Quotes by American Authors - Page 1209

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we give a map to our most secret feelings. Why do writers do it? Perhaps because we'd be crazier still if we didn't.
Leland Dirks
I don't understand why some kids git a good school and mother and father and some don't. But Rita say forgit the WHY ME shit and git on to what's next.
Sapphire
A lot of young girls think that the opposite of fake is rudeness. And just as ugly as fake is, so is saying whatever is on your mind because it's the truth.
Tyra Banks
It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.
Barbara Kingsolver
There may be no English word as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church.
Craig Keen
It is nearly impossible.''Nearly impossible and impossible are not the same thing.
Kristin Hannah
Special Super Bowl Wisdom of the Ages: "Patriot Act" In theater and football, it's the last act before it's curtains for Seahawks opponents.
Matthew Heines
The first sign that Karma was now in cahoots with the Devil Incarnate to ruin her existance should've been before sunrise and pre-coffee.
Kelly Moran
They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.
Paulette Jiles
What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions.
Meredith Duran
Michael nodded tersely, eyeing a table across the room. It was empty. So empty. So joyfully, blessedly empty.He could picture himself a very happy man at that table."Not feeling very conversational this evening, are we?" Colin asked, breaking into his (admittedly tame) fantasies.
Julia Quinn
Another thing that happens in the movies: They all have these dramatic crises where everything looks bleak and you think the couple will never, ever get back together. But then they realize they can't live without each other, and in the end they live happily ever after.It's all a lie. When you hate someone you used to love, and you think he's done something awful-he probably has.You're not going to love him again.He's not going to apologize, or come back to you.He probably doesn't even ever think about you at all, because he's too busy thinking about someone else.
E. Lockhart
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks
Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.
Laura Miller
A truly good person will speak truth, act with truth, and stand for Truth. A truly good person is not afraid to think from their heart; therefore, allowing nonconformist decisions, viewpoints, and perspectives to lead their life. By following their heart, they stand with their conscience, and only with God.
Suzy Kassem
Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Suzy Kassem
The best we can do is size up the chances calculate the risks involved estimate our ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence.
Henry Ford
Jolly good!" ... King [George VI] exclaimed [after Queen Elizabeth fired the gun at Hitler's photograph]. "You got him right in the n-n-n-naughty bits."... "Good," she said. "That's where I was aiming.
Susan Elia MacNeal
Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.
Leah Hager Cohen
Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.
James S.A. Corey
Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.
Utah Phillips
That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.
Ira Levin
If you cannot be yourself in a relationship, you no longer have one.
Shya Kane
Talk helps shape one's thoughts.
David McCullough
The sense of community is that feeling of togetherness that brings us comfort. We are all alone in the world, so we strive to form bonds with others to eliminate that sense of feeling alone.
Del Suggs
The courtyard kept changing, dazzling her with the flowers that bloomed between one day and the next, with the bare branches of trees that were swollen with the buds of new leaves and then fuzzed with green. Every day, she drove a familiar road through a new place.
Anne Bishop
Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Carl Sagan
The challenge is quite formidable if you spell it out explicitly: artists must look at a three-dimensional scene with their two-dimensional retinas and then generate a two-dimensional painting that appears three-dimensional to viewers who look at it with their two-dimensional retinas.
Margaret S. Livingstone
Never forget what you were saved from.
Jim George
You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off.
Rodman Philbrick
Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.
Erwin Raphael McManus
We all want to go there something awful, but to stand there takes some grace.
Rich Mullins
Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.
Catherynne M. Valente
The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.
Paul Monette
Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it
Sylvia Plath
As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.
Jodi Picoult
We change the future with every choice we make,
Kiersten White
Celestia laughed wickedly. "Danny is your BBB, silly. I’d never ask you to marry him.""BBB?" Now she had to learn abbreviations? She didn’t have the patience to deal with this tonight."Bodyguard, Blood Bag, and cover Boyfriend." Celestia counted the items off one by one on her beautifully manicured fingers."Convenient." Sarcasm laced Savannah’s words, but internally her mind processed the logic behind the BBB.From Vampire Princess Rising (book two in the Winters Saga)
Jami Brumfield
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee Williams
Death should take me while I am in the mood.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.
John Green
We pretended to be of mud instead of stars. We pretended not to fly.
Shana Abe
I've never understood the phrase they have chemistry before now. After all, everything is chemistry. Everything is combination and reaction. The atoms in by body align themselves with the atoms in his.
Nicola Yoon
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate whose faithful work will answer for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
the nurse smiled and patted my arm. “Don’t give up yet. Sometimes when we think God has written The End, what he really means is The Beginning.
Rachel Van Dyken
If Flynn hadn't known his older brother for the addicted, lying sack of shit he was, he might have believed the pain he saw in that gaze, might have trusted that Connor had finally seen the error of his ways and was going to change his life and step out of their father's shadow. But Connor usually only had an epiphany if it got him laid, increased his bank balance, or severely pissed off Rupert.
M.A. Grant
You fill a bucket drop by drop. You clear your mind thought by thought. You heal yourself moment by moment. Today I make one drop, clear one thought, and get present to one moment. And then I do it again.
Lisa Wimberger
I had come to believe that there was something sacred in telling stories and telling them true.
Kirby Larson
Asleep? That's what she is right now?” Pure menace laced his words. “And when you decide to answer that question, Kane, be sure that you answer this with great care. I for one see you as my friend. We've never had problems. But now you've met my Melody, and problems cannot be avoided. So when I ask you, is she asleep, be sure that you give me a clear answer, because different ones will result in your death and the slashing away of every fucking person you know.
Kenya Wright
I'm getting stale. I always do this time of year. I keep my nose to the grindestone and put in long hours and rustle up good meals and do all the chores and run errands and get along with people -- and have a fine time doing it and enjoy life. Then I realize, bang, that I'm tired and I don't want to wait on my family for a while and I wish I could go away somewhere and have people wait on me hand and foot, and dress up and go to restaurants and the theater and act like a woman of the world. I feel as if I'd been swallowed up whole by all these powerful DeVotos and I'd like to be me for a while with somebody who never heard the name.
Joan Reardon
Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.
Toni Morrison
God impressed me with this a long time ago: 'Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you!'."~R. Alan Woods [1998]
R. Alan Woods
This isn't a crush, it's obsession.You are never not in my thoughts. Your scent carries across a room and paralyzes me with longing. I don't want to hold your hand. Part of me wants to set you on fire and hold you while the flame consumes us both, to eat your heart so I know that only I possess it entirely.
Gwen Hayes
You once told me some lives are worth more than others. How many deaths before the scales tipout of our favor?”She had no answer.
Kiersten White
You are Zyon's daughter. You are a soul reader. This trip is more than just a vacation," Jadan said firmly. "You might feel like postponing it now, but we need to look for the medallion while we are in that region. Joe will keep an eye on everything. Plus, your mom will know what to do. I can even call for backup.
Dianne Bright
...the big increases in heart and blood volumes that occur by the 12th week of pregnancy should have the same effect as 'blood doping'. This partially explains the outstanding performances of several female athletes from Eastern bloc countries who were at this stage of pregnancy when they competed in the 1976 Olympics.
James F. Clapp III
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith Wharton
Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.
Criss Jami
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell (1899)
I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
Anna Quindlen