Quotes by American Authors - Page 3090

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
Anaïs Nin
Men die. It's practically what they're for.
Catherynne M. Valente
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
Edith Wharton
... fantasy is not practice for what is real—fantasy is the opiate of women.
Shannon Hale
You were on the other side of the world, but I often woke with the scent of you surrounding me. I ached for you, Kells. No matter how much Kishan thrashed me, it couldn’t diminish the pain of losing you. I’d dream of you and reach out to touch you, but you were always just out of reach.
Colleen Houck
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Guy Billout
You're asking the cyborg fugitive and the wild animal to be the welcoming committee? That's adorable.
Marissa Meyer
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor...When I say this, it should mean laughter,not poison.
Richard Siken
I was dead unit you found me, though I breathed. I was sightless, though I could see. And then you came...and I was awakened.
J.R. Ward
In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine.
Michael Meade
You cannot let a fear of failure, or a fear of comparison, or a fear of judgement stop you from doing what's going to make you great. You cannot succeed without this risk of failure, you cannot have a voice without the risk of criticism and you cannot love without the risk of loss. You must go out and take these risk. … Do what’s uncomfortable, and scary, and hard, but pays off in the long run. Be willing to fail. Let yourself fail. Fail in the way and the place where you would want to fail. Fail, pick yourself up and fail again. Because without this struggle, what is your success anyway?
Charlie Day
Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.
Victor LaValle
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
But what is identity really? What is it to ‘belong’ when we cast ourselves in the mold of a social group? I ask this, in spite of my implicit allegiance to one; yet, it is a worthwhile question. I mean, really, what does it even mean to share a commonality of blood or language or religion or heritage or context or economy or trade—and what value does this sharing of common traits, values and experiences truly have when there exists already a larger model of connection and commonality enveloping these disparate identities whole...? Do we pout at our inadequacies in the face of a “something” that is slightly more heterogeneous in its model of belonging? Sometimes, we simply must let go and chalk up all these movements to an inveterate (and arbitrary) sense of pride.
Ashim Shanker
And the peace! The most magnificent peace. I lose myself in a place where time no longer exists and nothing is impossible. I can do anything I imagine. I can fight and win any war. Nothing frightens me, because I know I'm here for a reason; and I'm not alone. I have friends in high places. Friends here. Friends up there. Victory is mine.
Gena Showalter
Are you afraid of the dark?” I asked.“No. Monsters aren't real. This is real. I'm scared of what could happen when the lights go out.
Bryant A. Loney
We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
Mary Karr
The amount of understanding produced by a theory is determined by how well it meets the criteria of adequacy–testability, fruitfulness, scope, simplicity, conservatism–because these criteria indicate the extent to which a theory systematizes and unifies our knowledge.
Theodore Schick Jr.
Regarding Christians who feel they have a free pass on being criticized; When the blind worship of an invisible being and the doctrine of millennia-old texts written by ignorant men in another country becomes more important than real, present human beings, then the blind worshiper SHOULD be shunned and criticized. It would be unethical to respond otherwise.
Kelli Jae Baeli
We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.
Lloyd Alexander
In the mist of Difficulty lies Opportunity.
Oprah Winfrey
Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, and the more it resists progress. The more it resists progress- resists change- the more its ciizens demand it. In response, the society tighten its grip, desperate to maintain control. It's afraid of losing its hold.
Victoria Schwab
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
Junot Díaz
Grover started to sniffle and I figured if I didn't cheer him up he'd either start bawling or chewing up my mattress. He tends to eat household objects whenever he gets upset.
Rick Riordan
We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house."Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?"Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.
Susan Trott
Staring into his eyes, she noticed a thin circle of gray around the green. A SILVER LINING, she thought.
Rachel Harris
I hated the flashcards and I hated the multiplication tables, but I did enjoy the fact that my dad took time out of his schedule to help me in the areas in which I needed it.
Sara Dormon
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.
John McPhee
What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?
