American Author Quotes

Another reason I wrote Fat Girl is that few writers about fatties write that even thin girls (and women and men) can, behind their bony walls, remain fat. They weigh 110; they think they weigh 200. How this happens is that if a person's been fat and gotten thin and maybe even stayed thin, she doesn't forget she was fat.

If we know that we are now at the point where we have always wanted to be, we will be there... because we are never there but always here, now!

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Karin Slaughter

Affection isn't so plentiful in this life that any of us can afford to reject it when it's offered, whatever its source.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Nell Freudenberger

No one can escape stress, but you can learn to cope with it. Practice positive thinking... seize control in small ways.

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

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

I've got this image in my head of how I want my life to look, and I have absolutely no idea how to get there. And I'm so scared that I'll make some wrong decision - just one - and everything will get messed up and go wrong -for good.

Lisa Ann Sandell

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Katherine Paterson

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.

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

Human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blueness becomes as real as a keynote of music.

Sally Carrighar

Tragedy isn't an easy thing to kill. It takes more than a turtle. Tragedy must be destroyed by someone willing to be swallowed by it, willing to be broken, torn out of the flesh, but able to return to it. Someone must be able to shatter the tragic from within and exit into comedy, able to rip a hole so wide that a train of souls, a parade, could follow after, banging drums and throwing candy as they strolled into the sun.

Seven minutes is all you get to make a positive first impression. In the first seven minutes of contact with your church, your first-time guests will know whether or not they are coming back. That's before a single worship song is sung and before a single word of the message is uttered.

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.

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

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?

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

Once the data is in, the theory has to follow along meekly.

Michael Swanwick

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Mercedes Lackey

A scientist is looking for general laws, it is true; but at the same time he wants to solve individual cases or problems; laws are not science, but only a means to get science; and if a law does not solve a specific problem, the scientist will change the law and not the problem. Thus science, like ethics, aims at the individual case.

The boys think they can all be athletes, and the girls think they can all be singers. That's the way to fame and success....as a group blacks must give up their illusions.