20th-century Author Quotes

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'.

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

Andrew Davidson (author)

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

There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.

Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love.

Catherine Marshall

Even when we speak of selflessness, the mind goes to "me." We think, "I'm selfless," but everything is selfless.

Life is full of opportunities to feel exactly the way
you want to feel.

Danielle LaPorte

The old line 'You deserve someone better than me' in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.

Norris Church Mailer

I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like an anvil strung around my neck just when I thought I was nearing the shore.

I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity?

Every thread you discover in the local web of life leads beyond your place to life elsewhere.

Scott Sanders (novelist)

I'd rather live precariously in my own office than comfortably in somebody else's.

To keep the fire burning brightly there's one easy rule: Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart - about a finger's breadth - for breathing room. Good fire, good marriage, same rule.

Marnie Reed Crowell

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

John Gregory Brown

First we must see that we cannot will ourselves to be open because openness is our very nature. Any tiny residue of willing, of wanting to be open takes us away from what we are. Willing never goes beyond willing. So the only way to be free from this circle is to glimpse the truth that openness is the egoless state, that it is here and now

Jean Klein (spiritual teacher)

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them.

Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.

Donald Hamilton

The greatest lessons to be learned about life, love, purpose, meaning, and priority are to be learned from children.

An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate.

I had always suspected that trying to play golf in the company of big-time pros and a gallery would be something like walking naked into choir practice.

If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don't confuse hunger with greed;
And don't wait until you are dead.

Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.

She was not able to return to the beginning, of course, and remake her life more to her liking, but now she was free to go on with the life she did have.

Janet Campbell Hale

Create a dream and give it everything you have, you could be surprised just how much you are capable of achieving.

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.