American Author Quotes

Murder, I'm afraid, if someone does not intervene.
He laughed. Oh, you women are so melodramatic. Do no expect me to catch you when you faint.
I would rather hit the ground. Good day, sir.

Mary Robinette Kowal

Oi'm always noble, sir; it's in my blood. 'As been ever since Oi ate that knight a few years back. Why?

Elizabeth Haydon

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

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

Marguerite Young

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

Robert Stone (novelist)

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

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)

Never judge people by who they date — your own sex life is confusing enough without trying to figure out someone else's.

Kim Gruenenfelder

Generations should not be mingled for daily fare, she thought; they are really contemptuous of one another, and the strong individuals, whether they belong to the older or the younger, impose on the meek their creeds and opinions, and, if they are strong enough, brook no dissent.

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

Walter Dean Myers

As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.

Jamaica Kincaid

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Katherine Paterson

And so he did his endless work,' I continued quietly, 'without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing and that was beyond bearing.

Martine Leavitt

One's words must glide across the page like a swan moving across the waters. One must be conscious of the movement without a thought of what is causing it to move.

Robert Crichton

By every mortal standard, the worst faeries in the world were those in the Dark Court. They fed on the baser emotions; they engaged in activities that the other-also amoral-faery courts repudiated. They were also the only ones she truly trusted or understood.

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

The boys think they can all be athletes, and the girls think they can all be singers. That's the way to fame and success....as a group blacks must give up their illusions.

We reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

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

Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you're asking me to interpret it? I'm just old. Being old doesn't mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber.

Jonathan Carroll

Me? What am I? Nothing. The legs on which dinner comes to the table, the arms by which cocktails enter the living room, the hands that drive cars. I am the eyes that see nothing, the ears that don't hear. I'm invisible too. They look and don't see me. When they move, I have to guess their direction and get myself out of the way.

Shirley Ann Grau

When you don't know what to do, do what's right and do what's in front of you. But not necessarily what's right in front of you.

People should have all their big adventures while they're still under the age of fourteen. If you don't, you start to lose your passion for big adventures. It just begins to fade away bit by bit and then you forget you ever wanted adventures in the first place.