20th-century Author Quotes

While you're alive, the IRS will attempt to take what you've made. When you're not, the IRS will attempt to take what it missed.

Charles J. Givens

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

Things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position.

Andrew Davidson (author)

Life goes by rapidly. Don't delay. Don't put it off. Don't wait until you have some spare time. Don't wait until the time's 'right'.

When you go into the world today, before you leave your home, promise yourself that you'll find at least one miracle. Without any limits or bounds on what you think it should look like, simply state for yourself your clear intention that of the many miracles that cross your path, you'll recognize one of them.

The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

David Whyte (poet)

But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.

James K. Baxter

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.

Reginald Horace Blyth

Ireland regards sex, when she regards it at all, with an entirely primitive and practical eye.

Children can withstand a lot of pressure and trial from the outside if the home inside is held steady by parents whose character is steady.

What a recovery of the wisdom of the Mother brings to all of us is the knowledge of inseparable connection with the entire creation and the wise, active love that is born from that knowledge.

Andrew Harvey (religious writer)

Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.... And we shall know him then for what he was and is—a prince, our own black shining Prince!—who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so.

Being alone in our present society raises an important question about identity and well-being.

Never talk back to a teacher. Teachers are like God. Actually, teachers are God's boss.

The brain is the man; its health is essential for normal living; its disorders are surely the most profound of human miseries; and its destruction annihilates a person humanly, however intact his body.

H. Chandler Elliott

Most days it feels as if the world is whirling around me and I am standing still. In slow motion, I watch the colors blur; people and faces all become a massive wash.

Sarah Kay (poet)

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

Mark Haskell Smith

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf.

As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing...

Enchanted worlds still exist because the child within us never dies. The doorways may be more obscure, but we can still seek them out. There are still noble adventures to undertake. There are still trees that speak and caverns that lead to nether realms. There will always be faeries and elves within nature because they will always be dancing in our hearts.

None of us can afford to pay the price of resenting...because of what it does to us.

Marion D. Hanks