American Author Quotes

Through my Invisible new veil Of finity, I see November's world — Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls — As, oddly, not as sombre As December, But as green As anything: As spring.

Statistics show that you have nothing to worry about.

Theodore Cogswell

If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.

All my life, I knew, all my life I would be haunted by words from Shakespeare.

Sarah Smith (writer)

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.

The view from the window, particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.

Chris Bachelder

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

Jane Hirshfield

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

Still, not much of a reason to live, is it? The fear of being punished for killing yourself.

You'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

Souls bound together can't be forever torn apart by distance and neither by death.

Patti Callahan Henry

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Tennessee Williams

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Robert Wilson (director)

Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

George Cooper (poet)

The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth.

Hallie Erminie Rives

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.

We have often had this particular exchange about climate and landscape and why we both feel so lonely here uprooted. It was what each of us had wanted of course.Besides wanting to experience a place we hated, we wanted to be insomniacs and loners, losers and drop-outs. To know the sky was the only location of meaning and joy left to us.

The soul of the river had entered my soul, And the gathered power of my soul was moving So swiftly, it seemed to be at rest Under cities of cloud and under Spheres of silver and changing worlds Until I saw a flash of trumpets Above the battlements over Time!

Edgar Lee Masters

One of the frustrations of having a mind trained to think and consider possibilities was that it couldn't simply be stopped once engaged.

Mel Odom (author)

When there's more sick ones than well ones, by golly the sick ones will lock the well ones up.

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.

Amos Bronson Alcott

The rules of marriage were simple and easy to follow: faithfulness, patience, compromise. But there were no rules to divorce, or if there were, he had not yet discovered them.