Karan Mahajan
Tomas led a young woman by the hand and walked up into the foothills. Millian, the miner from Rosario, had introduced her to the patron, already buying points for himself. He was no fool. And the girl, no fool either, lifted her skirts for Tomas as he knelt before her, licking his way up her thighs -brown and sweet as candy, at the same time, tart and salty, musky, silken and cold in the warm air, refreshing as the sorbet he licked in Culiacan back when he was a student. She was amazed that this bit of her body could the great master to his knees before her. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl on that whole plain, but he did not her name and felt no need to ask. He pressed his face to her underwear, redolent with the burning scent of her, and he pulled the cotton down, over the bright points of her hips , the shadowy curve of her belly, until the fog of dark hair came into his sight, soft in the moonlight, tickling his face as he bent down to her again. He pressed his lips on the mound of her, breathing her in, tasting her like a dog, as her skirts fell over his head and her fingers pulled his head tighter to her, her legs moving apart in the dark, her beauty falling around him, his greatest gift to him, this flavor, this smell, her scent.
Luis Alberto Urrea
I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.
Lauren Oliver
We can't always take the higher road when faced with adversity. Sometimes for the sake of restoration, peace and sharing the love of Jesus, we have to walk through the tribulation.
Chris Vonada
In the half light of morning, in a world between the sheets I swear I saw her angel wing, my vision was completefrom TIGHTROPE - Stone Roses
Matt Squire
Giving up is the only sure way to fail.
Gena Showalter
Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.
Dorianne Laux
No one’s life ever goes as they planned. That truth alone should bring a sense of relief to everyone.
Andrena Sawyer
There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time.
Stephen Kendrick
Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can - social, biological, what have you.
Elizabeth Bear
You could make friends with a possessed unicorn, couldn’t you?”“Probably so. We both fart rainbows.
Jamie Farrell
Tolerance is nothing more than patience with boundaries.
Shannon L. Alder
There you go...let it all slide out. Unhappiness can't stick in a person's soul when it's slick with tears.
Shannon Hale
[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.
Anthony M. Esolen
Every misfortune is a blessing in disguise.
Laurie Nadel
His voice was languidly dense, as if he was a little slow on the uptake, but Strike knew that tone came from the man's feeling of complete control.
Richard Price
This date had started as bland and was speeding right along to abysmal.
Katherine McIntyre
I'm trying to decide what's worse. Someone being gone, but still out there, or someone being gone forever, dead. I think someone being gone, but still out there, might be worse. Then there’s always the chance, the hoping, the wondering if things might change. If maybe one day he’ll come back. There’s also the wondering about what his new life is like. The life without you. Is he happier? And if he is, you’re left being sad, wondering what it would be like if you were happy with him. But when someone is dead, he’s dead. He’s not coming back. There is no second chance. Death is a period at the end of a sentence. Someone gone, but still out there, is an ellipsis…or a question to be answered.
Samantha Schutz
Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
Richard Russo
You must believe to see, see to do, do to improve, and improve consistently to win; therefore, believing is the key to winning.
Orrin Woodward
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant
Love is waiting for you lifting to hand, open your heart, and accept it.
Debasish Mridha
Isn't this the truth of any good mother? That in all of our lives. We worry only about those we brought into this world, regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings.
Adriana Trigiani
I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.
Margaret Mitchell
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
You dirty rat...
James Cagney
I think men think about their penises as much as women think about molestation.
Christy Leigh Stewart
How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.
Karl Marlantes
Ah, mistress, you’re an angel. Sure there’s not a drop left? I might have remembered one more person….”“Up yours,” I said rudely with another belch. “It’s empty. You should tell me the name anyway, after making me drink all that sewage.”Winston gave me a devious smile. “Come back with a full bottle and I will.”“Selfish spook,” I mumbled, and staggered away.I’d made it a few feet when I felt that distinct pins-and-needles sensation again, only this time it wasn’t in my throat.“Hey!”I looked down in time to see Winston’s grinning, transparent form fly out of my pants. He was chuckling even as I smacked at myself and hopped up and down furiously.“Drunken filthy pig!” I spat. “Bastard!”“And a good eve’in’ to you, too, mistress!” he called out, his edges starting to blur and fade. “Come back soon!”“I hope worms shit on your corpse!” was my reply. A ghost had just gotten to third base with me. Could I sink any lower?
Jeaniene Frost
But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!
Harriet Beecher Stowe
I understood the ominous sky because it was so much like you, and I was the sun always willing to burn for our love.
Melody Lee