Quotes by American Authors - Page 236

I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Stephanie Perkins
Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again— words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!
Erich Maria Remarque
There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which springs from fear. Sometimes it is a religious intolerance, sometimes it is a racial intolerance, but all intolerance grows from the same roots.
Eleanor Roosevelt
She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.
Kristin Cashore
Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch's crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas....Now, far from women's armsAnd memory of women, in our father's hutwe sleep, are never hungry.Why do I not forget?My father bars the door, bars harmfrom this house, and it is years.No one remembers. Even you, my brother,summer afternoons you look at me as thoughyou meant to leave,as though it never happened.But I killed for you. I see armed firs,the spires of that gleaming kiln--Nights I turn to you to hold mebut you are not there.Am I alone? Spieshiss in the stillness, Hanselwe are there still, and it is real, real,that black forest, and the fire in earnest.
Louise Glück
To do otherwise with a 'prentice was to ask for a second, less playful bite. And who would be to blame for that? Who but the teacher? For was he not training her to bite? Training both of them to bite?
Stephen King
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
Ursula K Le Guin
How could it ever be to our purpose to rob another living being of his or her purpose?
Will Tuttle
Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.
Loren Eiseley
It's really simple: Try to make people happy.
Zach Sobiech
We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.
Emily Dickinson
Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.
Marge Piercy
Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!
Jackson Pearce
Mr. Rawlings is a man of his word. The problem was, he made two different promises and he felt honored to keep them both. He hoped that by fulfilling one, in a different than expected way, he may have the chance to rectify the other.
Aleatha Romig
An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".
Sebastian Junger
I’m tired of the lies and the cheating, and the broken promises that were never meant to be kept.
Sidney Sheldon
Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.
Thomas Pynchon
She dribbled water over his neck and back. The towel didn't quite soak up all of it, and drops raced down his back, trailing the curve of his spine. She loved that curve, framed on either side by ripple after ripple of muscle, and she especially loved the way it dipped in at his waist before flaring onto his perfect, rounded backside.
Melissa Cutler
A kind of Providence keeps us blind to the intensity of suffering so as to keep us sane, until that day when the suffering is our own or that of someone we love beyond imagining.
Jim Beaver
Quick now, here, now, always, as if we are in a condition of complete simplicity...
Dean Koontz
Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
Seth Godin
She was the goddess of gossip and rumor, not the goddess of thoroughly fact-checked information. Some people, Principal Zeus included, didn't seem to realize that gossip wasn't, and never would be, an exact science. It was more of an art, really.
Joan Holub & Suzanne Williams
The backbone of success is...hard work, determination, good planning, and perserverence.
Mia Hamm
Make sure the seaweed lies flat.''Okay.''Leave an inch below the knee.''Okay.''It's got to be loose enough to put a finger in the top.''Sean Kendrick.' I say it emphatically enough that the stallion's ears prick toward me. (...)Sean doesn't appear to be at all apologetic. 'I think you'd better let me do that after all.''You're the one who had me in here in the first place.' I say. 'Now I think it's you who doesn't trust me.''It's not just you,' He replies.I glower at him. 'Well, I'll tell you what. I'll hold him and you wrap. That way, when it's done wrong, there's only yourself to slap. And take your jacket. I'm tired of holding it.
Maggie Stiefvater
Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap.
Kate O'Neill
He is stronger than anyone I know, & warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, & will keep, for the rest of my life.
Veronica Roth
I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.
Roman Payne
People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.
Stephen King
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Yogi Berra
Gil has put his book down and is gazing at something inside his head.
Meg Rosoff
What had been so funny? But you can never remember what you were laughing about, and even if you could, it seems doubtful that it would still be funny.
Rufi Thorpe
It's happiness to see you.
Larry McMurtry
‎"But you're the toughest son of a b!&€# i've ever seen.You never let anybody get near you.You never let anybody know what you really think.
