American Author Quotes

A feller's glad to be a friend, Out fishin'. A helpin' hand he'll always lend, Out fishin' The brotherhood of rod and line An' sky an' stream is always fine; Men come real close to God's design, Out fishin'. A feller isn't plotting schemes, Out fishin'. He's only busy with his dreams, Out fishin' His livery is a coat of tan; His creed, to do the best he can; A feller's always mostly man Out fishin'.

Edgar Guest
Edgar Guest
I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

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

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

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

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

Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
I read, for the first time, of the Carolina Parakeet-a North American parakeet whose green, yellow and reddish-orange plumage appeared vivacious and altogether quite wonderful. As stunning as I found the hawk-chased conures, this bird astounded me even more. That the Carolina Parakeet was extinct simply added to my amazement.

To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.

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.'

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

Only Death could teach us love
By Death we shall grow wise.

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

I like to make the reader laugh — and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.

Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux
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
Edgar Lee Masters
Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.

Poor indeed must thou be, if around thee
Thou no ray of light and joy canst throw—

Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

We are the whirlwinds that winnow the West—
We scatter the wicked like straw!
We are the Nemeses, never at rest—
We are Justice, and Right, and the Law!

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in — the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

Did you ever hear
Of the frolic fairies dear?
They're a blessed little race,
Peeping up in fancy's face,
In the valley, on the hill,
By the fountain and the rill;
Laughing out between the leaves
That the loving summer weaves.

Frances Sargent Osgood
Frances Sargent Osgood
So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain....

John Ashbery
John Ashbery
If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi