American Author Quotes

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.

Robert Byrne (author)

Victory is freedom of mind and body.' I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory. Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

What I am thinking and doing day by day is resistlessly shaping my future - a future in which there is no expiation except through my own better conduct. No one can save. No one can live my life for me. If I am wise I shall begin today to build my own truer and better world from within.

Horatio Dresser

I'm always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don't satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.

My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

Marianne Wiggins

And so he did his endless work,' I continued quietly, 'without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing and that was beyond bearing.

Martine Leavitt

God's love means that our Creator desires to have a relationship with us. God's holiness prevents him from having fellowship with us and, instead, demands the outpouring of his anger against us.

Robert Jeffress

Anglo-Saxon barbarians. Arthur should have been made a Knight

William W. Johnstone

People should have all their big adventures while they're still under the age of fourteen. If you don't, you start to lose your passion for big adventures. It just begins to fade away bit by bit and then you forget you ever wanted adventures in the first place.

Do you know what it is to be a man violently in love? To live for a woman's smiles and laughter, to hunger for her touch until life itself seems impossible without it, to desire her as you desire to breathe?

Abigail Reynolds

I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.

We have souls. Sure we do. Otherwise we'd do bad things all the time. You know, like politicians.

MaryJanice Davidson

The hat on the table
in the dining room
is no pet trained
to sit still. Three
pearl-tipped spears and Beulah
maneuvering her shadow
to the floor. The hat
is cold. The hat
wants more.

Your skin is so soft. Smells like...-She had to tilt him to get this other arm free and hated knowing how badly she was hurting him as she did so. Sheer, unadulterated fear?

It was any outcast's nightmare. If I looked carefully, I suspected I might find it beneath the black paint of the small acrylic by the window.

It was one thing to go into battle with confidence, another to believe the foe so easily defeated.

Richard A. Knaak

But the UFO phenomenon simply does not behave like extraterrestrial visitors. It actually molds itself in order to fit a given culture.

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

Robert Stone (novelist)

There were times when I thought I got a bit more punishment than was coming to me, but I don't regret a minute of it now. Each of us must be tempered in some fire. Nobody had more to do with choosing the fire that tempered me than myself, and instead of finding fault with the fire I give thanks that I had the metal to take the temper and hold it.

Jack Black (author)

If you hear my idea but don't believe it, that's not your fault; it's mine. If you see my new product but don't buy it, that's my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you're bored, that's my fault too.

The old line 'You deserve someone better than me' in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.

Norris Church Mailer

For, in life, it is in the darkest zones one finds the brightest beauty and the most luminous wisdom.

If you want the fire of God, you must become the fuel of God.

Our attempts to trust others will often be frustrated, but that's because God never wanted us to trust others. He wanted us to love others but to trust him alone.