Quotes by American Authors - Page 64

I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can't do.
Edgar Watson Howe
Any talent that we are born with eventually surfaces as a need.
Marsha Sinetar
All of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their fullest extent. ... And every life must be chalked up at least a partial failure when it does not succeed in reaching its inherent destiny.
Smiley Blanton
Each of us has some unique capability waiting for realization. Every person is valuable in his own existence for himself alone ... each of us can bring to fruition these innate God-given abilities.
George H. Bender
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Flannery O'Connor
In the first grade I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it but I knew the line. ... From the first day in school until the day I graduated everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.
Louise Nevelson
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless speed up. If you become winded slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then when you're no longer thinking ahead each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size or it is not the door that providence means for him.
Henry Ward Beecher
I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame you just do it.
Doris Lund
I look at ordinary people in their suits them with no scars and I'm different. I don't fit with them. I'm where everybody's got scar tissue on their eyes and got noses like saddles. I go to conventions of old fighters like me and I see the scar tissue and all them flat noses and it's beautiful. ... They talk like me like they got rocks in their throats. Beautiful!
Willie Pastrano
The source of continuing aliveness was to find your passion and pursue it with whole heart and single mind.
Gail Sheehy
For a long time the only time I felt beautiful-in the sense of being complete as a woman as a human being and even female-was when I was singing.
Leontyne Price
I'm uncomfortable when I'm comfortable ... I can't help it it's my personality.
Jay Chiat
I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn't pronounce my R's. I wasn't a beauty.
Barbara Walters
It is healthier in any case to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
Alice Walker
Criticism ... makes very little dent upon me unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I'm not going to limit myself just because some people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.
Dolly Parton
Innovators are inevitably controversial.
Eva Le Gallienne
Go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize after something's been done than to get permission ahead of time.
Grace Murray Hopper
Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages.
Hazel Henderson
The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz
That suit is best that best suits me.
John Clark
If you're gonna be a failure at least be one at something you enjoy.
Sylvester Stallone
I searched through rebellion drugs diets mysticism religions intellectu-alism and much more only to begin to find ... that truth is basically simple-and feels good clean and right.
Chick Corea
Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If we do not rise to the challenge of our unique capacity to shape our lives to seek the kinds of growth that we find individually fulfilling then we can have no security: we will live in a world of sham in which our selves are determined by the will of others in which we will be constantly buffeted and increasingly isolated by the changes round us.
Nena O'Neil
Dress to please yourself.... Forget you are what you wear.... Wear what you are.
Elizabeth Hawkes
Follow what you love! Don't deign to ask what "they" are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests which change but what you are and what you love which will and should not change.
Georgie Anne Geyer
There are as many ways to live and grow as there are people. Our own ways are the only ways that should matter to us.
Evelyn Mandel
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual you have an obligation to be one.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness.
Leo Buscaglia
I was raised to sense what someone wanted me to be and be that kind of person. It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.
Sally Field
Let the world know you as you are not as you think you should be because sooner or later if you are posing you will forget the pose and then where are you?
Fanny Brice
I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman
It is possible to be different and still be all right.
Anne Wilson Schaef
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
Helen Merrell Lynd
The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is.
John Lancaster Spalding
Theories are like scaffolding: they are not the house but you cannot build the house without them.
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Janis Joplin
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.
Thomas Paine
I think God rarely gives to one man or one set of men more than one great moral victory to win.
Lucy Stone
Every human being is intended to have a character of his own to be what no others are and to do what no other can do.
William Ellery Channing
Man has no nobler function than to defend the truth.
Mahalia Jackson
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself
James Russell Lowell
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings
Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody other than the person he is.
Angelo Patri
I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes economic pressure and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.
Naomi Wolf
Whatever you want in life other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
Diane Sawyer
I believe there's an inner power that makes winners or losers. And the winners are the ones who really listen to the truth of their hearts.
Sylvester Stallone
Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate As the voyage along thru life 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal And not the calm or the strife.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
The possibilities are unlimited as long as you are true to your life's purpose.
Marcia Wieder
I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Helen Keller
We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.
Sonia Johnson
The world may take your reputation from you but it cannot take your character.
Emma Dunham Kelley
Keep integrity and your work ethics intact. So what if that means working a little harder an honorable character is your best calling card and that's something anyone can have!
Kathy Ireland