American Author Quotes

When Spirit comes into your life, It will uplift you and give you an understanding into the problems and the joys of your daily life. It gives direction, and for many people this is the first time that they have found it.

Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

The boys think they can all be athletes, and the girls think they can all be singers. That's the way to fame and success....as a group blacks must give up their illusions.

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Knowledge, whatever the form, could be as effective as a weapon.

Maria V. Snyder

And here is our girl, looking— If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)

James Tiptree, Jr

I sincerely believe that there is a time in life for drifting. There is a time for sitting back and getting in touch with yourself. Some of our most interesting illuminations and ideas will come when we take time to reflect, time to kick back and cruise awhile.

It was on the cross of Calvary that God, in Christ, dealt fully and finally with self, the nature from which all our sins flow.

Miles J. Stanford

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do.

Madeline Miller

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

I'm scared," he says."I know," says the nurse."I want you all to go to Hell.""That's natural.

Neal Shusterman

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

It is an easy thing to call names; any fool is equal to that... and the weapon of vituperation is generally used by those who lack brains for argument or are upon the wrong side.

A man who is a man goes on until he can go no further—and then goes twice as far.

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy,

Gregory Maguire

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

If I am to be judged by those who come after me, let me be judged for the truth.

Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you're asking me to interpret it? I'm just old. Being old doesn't mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber.

Jonathan Carroll

We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job.

The trouble with most people is they think there's only one right way to do anything.

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.