought his wife flowers in the hospital. They held hands, kissed and were as affectionate as any cute couple could be. They were both in their eighties. I asked them how long they were married. I expected them to tell me fifty years or longer. To my surprise, they said only five years. He then began to explain to me that he was married thirty years to someone that didn’t love him, and then he remarried a second time only to have his second wife die of cancer, two years later. I looked at my patient (his wife) sitting in the wheelchair next to him smiling. She added that she had been widowed two times. Both of her marriages lasted fifteen years. I was curious, so I asked them why they would even bother pursuing love again at their age. He looked at me with astonishment and said, “Do you really think that you stop looking for a soulmate at our age? Do you honestly believe that God would stop caring about how much I needed it still, just because I am nearing the end of my life? No, he left the best for last. I have lived through hell, but if I only get five years of happiness with this woman then it was worth the years of struggle I have been through.
Shannon L. Alder
We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand.
Anne Lamott
Wisdom is an ornament of grace to the soul.
Elizabeth George
Let no one take the limited, narrow position that any of the works of man can help in the least possible way to liquidate the debt of his transgression. This is a fatal deception. If you would understand it, you must cease haggling over your pet ideas, and with humble hears survey the atonement. This matter is so dimly comprehended that thousands upon thousands claiming to be sons of God are children of the wicked one, because they will depend on their own works. God always demanded good works, the law demands it, but because man placed himself in sin where his good works were valueless, Jesus' righteousness alone can avail. Christ is able to save to the uttermost because He ever liveth to make intercession for us. All man can possibly do toward his own salvation is to accept the invitation, "Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.
Ellen G. White
The sun, rising and setting in splendid colors, never grows tired of its admirers―much like a lady, aglow with grace, never grows tired of chivalrous acts or pretty flowers.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I used to move gracefully. I used to know the word grace to the center of my bones. Now I seek it every day and fall short, inevitably, every day. I lost grace.
Katherine Locke
Dignity impacts everything in your life. It affects the quality of your internal world for how you see, feel, and think about yourself.
Susan C.Young
Do you see dignity & grace as a state of emotional and spiritual being or a physical projection of courage and class? Perhaps they describe both.
Susan C.Young
Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.
Marilynne Robinson
Her tone changed from shocked to curious. “How was it? Was it… different?”Sarah bit her lip, ashamed to be gossiping but feeling the strong urge to tell. “Yes,”she confided. “He’s nothing like John. Nothing like him at all.”“Really? What was different? Did he…?” Grace waved a hand as though erasing achalkboard. “Oh, forget it. I shouldn’t be asking this. But,” again her voice lowered, “is he tattooed everywhere?”Sarah knew it was wrong to talk about him like this, but her inner schoolgirl took over and she nodded, eager to share details. “He’s beautiful … like a stained glass window. And he’s really good with his … mouth.” She raised an eyebrow, giving Grace a significant look.Her friend gasped and giggled. “But isn’t it weird? Touching him?”“Skin is skin, Grace,” Sarah chided. “The tattoos are only on the surface, you know.He’s a man.” A sexy, vulnerable, intense, attractive, responsible, sweet, gentle and loving man.
Bonnie Dee
Some people's theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.
Criss Jami
True repentance is a turning from sin . . . Humanly speaking, it is our small part in the plan of salvation. Our part is repenting. God will do the converting, the transforming, and the forgiving.
Billy Graham
Oh God, if You want me to preach, I will do it.
Billy Graham
Have you fallen into the world’s trap, following its self-indulgent goals and driven by its self-centered motives? It can happen without you even being aware of it. Make sure Christ is first in your life, and make it your goal to live according to His Word.
Billy Graham
Jesus told His disciples that the “world,” meaning the world system, the political and social order organized apart from God, will despise Christians.
Billy Graham
Next time when I dive into the territory that I had lived next to, where my sister grew up, I know what to expect. I would be ready. I would be prepared.
Erica Sehyun Song
The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.
Alessandra Torre
Crying is part of the adventure
Gail Carson Levine
It was definitely a new way of life for people who had become so used to being entertained by televisions, computers and technology." -from Day After Disaster
Sara F. Hathaway
The sad thing about miracles is that they’re unique. They can’t be explained, or shared, or duplicated. And they absolutely cannot be captured and made to perform on demand. If that day ever came, our world would die for lack of wonder.
Bryan Fields
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...” ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Lisa M. Collins
It's like you're averse to adventure.
Gayle Forman
The only woman who would wear a gown like this one, love, is one who knows the power she wields and isn’t afraid to use it.
Tamara Hughes
Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge….There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find what I really sought was something I had left behind.
Thomas F. Hornbein
Capture your youth, while you can.
Anthony Liccione
People gravitated here for the open air, the prolific intoxicants and the visual treats. They made the deals here that were later played out elsewhere. They drank and got high. Sometimes they fought, not for money but for sport or grudge.They were the desperate and the daring, the lost and the searching. Tonight, they were his audience. Tomorrow, they would be his front line.
G.S. Jennsen
They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.
Malcolm Cowley
Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.
Eveli Acosta
The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.
Helen Bevington
Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.
Donna Lynn Hope
Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire.
Criss Jami
Testing the wrong person can prove a massive failure for the antagonist.
Carlos Wallace
The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The fear of getting knocked down is less about the pain of the fall and more about the embarrassment in having fallen. And so, to rid myself of the latter is to reduce my concern about the former, which means I just unleashed my life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I will be known forever as the Puppy who chased a cutpurse and caught fish garbage instead. My descendants will pretend I'm not in their bloodline. No – no one will want to make descendants with me. [from Beka Cooper's journal of her first day as a new Dog i.e. cop]
Tamora Pierce