American Author Quotes

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

In this life you sometimes have to choose between pleasing God and pleasing man. - In the long run, it's better to please God - he's more apt to remember.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

Lorine Niedecker

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

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.

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.

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

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

David Lindsay-Abaire

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

Gwendolyn Brooks

Hollywood – a place where the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Laurence Stallings

There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.

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

Statistics show that you have nothing to worry about.

Theodore Cogswell

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

Harriet Winslow Sewall

I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute

There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.

You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

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

Joel C. Rosenberg

You'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.