American Author Quotes

Take one of my favourite experiments, for example. I see a little ball rattling around in a wheel. Where will that ball stop? You, being less intellectual than I, don't care where it stops I do. Instantly my scientific curiosity is aroused; I reason logically; I evolve an opinion; I back that opinion; and I remain busy and poor.

Robert W. Chambers

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.

Max: "You'll never be good enough to deserve her, you know." Ash: "God doesn't always give you what you deserve," Ash said quietly. "Sometimes he gives you what you can't live without.

Teresa Medeiros

God comes to each of us in the form we can best perceive Him. To you, just now, He was a heron. To someone else, He might come as a flower or even a breeze.

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

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

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.

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

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

It's when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I'd assassinated, that I unravel inside.

Cheyenne McCray

It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

Timothy Hallinan

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

There are bullfighters who do it just for the money-they are worthless [said Hemingway]. The only one who matters is the bullfighter who feels it, so that if he did it for nothing, he would do it just as well. Same holds true for damn near everyone.

Neither awake nor in a dark dream are perilous blades just as they seem.

Dennis L. McKiernan

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.

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

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

Christopher Barzak

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

George Cooper (poet)

Sparkling and bright in liquid light
Does the wine our goblets gleam in;
With hue as red as the rosy bed
Which a bee would choose to dream in.
Then fill to-night, with hearts as light
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim on the beaker's brim
And break on the lips while meeting.

Charles Fenno Hoffman

Even though she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn't people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that.

Painters are so bitchy. Magritte told Miró that Kandinsky had feet of Klee.

Told to Ned Sherrin

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

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.

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.