Quotes by American Authors - Page 82

As it peaks over the horizon, does not a sunrise whisper the opportunity to try again. And if the day passes and our efforts were stunted by the bane of our insecurities or blunted by the challenges of life, does not a sunset invite us to rest before it whispers the same message the next morning?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware and worthy of Your listening. I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You. I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.They are modest, my prayers, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land. I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too. I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only implore You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together
Elie Wiesel
ving self and others is an every second of every day of every week, of every month, of every year gift that should not be taken for granted or withdrawn for petty arguments and misunderstandings. No one knows the day nor the hour that we or a loved one will meet our expiration here on this earth. Time to make time to heal, amend and/or forgive broken relationships, to live your dreams without regret and love like there is no tomorrow for when tomorrow is no longer there...memories will be great and consciences will be clear.
Sanjo Jendayi
You stubborn bastard. Take it from someone who knows firsthand, there’s a lot to be said for forgiveness. Grudges seldom hurt anyone except the one bearing them.""And there’s a lot to be said for knocking enemies upside their heads and cracking skulls open."Ash & Urian
Sherrilyn Kenyon
When we forgive, the slave we free is ourselves.
Edward M. Hallowell
Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community ofhumans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no onecan be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long withoutovercoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from thesphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself fromthe sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. Whenone knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternallytriumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity andimitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates]that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light ofGod’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.
Miroslav Volf
A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.
Criss Jami
I don't understand women that call themselves a "bitch". It doesn't empower a woman. Rather, it reveals to everyone that you were deeply hurt at one time. Because of the pain your still carrying, you will continue to hurt anyone that reminds you of those moments when you let your guard down and were fooled. Sadly, it sends a clear message to the observant that you are still hurt. If only women would realize that "we all" have moments of stupidity then they would stop comparing themselves to the masses.
Shannon L. Alder
Make sure when you reach for the stars, you keep both feet firmly planted on the ground.
Charles F. Glassman
I have finally figured out the meaning of life: there's no such thing. And that's a beautiful thing, because that means that WE get to choose it ourselves. Life has no meaning besides the meaning you give it. You are indeed the author of your destiny. So why not write a book worth reading?
Dean Bokhari
Love transports mortal beings to the existential plane of spiritual eternity transcending the emotional, mental, and physical limitations of an inaccurately perceived finite existence.
Ken Poirot
To be sure, just because the darkness and the light are equally sacred does not mean we benefit by becoming complacent about the darkness we may meet in ourselves. Ultimately, if we are to cleanse the mirror of perception and purify ourselves, then we must bring light into the darkness. That’s always been the path of consciousness and the movement of illumination. This coexistence of darkness and light indeed creates a dance in which the clarity of light is invited to lead, but it does not create a hierarchy.
Tehya Sky
All my relationships and all of my challenges are opportunities for my soul to evolve.
Eileen Anglin
Strong people are those who have been broken so many times, lost many people in life but still have love to give and strength to trust again.
Steeven Shaw
At Learning's fountain it is sweet to drink, But 'tis a nobler privilege to think.
John Godfrey Saxe
You make me want things that I can't have.
Kendare Blake
Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life - that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.
Victoria Erickson
The most important legacy you will ever leave is your vision planted in the minds of your disciples and a passion as strong as a storm in their hearts.
Shannon L. Alder
Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. One word absent from a sentence can drastically change the true intended meaning of the entire sentence. For instance, if the word love is intentionally or accidentally replaced with hate in a sentence, its effect could trigger a war or false dogma.
Suzy Kassem
The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grit and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, inter-breeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban boilto houses, shacks whose only romance was their names
Ernest Hemingway
A scent of lavender cannot be put into words.
Marty Rubin
Sometimes we don't get second chances. Sometimes things just end.
Colleen Hoover
The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.
Robert Smithson
Zoe let the poetry flow over her, like shadows on water, sunlight against stone: timeworn words shaped like stars, like shells, like the ruins of lost temples, soft as the breaths of mystics.
Christine Brodien-Jones
Never underestimate wisdom in silence, proof isn't always a mouthful of words.
Anthony Liccione
Is love always like this? Is it always so passionate, yet so damn painful?
Anna Todd
What good are words if no one believes them?
Rachel L. Schade
It occurred to Keth for the first time that perhaps magic wasn't simply a matter of fires, lightning, and power in the air, if spoken words could also create such a transformation.
Tamora Pierce
The annihilating strokes slashed across my penned heartfelt words.
Jazz Feylynn
Watch your mouth: The language we use creates the reality we experience.
Michael Hyatt
Curses. Jesus. It took all kinds. There wasn't anything to a curse but words. Just like blessings and prayers and all the rest of it. People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference.
Mindy Mejia
The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.
Dexter Palmer
Attending to your own words and ideas as well as those of others is an admirable trait in any person, but a necessity in a leader.
Jennifer Frick-Ruppert
His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.
Jami Attenberg
I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way. The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be — and act — human.
Derrick Jensen
The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words - there's so much more of life that only words can convey - strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer's direction from the start, not a photographer's or a recorder's.
Eudora Welty
For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy-five miles an hour, through a blur of million-dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man re-lives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.
Robert Penn Warren
Disappear, she says. I love that word.
Will Christopher Baer
What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them--or they cling to her--as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her.
Patricia A. McKillip
So many thoughts ran through my head. Most of them contained the same, simply three words so often strung together that it was too much a classic cheese or cliche to say it, but they still had meaning, no matter how many times they had been repeated.
Alysha Speer
I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.
Evan Mandery
Are you watching the boats?" Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.Heavens no, I'm spying on people," Virginia responded unrepentantly.-Cornelia E and Virginia Somerset
Lesley M.M. Blume
It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.
Veronica Roth
If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?
E.A. Bucchianeri
Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.
Francine Prose
Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!").
Amy Smith
Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.
Camron Wright
I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.
Ander Monson
Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment.
Aberjhani
Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.
Roman Payne
A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.
Sergio Troncoso
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.
Henry David Thoreau
The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.
Jack Cady
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
Harold Bloom
His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.
Cormac McCarthy
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.
Vladimir Nabokov
Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own.
Kelseyleigh Reber
Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway
Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.
Kilroy J. Oldster