Quotes by American Authors - Page 37

Many people define beauty as skin deep, but I’ve found the beauty in physical and superficial changes that continue throughout the life of a woman.
Alyscia Cunningham
I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A
Clint Catalyst
It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit.
Regina O'Melveny
Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.
Lee Smith
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
Willa Cather
If old age is good for anything it's good for being generous.
William Kuhn
Rich old people are more attractive than poor old people, so by all means, try to get rich before age sets in. Otherwise, you'll just be playing catch-up for the rest of your life and that will just wear you out, let me tell you.
Jill Conner Browne
After all these years, his best friend is malaria.Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
Louis Bayard
As I've gotten older, I have taught myself to act "normal." I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.
John Elder Robison
Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now. (p.125 )
Michael Zadoorian
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.
Michael Zadoorian
[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
Donald Hall
A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)
Victoria Moran
I Didn't Ask to Be a Senior Citizen (I Was Drafted)
Doug Jensen
Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.
Phyllis Diller
I say haven’t we had enough of just tossing our children in jail? Make them do community service, I say!
Jacquel Chrissy May
The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
Neil Postman
...this two-way hatred. I don’t understand it. I wonder how much of it is caused by fear?
Judy Blume
He [Alexander von Humboldt] was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama.
Robert G. Ingersoll
There's something to say about inspiration - when it comes into your life...the feeling is insatiable.
Ann Marie Frohoff
Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.
Ellen Bass
Upon the publication of Goethe’s epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy.
E.A. Bucchianeri
……, but as I am a scholar I feel obliged to document what it is like here, most of the time, between the dramatic climaxes. In truth it is like this: You cannot imagine how time can be so still. It hangs. It weighs, and yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly and it is so scarce. If I was writing this scene it would last a full 15 minutes. I would lie here and you would sit there.
Margaret Edson
The other girl, Iko, cupped her chin with both hands. "This is so much better than a net drama.
Marissa Meyer
It has been known for many years that a subset of the population cannot tolerate the radiation emitted by transmitting utility meters and sickness results in these people.
Steven Magee
Stray voltage/current/frequency is the most serious form of exposure. Electrocution kills very few people per year. Stray voltage/current/frequency exposure is suspected to be making people sick in the millions!
Steven Magee
I might be manipulating you to create risk for myself.
Sharon Stone
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
David Carr
People can become addicted to fame, money, and attention as deeply as they become addicted to drugs.
Dennis Prager
When you push someone's head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber.And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.
Oliver Markus
I was at this guy's house. I met this girl who was hanging out there. She was real pretty, she had brown eyes and dark hair. She was soft-spoken and real nice. I know that everyone has their own life and they can do what they want and you shouldn't think anything of it or anything. But man, I couldn't help but flinch a little when I saw all those needle marks in her arm, they looked so sore. Hateful little holes. I wanted to say something, but I didn't.
Henry Rollins
When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.
Chris Prentiss
But I know that in my heart of hearts that drinking is about as good an escape as an innocent game of suicide skiing, so I know also that David's complete obsession with video games of this type, or any type, are far from healthy.
Sarabeth Purcell
I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.
Steven Magee
When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.
H.W. Brands
The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. An all-encompassing, fully enveloping, completely overwhelming obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth.
James Frey
Under the influence, I am easily influenced. I try to keep my pants on, but some things are easier said than done.
Kris Kidd
she said, “I swear, I put something in my mouth one time, and I’m addicted. I think I have oral fixation issues.
Alannah Lynne
Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn't fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to sleep, and have fun without a pill or a line to help me function. These days it felt like I might have a nervous breakdown if I didn't have them.
Cherie Currie
There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
Sam Keen
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A budget tells us what we can't afford, but it doesn't keep us from buying it.
William Feather
Prosperity starts in ones heart not their pocket.
Ricky Maye
All through time, people have basically acted and reacted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. That is why the numerical formations and patternsrecur on a constant basis. Over and over, with slight variations. Because markets are driven by humans and human nature never changes.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Monetary policy does not work like a scalpel but more like a sledgehammer.
Liaquat Ahamed
he had kidded with us that if we didn't let go at the proper moment, he would slap our hands with a stick, and we had all laughed because who would be silly enough to hang on when they should let go?
Dee-Williams
Maybe the things she loved most weren't meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.
Julie Schumacher
Guilt and fear are a kind of rot. It spreads unless it's cleaned. And there's only one way to do that.
Lee Goldberg
And that for every negative event or coincidence that has happened since, imagining that you triggered them, that you made them happen makes you feel like you possess a degree of control that you don't have.
Michelle Hodkin
Guilt doesn't follow the rules of time. Most things fade with time, regret, eyesight, memories. But guilt feeds on time, and as it feeds, it grows, and when it runs out of time, it begins to gnaw on the guilty.
J.D. Mason
God has broken me in every way possible. I spent a year not caring, a year trying to figure out what I'd done to deserve it. and a year trying to make it right.
Cassandra Giovanni
It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
Aleksandar Hemon
I asked Mama was it a sin to do what I done, and she said no, it was the same as David slaying Goliath, it was only to save Ulyssa and the others, not because of meanness that I did it. I would do it again, too. I am not sorry, but this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed.
Nancy E. Turner
I have only ever known Guilt to have one weakness, one not easily given and not easily found: Forgiveness...In truth, Guilt’s strength lies not in the failure of others to grant us forgiveness, but in our failure to forgive ourselves.
Kelseyleigh Reber
On the perfect night there is nothing more transcendent or terrifying than boxing. It's the ultimate representation of the guilty pleasure.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Jesus isn't suffering day after day for your sin. He sits triumphantly at the right hand of God and has won the final and decisive victory for you. If constant lamenting over your sin could actually help you atone for it, then it would be a noble act. However, since there is nothing to be added to your salvation and your agony contributes nothing to your salvation or sanctification, then you are free to walk through life with confidence in your forgiveness. Godly sorrow for sin does not lead to self-condemnation and attempts to atone for your sins through acts of penance. Godly sorrow leads to repentance, which leads us to the cross. There we see, once again, the beautiful sufficiency of our marvelous Savior. Godly sorrow leads us on to a big party, another glorious celebration of the truth of the gospel.
Barbara R. Duguid
I can turn every "is" into "ought ".
Kevin DeYoung
It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
Vladimir Nabokov
[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
Christopher Hitchens
I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did. I don't.
Veronica Roth