American Author Quotes

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.

Robert Byrne (author)

I've got this image in my head of how I want my life to look, and I have absolutely no idea how to get there. And I'm so scared that I'll make some wrong decision - just one - and everything will get messed up and go wrong -for good.

Lisa Ann Sandell

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

Do you know what it is to be a man violently in love? To live for a woman's smiles and laughter, to hunger for her touch until life itself seems impossible without it, to desire her as you desire to breathe?

Abigail Reynolds

You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

Gennifer Choldenko

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

A fish, which you can't see, deep down in the water, is a kind of symbol of peace on earth, good will to yourself. Fishing gives a man... some time to collect his thoughts and reaarange them kind of neatly, in an orderly fashion. Once the bait is on the hook and the boat is anchored, there's nothing to interfere with thinking except an occasional bite

"My father used to call all soldiers angel warriors," he [Lieutenant Carroll] said. "Because usually they get boys to fight wars."

Walter Dean Myers

Victory is freedom of mind and body.' I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory. Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

It is an easy thing to call names; any fool is equal to that... and the weapon of vituperation is generally used by those who lack brains for argument or are upon the wrong side.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

Jonathan Evison

That was the problem with getting used to people - you had to miss them when they were gone.

Listen, if you choose to believe nothing else that transpires here, believe this: your body does not have a soul; your soul has a body, and souls never, ever die.

Bernice McFadden

I'm always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don't satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.

Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don't get in them and lie down.

Louise Fitzhugh

A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Enough has been unrolled to demand your sympathy and aid.

Harriet E. Wilson

The old line 'You deserve someone better than me' in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.

Norris Church Mailer

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

Robert Stone (novelist)

As Auntie Mame:

Life is a banquet, and some poor suckers are starving to death.

Maybe you've got the patience to work out some complicated, long-term, ironic way to get back at the people who've wronged you, but that's you.

Greg Cox (writer)

Men and women will forever make gods of others rather than see the god in themselves.