American Author Quotes

Beauty is no threat to the wary who treat the mountain in its way, the copperhead in its way, and the deer in its way, knowing that nature is the human heart made tangible.

Marilou Awiakta

Imagine settling for a life you can have because you don't have the courage to go after the life you really want.

Treasured Pagan Deities were misrepresented and distorted by the Christians for political and religious gain. Dressing their own Satan, who has remained one of the most opressive symbols of evil in our time, in the horned antlers of Cernunnos, a revered Celtic God, was one of the more recognizable ways Christians robbed Pagans of their way of life.

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

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 deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.

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

Utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all.

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?

A smart woman would have shut up. Did I? Hell no. Intelligence is overrated anyway.

A man who is a man goes on until he can go no further—and then goes twice as far.

When Spirit comes into your life, It will uplift you and give you an understanding into the problems and the joys of your daily life. It gives direction, and for many people this is the first time that they have found it.

As in so many cases of sexual abuse within the family, it is much more complicated than had it been done by a stranger.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

Golf. The art of driving hard, avoiding the rough, surmounting traps and hazards, aiming straight, and arriving on the green at last, only to end up in a hole in the ground before your companions.

Even when it was easy, music's patterning shaped the emotions... Music proclaimed an orderly universe, promised a better place.

Ellen Hunnicutt

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

Free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight.

Without discipline a body of men becomes rabble. Rabble dies, either on the battlefield or in a POW camp.

W. E. B. Griffin

When I wrote, I felt better, as if I had remade the world all of a piece, the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm.

Rob Thomas (writer)

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow