American Author Quotes

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.

To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.

Joel C. Rosenberg

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

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.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.

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

You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

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.

People often choose to misunderstand if it makes life more interesting.

Carlene Thompson

When and where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

Margaret Walker

In this life you sometimes have to choose between pleasing God and pleasing man. - In the long run, it's better to please God - he's more apt to remember.

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

Patti Callahan Henry

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

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

Chris Bachelder

The big picture is that there is no big picture.
That's why we keep painting it.

Ronald Sukenick

Love is the answer, that everyone seeks...Love is the language, that every heart speaks.

Helen Steiner Rice

under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés

So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere...

David Lindsay-Abaire

Those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

Lorine Niedecker

There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.