Quotes by American Authors - Page 8

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
Mark Lawrence
In order to create an idea... to become an idea, it is a necessity for you to believe that it is your own idea. The idea will grow to define your entire life. And when you die... you don't.
Lionel Suggs
When I was girl by Nilus stream I watched the deserts stars arise; My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx, Learned all his dreaming from eyes. I bore in Greece a burning name, And I have been in Italy Madonna to a painter-lad, And mistress to a Medici. And have you heard (and I have heard) Of puzzled men with decorous mien, Who judged - the wench knew far too much - And burnt her on the Salem green?
Adelaide Crapsey
I took my menial life for granted until it became clear, why my early years resulted in a lack of adoption.- J.D. Stroube (Rival: Prelude to the Mirage Chronicles.)
J.D. Stroube
But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.
Cormac McCarthy
You know it’s the 21st Century when someone TEXTS you from the washroom to ask you to bring them a roll of toilet paper.
Tanya Masse
The astounding natural beauty of the USA is offset by its extremely poor social security system that is clearly apparent when driving around the country.
Steven Magee
Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.
Charles Manning Child
A few years after working on Mauna Kea, I discovered that I had radiation sickness
Steven Magee
All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.
Sam Kean
Sometimes in life, from out of a myriad of prosaic decisions like what to eat and where to sleep and how to dress, a true crossroads is revealed. In these moments, when the fog of relative irrelevancy lifts and fate rolls out a demand for free will, there is only left or right – no option of four-by-fouring into the underbrush between two paths, no negotiating with the choice that has been presented. You must answer the call and pick your way. And there is no reverse.
J.R. Ward
I could not undo overnight the damage that had been done to my psyche over many years. The only way over was through-I knew that_ but it was still debilitating and stressful. All I could do was face the fear and keep going.
Carolyn Jessop
When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.
Tom DeMarco
Positive emotions and mental states may make people more resilient to stress, like sturdy tree branches that bend but don’t break when battered by a storm
Melanie Greenberg
When your stomach turns somersaults every time you see your love interest, when you can go without eating for half a day because you can't think of anything else, and when the sound of her voice blocks out every possible distraction each time you hear it...then logic's role becomes a very minor one.
Erik Tomblin
She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.
Zelda Fitzgerald
See that's where you're wrong baby. When you find your man, it's almost too easy. Gettin' married and havin' a mortgage, kids and a business to run and findin' a way to stay in love day in day out, that's the tougher part. But the beginning'… that parts easy as pie. That's why they call it fallin' because it happens before you have time to stop yourself.
Rachel Hollis
He'd been saving up his love for years and years, waiting for the right personto spend his fortune on.
John Mark Green
Daniel reaches out and grabs my hand to steady me. His skin is warm and soft, and holding his hand sends an electric sensation up my right arm. He holds my hand firmly until I regain my balance, which takes me a heartbeat longer than it should have.“Thanks for keeping me from falling,” I say. He smiles warmly. “Sometimes we just can’t stop ourselves from falling, cher.
Lisa Daily
They listened more than they talked, but that was the way of wise men and women.
Lee Goff
Our civic life is heavily marked—indeed, pocked—by debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate—in its original sense of “to consider something, to deliberate”—is impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained.
Leah Hager Cohen
Due to previous lack of systematic assessment of dissociative symptoms, many subjects experience the SCID-D as their first opportunity to describe their symptoms in their own words to a receptive listener.
Marlene Steinberg
That's what mild television fame is like: it's like walking through the world with your fly down.
Dave Holmes
You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.
Jerry Spinelli
She looked up and their eyes locked. “Want to be my birthday present?” she asked in a breathy whisper.Chase’s mother didn’t raise any fools. He released her hips and trailed his hand down her arm until their fingers entwined.“Let’s get out of here.”He tugged her from the dance floor, trying not to rush like he was running from a fire. But, damn. There was a fire in his britches.
Tamara Hoffa
How have you always felt?” he wondered.“Loved.” Her eyes opened and met his. “Wanted, happy, excited. A little sad.”He felt himself stiffen. “Why sad?”“Because it always feels like one lifetime with you just isn’t enough.
Airicka Phoenix
Turns out, most girls would rather put on lip gloss than play with sand toads.
Jenny Lundquist
P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy.
Jenny Lundquist
What's all this nonsense about odd vision and not fitting in? There are plenty worse things in this world than not fitting in--like fitting in way too much. You strike me as a real original, Izzy Malone, in a world that loves carbon copies. If you think you beautified something, I believe you. I've never understood why folks love safe, neutral colors so much. Colors are what make this world worth living in.
Jenny Lundquist
I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.
Jenny Lundquist
As for learning to wear high heels, no need to worry. I've got no tolerance for those dreadful things. If God wanted us girls tottering around like a bunch of drunken sailors, we'd have been born wearing stilts!
Jenny Lundquist
The weaker the argument the louder and more frequent the rhetoric.
Ken Poirot
There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life.
Charles Bukowski
Always you, since the moment I first lay my hands on you to heal that bullet wound. SinceI fell inside your soul. Don’t you know that by now, Quinn?
Alyssa Day
Finally, she looked up at him and met his gaze, and she gasped. He knew what must be visible on his face and therefore did not try to deny it. “You know,” he rasped out. “You have always known, and you will always know that I am yours, and yet never can be. I am the most powerful high priest Poseidon has ever appointed, and yet I am too weak to hide the depths of my feelings for you.
Alyssa Day
I could take a shower every day in my own bathroom. I almost didn’t know what to do with such luxury. Other than, you know, not stink.
