20th-century Author Quotes

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

Marriages are more likely to fail when one partner not only does not mirror the other's expressions of happiness, but instead shows expressions of contempt.

What I'm trying to get at is, as bad as everything seems, I think, at its heart, life is good. It doesn't throw anything at us that it knows we can't handle—and, even if it takes its time, it turns everything right side up again.

Alexandra Bracken

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?

When someone is always looking over their shoulder, they're more likely to trip.

I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived

We should not seek to confirm God's will by the absence of adversity.

We express true love in obedience to God and service to others- not reckless or selfish behavior- and we choose these behaviors.

Joshua Harris (pastor)

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

Things worth having don't come easy," Woods said. "You have to fight for it until you're tired of fighting, and then you take a breather and fight some more." He squeezed my shoulder. "Don't give up. You'll regret it.

I told my brothers I heard
You & mother making love,
Your low moans like blues
Bringing them into the world.

Yusef Komunyakaa

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important than not a single moment be wasted.

Hatred can eat at you until there's nothing left, until you become the thing you hate.

I've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room for me to move.Most of the time I'm good. I accepted my sentence and do not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become -

I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic.

Janice Galloway

My only mistake was in waiting too long to be rid of you", Adri said, running the washcloth between her fingers. "Believe me, Cinder. You are a sacrifice I will never regret.

I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright light brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.

Life might be easier if you give in a little, but it's better if you hold onto something so hard you can't give it up.

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

Folks think a lifetime is a thing stretched out over years. It ain't. It can happen quick as a match in a dark room.