Quotes by American Authors - Page 5

But at the time I thought that if I could just get the world to see me the way I saw myself then my body wouldn't be the thing you walked away thinking about. I wouldn't be that fat girl.
Gabourey Sidibe
Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.
Walter Isaacson
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism
Alexander Hamilton
December 29, 1946: Snowing this morning. The year seems to be dying in a light white blanket. Only three more days of this year, then comes a new one. Then, what? No one knows. -- Diary of Bertha Kate Gaddis who passed away 6 months later, age 78, West Lafayette, IN.
Angie Klink
...she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. "I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.
Carol Shields
This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarkoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day.
Robert K. Massie
Broad-Based Education:Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… Itwas beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practicalapplication in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.—Commencement address, Stanford University,June 12, 2005
George Beahm
Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.
Frances Mayes
Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying."Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason,but at the very least you will be living grandly.
Marisha Pessl
He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.
George Plimpton
Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild."“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 conservatism, 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.
Jon Krakauer
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.
Paul Auster
Always live your life with your biography in mind.
Marisha Pessl
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain
How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
Christopher Hitchens
I cried because I was so beautiful.
Victoria Kann
My intellect was my greatest vanity.
Dan Simmons
Vanity, right?" Nash reappeared in the living room with an open bag of potato chips. "I nominate my venerable brother. He likes to play hero, and one look at him should establish the vanity angle.""Nash!" I really shouldn't have been surprised by the dig. But I was."What?" He raised one brow at me in challenge. "It's okay to call me jealous, but not to call him vain?""Awareness of one's obvious advantages doesn't imply vanity," Tod insisted calmly.Nash turned on him. "Does it imply narcissism?"Tod huffed. "This coming from the guy who owns more hair products than his girlfriend.
Rachel Vincent
She was the most alone person he had ever met - so intent on staying forever breathtaking that she could never let any of life's glories take her own breath away.
Jenny Wingfield
Agatha: "If you say anything smug or stuck-up or shallow, I'll have Reaper follow you home."Sophie: "But then I can't talk!
Soman Chainani
The false face had been handsome, yes, but consciously so. As though he was too aware of his own attractivensss, something she found distinctly unappealing.
Erin Morgenstern
Admiring and a little overwhelmed by the simple opulence of the limousine’s interior, she shook snowflakes from her scarf and tresses, hoping the rare effort she had put into doing her hair was not entirely r
Roberta Pearce
What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked. "Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of expensive books they've never read.
Ruta Sepetys
Jo, they have a baby grand piano, but no one in the family plays. They have shelves of books they've never read, and the tension between the couples was so thick it nearly choked us.""Let me tell you something 'bout those rich Uptown folk," said Cokie. "They got everything that money can buy, their bank accounts are fat, but they ain't happy. They ain't ever gone be happy. You know why? They soul broke. And money can't fix that, no sir. My friend Bix was poor. Lord, he had to blow that trumpet ten hours a day just to put a little taste in the pot. Died poor, too. You saw him, Jo, with that plate on his chest. But that man wasn't soul broke.
Ruta Sepetys
Robert Ashford possessed one of the key character flaws necessary to a traitor. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. This allowed the overeducated career bureaucrat to sell out his own country, because he believed he knew what was best for his nation and its people.
Brad Thor
The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
Eric Hoffer
My vanity suggested I should take offense, but the deeper part of me was relieved- relieved that he was noble enough to want to make such a sacrifice from his heart rather than from his desire to impress me.
Jody Hedlund
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.
Dennis Lehane
Like all vain men, he had moments of unreasonable confidence.
Warren Eyster
I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
Truman Capote
Doesn't matter how pretty you are. What's important is how pretty you feel. No one feels pretty when they hear "no" often enough.
Jim Butcher
Vain until the bitter end.
Sarah J Maas
Gertrude, behind her, again had just one... That one little feather she had as a starter. But now that's enough, because now she is smarter.
Dr. Seuss
Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.
Mark Helprin
Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.
N K Jemisin
Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.
Don DeLillo
Of all the weaknesses that beset a man, vanity is the most deadly. For through vanity can a wise man turn to folly.
Raymond E. Feist
One quick glance in the mirror is enough for a lifetime.
Marty Rubin
I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.
Jeff Lindsay
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.
J.D. Salinger
I'm not good, of course; I wouldn't give a fig to be good. So it's not vanity. It's on a far grander scale; a splendid selfishness, - authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to worship beauty, -and there's the fifth commandment, you know.
Harriet Prescott Spofford
You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.
Catherynne M. Valente
I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.
Peter S Beagle
Clichés so often befall vain people.
Ann Beattie
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
Edith Wharton
But who bothers looking beyond the surface? Who even knows anything about Cinderella's Prince Charming - other than he's a handsome prince?
Mandy Hubbard
I'm brilliant as well as skilled," he said modestly. "It's a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can.
Jim Butcher
guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
Toni Morrison
Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.
Jim Butcher
We all know you're beautiful, Scott.
Becca Fitzpatrick
There's something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he's pretty and assumes everyone else know it too.
Nova Ren Suma
A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.
Lisa Kleypas
50,000-63,000 individuals in the United States and 19,000-25,000 in the UK die prematurely from cancer annually due to insufficient vitamin D.
John Cannell
Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.
Wally Lamb
Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.
John Green
If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
John Green
I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.
John Green
Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.
Mary Burton Maggie Watson