Brandon Sanderson
A hot shower, and a little food might help how he felt. But he doubted anything could take away the vision he kept having of Day flying over the bed and slamming into his dresser. God squeezed his eyes shut. Fuck. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.Too much happened in that room at one time. God wasn’t seeing straight. Genesis was beating the hell out of him. Day had violated his trust. His hood neighbors had barged into his home and choked his baby brother. God had so much medication coursing through him, he’d reacted without thinking.Now he wanted to call Day so badly, but he needed to let things cool off between them. Then he’d have to figure out how he was going to make it up to him.
A.E. Via
Annabeth looked at me. " We have to get out of here." " You think I want to be in the girls' restroom?" " I mean the ship, Percy! We have to get off the ship." " Smells bad," Tyson agreed. " And dogs eat all the eggs. Annabeth is right. We must leave the restroom and the ship.
Rick Riordan
Correct." Kekrops sounded bitter, like he regretted his decision. "My people were the original Athenians--the gemini.""Like your zodiac sign?" Percy asked. "I'm a Leo.""No, stupid. "I'm a Leo. You're a Percy.
Rick Riordan
I sat up in bed. "What did he say?"Tyson groaned, still half asleep. He was lying facedown on the couch, his feet so far over the edge they were in the bathroom. "The happy man said...bowling practice?"I hoped he was right, but then there was an urgent knock on the suite's interior door. Annabeth stuck her head in--her blonde hair in a rat's nest. "DISEMBOWLING practice?
Rick Riordan
Percy, we're going to Polyphemus' island! Polyphemus is an S-i-k...a C-y-k..." She stamped her foot in frustration. As smart as she was, Annabeth was dyslexic, too. We could've been there all night while she tried to spell Cyclops. "You know what I mean!
Rick Riordan
Don't you ever feel like, what if the world really IS messed up? What if we COULD Do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.'m listening. Annabeth: I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did--that's why the fire is still burning. That's why OlympusIs still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: 'If I could tear this all down, i would do it better.'. Don't you ever feel that way? Like YOU could do a better job I'd you ran the world?Percy:Um...no. Me running the world would be kind of a nightmare. Annabeth: then you're lucky. Hubris isn't your fatal flaw.Percy: what is?Annabeth: I don't know, Percy, but every hero has one. If you don't find it and learn to control it...well, they don't call it 'fatal' for nothing. Percy(thinking to himself): I thought about that. It didn't exactly cheer me up.
Rick Riordan
Butch hesitated. "Annabeth's okay. You gotta cut her some slack. She had a vision telling her to come here, to find a guy with one shoe. That was supposed to be the answer to her problem.""What Problem?" Piper asked."She's been looking for one of our campers, who's been missing three days," Butch said. "She's going out of her mind with worry. She hoped he'd be here.""Who?" Jason asked."Her boyfriend," Butch said, "A guy named Percy Jackson.
Rick Riordan
Annabeth:My fatal flaw. That's what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris. Percy: the brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?Annabeth:No, Seaweed Brain. That's HUMMUS. hubris is worse.Percy: what could be worse than hummus? Annabeth: Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else... Even the gods.
Rick Riordan
Hey, can I see that sword you were using?"I showed him Riptide, and explained how it turned from a pen into a sword just by uncapping it."Cool! Does it ever run out of ink?""Um, well, I don't actually write with it.""Are you really the son of Poseidon?""Well, yeah.""Can you surf really well, then?"I looked at Grover, who was trying hard not to laugh."Jeez, Nico," I said. "I've never really tried."He went on asking questions. Did I fight a lot with Thalia, since she was a daughter of Zeus? (I didn't answer that one.) If Annabeth's mother was Athena, the goddess of wisdom, then why didn't Annabeth know better than to fall off a cliff? (I tried not to strangle Nico for asking that one.) Was Annabeth my girlfriend? (At this point, I was ready to stick the kid in a meat-flavored sack and throw him to the wolves.)
Rick Riordan
There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.
Curtis Bill Pepper
Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.
J. Christopher Herold
Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.
John Updike
He said to the cardinal, "I'm a peasant, not instructed in the ways of heaven. But I have never broken my word. And you, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, with all your holy garments and crosses of Jesus, lied to me like a heathen Moor. Your sacred office alone will not save your life.
Mario Puzo
Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.
James Baldwin
All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
Alice Walker
In the days following the crash, an axiom as old as the Republic came into play once more. In good times Wall Street wanted Washington to leave it alone. In bad times it wanted Washington to act.
Haynes Johnson
The real moments that changed the world are when church members miss the meaning of a whole sermon, and take no accountability for the testimonies they damage, by being self-righteous.
Shannon L. Alder
What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing
Willem Lange
He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.
Kevin Brockmeier
Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.
Mike Bond
Death gets a bad rap. People think that euthanasia is putting their pets “down” when it really is lifting us up. In the first moment, when we come back to earth, we remember the comfort of the Heaven we came from and this is why we cry when we are born. When we are born in Heaven we come in laughing not crying! In birth we have the passage and then the pain. In death we have the pain and then the passage.
Kate McGahan
It’s amazing how two thin pieces of clothing can hold such deep memories. Laughter, pain, victory, defeat, friendship, fatigue, elation… they’re all there, but only to the person who’s worn the uniform
Wendelin Van Draanen
This message is brought to you by the BCBS [Booty Call Broadcasting System]. If you are back in town, get your wet ass over here." (The Hook Up, 42%)
Kristen Callihan