American Author Quotes

A man who is a man goes on until he can go no further—and then goes twice as far.

Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

When Spirit comes into your life, It will uplift you and give you an understanding into the problems and the joys of your daily life. It gives direction, and for many people this is the first time that they have found it.

Another reason I wrote Fat Girl is that few writers about fatties write that even thin girls (and women and men) can, behind their bony walls, remain fat. They weigh 110; they think they weigh 200. How this happens is that if a person's been fat and gotten thin and maybe even stayed thin, she doesn't forget she was fat.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

One needs the invented, the spontaneous, the impromptu for ritual. Skepticism, that grain of salt, is inappropriate.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Alice McDermott

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

The trouble with most people is they think there's only one right way to do anything.

We are all born free from all religious affiliations and only come to believe in such things after being introduced to it ― so, atheism is the default position. Although some children are not indoctrinated with a specific religion before the age of reason, there are many more who are.

David G. McAfee

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

If I am to be judged by those who come after me, let me be judged for the truth.

Fashion is in ceaseless pursuit of things that are about to look familiar and in uneasy flight from things that have just become a bore.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

Coincidence is the evidence of the True Believer.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

Once, there was a girl who vowed she would save everyone in the world, but forgot herself.

Take care not to listen to anyone
who tells you what you can
and can't be in life.

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

If we know that we are now at the point where we have always wanted to be, we will be there... because we are never there but always here, now!

Even when it was easy, music's patterning shaped the emotions... Music proclaimed an orderly universe, promised a better place.

Ellen Hunnicutt

It's easier to be authentic if you don't say you are authentic.

B. Joseph Pine II