American Author Quotes

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.

Nothing is true unless it works. And it has to work for you, not for someone else.

Raymond Charles Barker

In the moon's eclipse,
The earth's round shadow on its face I see!
I read God's works, which are his book indeed,
And trust the hint that falleth from his lips
More than all man's infallibility.

Minot Judson Savage

Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North's lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

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

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept? Such a house could even be the whole world.

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

Instead of facing a crisis as I approached middle age, I discovered that a new and better life lay before me. I called the process of discovery 'halftime,' and the outcome led to my second half.

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

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.

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?

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

Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

I loved all the parts of him, even the ones I didn't understand.

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

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Nell Freudenberger

Men, being conditioned badly, are always feeling nooses closing around their necks, even dumpy boors no girl would take on a bet.

The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Mercedes Lackey

In most cases there is something horrible in the idea of being bought and sold; it sent a thrill to my heart, a shiver through my brain. For a moment I felt dizzy, but a moment only. I had experienced too much trouble and anxiety to be overwhelmed by this. Then, too, I thought that though my perishable body was at their disposal, my soul was beyond their reach.

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