Quotes by American Authors - Page 1892

The problem with books is that they end. They seduce you.[…]You turn the page and there is nothing.
Caroline Kepnes
It was the first time in years I didn’t wonder if my father was out there, looking at it too.
Ally Carter
A sleeping man would miss the best of the evening, and the moonrise as well.
Larry McMurtry
My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.
Sue Monk Kidd
The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.
Chuck Palahniuk
There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
Darkness might keep flooding in, but I finally had just enough light to find the way back to myself.
Emery Lord
In studying the psychological significance of a religious or political doctrine, we must first bear in mind that the psychological analysis does not imply a judgement concerning the truth of the doctrine one analyzes. This latter question can be decided only in terms of the logical structure of the problem itself.
Erich Fromm
I know I'll never marry, never risk bringing a child into the world. Because if there's one thing being a victor doesn't guarantee, it's our children's safety. My kids' names would go right into the reaping balls with everyone else's. And I swear I'll never let that happen.
Suzanne Collins
for a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had
Charles Bukowski
A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.
Edna Ferber
Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.
John Pipkin
Don’t assume meekness is weakness and those who are loud are strong.
Brad Lomenick
Dakota started laughing. "You wouldn't have anything back there to help me tame a punk-rock wild child with a disdain for cowboys, would you?
Sara Humphreys
Turren blinked and then smiled from ear to ear. “What makes a pure soul extra purer?”“I don’t know,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t eat anything weird today.
Sam Argent
You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.
Maria Callas
The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.
Elizabeth Berg
Life doesn't stop. It doesn't stop progressing forward and it never stops trying to bring you to your knees. It will test your strengths and exploit your weakness, and I'm not sure that is always such a bad thing.
Christy Aldridge
Life is for participating, not for spectating.
Kathrine Switzer
I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
Jon Krakauer
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Mitch Albom
Nightmares did come true. Because, after her second night of major loving with the man of her dreams, the absolute last person she ever wanted to see was her mother. Yet there she was, her small, hefty frame trundling up the stairs to Maira’s front door.She was so frozen with horror, she couldn’t move until she heard the doorbell ring.Don’t answer it. Maybe she’ll go away.Well, that was just stupid.
Alisha Rai
A dream is like a first draft. No one will ever see it but you.
T.N. Suarez
See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don't work. A guy like me. I don't have religion or family that sort of thing. So you accept some system of order, and you stick to it.
Robert B. Parker
For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the subject.she'd begin, orTo call your best friendsby their schoolboy namesand give them kisses good-bye,to look away when they say! So your confidence grows.She doesn't ask what you wantbecause she knows.Isn't that what you think?When actually she was only waitingto be stunned, and then do this,never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:in one motion up, over, and gone,the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,her face flashing away from you in the fabricso that you couldn't say if she wasappearing or disappearing.
Deborah Garrison
Happiness doesn't depend on reality but it depends on perception.
Debasish Mridha
We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.
Michael Pollan
People come and go in our life but memories stays for ever.
Debasish Mridha
Writing is dreaming for me, and I can dream most anywhere.
Tyrone Jaeger
Babe!
Janet Evanovich
Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.
Robert Creeley
I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.
Jennifer Donnelly
What I remember most clearly is how it felt. I’d just finished painting a red fire engine-like the one I often walked past near my grandparents’ house. Suddenly the teachers, whose names I've long forgotten, closed in on my desk. They seemed unusually impressed, and my still dripping fire engine was immediately and ceremoniously pinned up. I don’t know what they might have said, but their unexpected attention and having something I’d made given a place of honor on the wall created an overwhelming and totally unfamiliar sense of pride inside me. I loved that feeling, and I wanted to feel it again and again. That desire, I suppose, was the beginning of my career. tI have no idea where my fire engine painting ended up, but I never forgot the basic layout. Several decades later, it served as the inspiration for this sketch for an illustration in a book called Why the chicken crossed the Road.
David Macaulay
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.
William Lloyd Garrison
Why are you alive? To discover joy and to share that joy with others.
Toni Sorenson
‎"You want more?" she asked a bit breathlessly. "Even after what we did?"His mouth took on a sardonic twist. "I'm afraid quantity usually matters for me . . ."--THE PRINCESS'S ASSASSINS
Emma Holly
If the eye really was a muscle, I had pulled it long ago.
Brodi Ashton
Our confidence needs to come from within, not without. From the quality of our hearts, not the quantity of things we own. After all, he who dies with the most toys...still dies.
Sean Covey
Josephus is the first historian to make note of Jesus having even existed – and that happened six full decades after his death.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
Showing up is 80 percent of life.
Woody Allen
In what life can I trust anything out of your mouth ever again?
Victoria Aveyard
Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man.
Mark Lawrence
When you're alone, you harbour one hundred percent all off the good things. But this also means that you harbour all the bad things. I learnt my own goals slowed down when I was with others, but having shared the good things, sharing the pain, having that friendship excelled what I alone couldn't do. It doesn't need to be logical, friendships are a part of life, and when is that logical? Life doesn't make sense, but you don't have to live it alone.
Michael Rogers
At the point that it dawns on me that I am not God I have finally made room for God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.
James Gleick
The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective.So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot.I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.
Julia Heaberlin
You will never truly realize the value of life until you take your very last breath.
Debasish Mridha
The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.
Junot Díaz
You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.
Richard Bach
I didn't give you a parting kiss." I tried to ignore the audience of witches and concentrate on the kiss. Dominic jumped right in and helped me with a sexy lingering sizzling hot kiss. By the time we broke free, I was sure my cheeks were rose red. For a minute I felt like I might swoon and Dominic held my arm to keep me upright and pressed his lips against my cheek and whispered, "You sure know how to send a guy to the moon, Marissa.
Terry Spear
Is the goal I’ve set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality...The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us...But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention.
Mark Galli
Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone.
Ambrose Bierce
I could not have asked for a better friends or a better life, but there’s a nasty trick about living. It happens at its own pace and in its own way and you never, never know what’s coming next. So you keep running and running to keep up with it and most people get tired. Others don’t get tired. They just get overtaken by the road.
Melodie Ramone
Hate is a powerful emotion. It can take over a sane man's mind and cloud it with insanity.
James Hauenstein
Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.
Dean Koontz
All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.
Quentin Crisp
I suggest you give up now. According to my research, in a vampire-werewolf love triangle, the vampire always gets the girl.
Ilona Andrews
These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
Abigail Adams
Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world… Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
Stephen King