American Author Quotes

Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Tell me thou all pervading mind,
When I this life forsake,
Must ev'ry tender tie unbind,
Each sweet connection break?

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

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.

What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Statistics show that you have nothing to worry about.

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

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

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.

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

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten... everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

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

None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.

Lizette Woodworth Reese
Lizette Woodworth Reese
You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.

Amelia Gray
Amelia Gray
I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

Dave Barry
Dave Barry
Painters are so bitchy. Magritte told Miró that Kandinsky had feet of Klee.
Told to Ned Sherrin

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.

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.

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

Oh! sing it in the light of freedom's morn,
Tho' tyrant wars have made the earth a grave;
The good, the great, and true, are, if so born,
And so with slaves, chains do not make the slave!

We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

David Eddings
David Eddings