American Author Quotes

The hat on the table
in the dining room
is no pet trained
to sit still. Three
pearl-tipped spears and Beulah
maneuvering her shadow
to the floor. The hat
is cold. The hat
wants more.

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it. And now I will have to be that person forever.

Robert Goolrick

We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that's a good thing.

We know that productivity suffers when uncertainty is high. But we've failed to realize the equally destructive effects of too little anxiety.... By protecting people from risk, we destroy their self-esteem. We rob them of the opportunity to become strong, competent people.

Judith M. Bardwick

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

Kristina McMorris

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

Rage keeps the person who feels it company. It moves into the hollows left by grief and loss, and turns inside you like a dark furred animal that grows and fills you; it kills off loneliness and takes its place.

It doesn't matter who you are, or what you've done, or think you can do. There's a confrontation with destiny awaiting you. Somewhere, there is a chile you cannot eat.

Daniel Pinkwater

There were times when I thought I got a bit more punishment than was coming to me, but I don't regret a minute of it now. Each of us must be tempered in some fire. Nobody had more to do with choosing the fire that tempered me than myself, and instead of finding fault with the fire I give thanks that I had the metal to take the temper and hold it.

Jack Black (author)

What I am thinking and doing day by day is resistlessly shaping my future - a future in which there is no expiation except through my own better conduct. No one can save. No one can live my life for me. If I am wise I shall begin today to build my own truer and better world from within.

Horatio Dresser

Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left over for the others.

Elizabeth Fishel

It was one thing to go into battle with confidence, another to believe the foe so easily defeated.

Richard A. Knaak

All adults who care about a baby will naturally be in competition for that baby.... Each adult wishes that he or she could do each job a bit more skillfully for the infant or small child than the other.

T. Berry Brazelton

I almost tell him that I'd never be able to do something like that, just take out my instrument and begin playing on a street corner. But it feels to personal. Yes, I'm shy, but why bring it to his attention? I'm too shy to talk about how shy I am.

Andrew Clements

There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you're with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.

You need a strategy, and a trade or investment decision can be evaluated only in the context of that strategy.

Feminism justified female victim power by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

A fact has no "why." There it stands, self demonstrating.

Robert A. Heinlein

The principle of happiness should be like the principle of virtue: it should not be dependent of things, but be a part of personality [and character].

William Lyon Phelps

But I don't want to have to stop feeling. I really think I'd rather die than stop feeling.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

But the UFO phenomenon simply does not behave like extraterrestrial visitors. It actually molds itself in order to fit a given culture.

The elite attack religious people and clergy with a vengeance.

I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.

The latter. She had a good run, Sook said, doing a little shrug. It was his usual response to death at Mapleshade, and it was a safe bet that he felt that way about himself. Like most twice-widowed, Korea-vet, nature-loving, gun-enthusiast, bilingual, weed-connoisseur great grandfathers of five, he'd lived a full life.

If you want the fire of God, you must become the fuel of God.