Mario Puzo
Perhaps you forgave him too much, but who among us would not wish to be so generously loved and generously forgiven?
Sherry Thomas
She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan
We were each other's rock. But did it make us each other's destiny?
Rachel Hawthorne
One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island,because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want.
Lemony Snicket
She had the kind of smile you see in toothpaste commercials, where you can see practically all of somebody's teeth. She should smile like that all the time, Park thought; it made her face cross over from weird to beautiful. He wanted to make her smile like that constantly.
Rainbow Rowell
Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning “between the wolf and the dog” because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can’t tell what’s what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?
Adam Rapp
Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.
Kate Bolick
You are not a perfect woman.You have an evil temper, you’re as blind as a mole, you’re a deplorable poet, and frankly, your French accent could use some work.” Supporting himself on his elbows, Leo took her face in his hands. “But when I put those things together with the rest of you, it makes you into the most perfectly imperfect woman I’ve ever known.
Lisa Kleypas
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.
Annie Dillard
Canada is a myth people made up to entertain children, like the Tooth Fairy. There’s no such place.
Christopher Moore
I had great pity on Ansje, because she always acted very happy, but I believed that it was really a front. I could see through it. Inside she was crying because she was really very sad. You pity people like that -- the ones who try to lie to themselves -- because they suffer so much and don't face reality.
Diet Eman
I have found in my travels that those who keep heaven in view remain serene and cheerful in the darkest day. Forward-looking Christians remain optimistic and joyful, knowing that Christ someday will rule.
Billy Graham
What you do defines who your are. Remember to be the best at what you do. You develop higher confidence from doing what you do excellently.
Mark F. LaMoure
He told me that from now on, everything I did and everything he did was of the utmost importance: any word spoken, the slightest gesture, would take on a meaning, and everything that happened between us would change us continually. 'For that reason,'he said,'I wish I were able to suspend time at this moment and keep things exactly at this point, because I feel this instant is a true beginning. We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone. That's why I wish I could hold it back at the start. We should make a minimum of gestures, pronounce a minimum of words, even see each other as seldom as possible, if that would prolong things. We don't know how much of everything we have ahead of us so we have to take the greatest precautions not to destroy the beauty of what we have. Everything exists in limited quantity-especially happiness. If a love is to come into being, it is all written down somewhere, and also its duration and content. If you could arrive at the complete intensity the first day, it would be ended the first day. And so if it's something you want so much that you'd like to have it prolonged in time, you must be extremely careful not to make the slightest excessive demand that might prevent it from developing to the greatest extent over the longest period...If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn't touch them. We mustn't abuse something which is to bring light into both our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing wih you seems like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open...
Françoise Gilot
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
Bill Bryson
Don't judge what you don't know.
Maria V. Snyder
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
If only you would kiss me.Press your lips to mine like a searing iron. Wrap me in your arms as if you were a monarch claiming a kingdom. Hold me close until I warm through to the core. Do this, and I promise to melt into you, no longer a cold and frozen figure in your narrowed sight. How devoted I would be if only your lips burned for mine!If only you would kiss me.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Impatience is racing at misery full speed.
Richelle E. Goodrich
For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty.Now I am pretty lonely.
Lemony Snicket
Hip-hop...has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.
Raquel Cepeda
Woodward, a registered Republican, did not vote. He couldn't decide whether he was more uneasy with the disorganization and naïve idealism of McGovern's campaign or with Richard Nixon's conduct. And he believed that not voting enabled him to be more objective in reporting on Watergate - a vier Bernstein regarded as silly. Bernstein voted for McGovern, unenthusiastically and unhesitatingly, then bet in the office pool that Nixon would win with 54 percent.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.
Henry David Thoreau
... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.
Suheir Hammad
People think that the opposite of success is failure, but it's not. Failure is part of the process of success.
Randy Gage
My innocence is not lost—it has been converted into wisdom. The sensation we call "breaking" is the pain that comes from resisting the truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life.
Jewel