American Author Quotes

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.

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten... everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they're merely the least searched.

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

Lauren Barnholdt

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.

I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.

Josephine Jacobsen

When you're living by instinct, then you will naturally enhance everything and everyone around you. In other words, success will come naturally! When both your intellect and instincts are aligned, then producing the fruits of your labors brings satisfaction beyond measure.

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

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.

Rather than being afraid to ask for help, remember this: When you ask someone to help you, you are actually doing them a tremendous favor by giving them an opportunity to feel needed.

Richard Carlson

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés

To know a little less and to understand a little more: that, it seems to me, is our greatest need.

James Ramsey Ullman

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

We come back to autumn,
to zucchini that wilt like witches' shoes...

Confound my genteel upbringing! I could not think of any name foul enough to call him.

It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!

Richard Lederer

Fly humbly,
when you fly;
walk,
when you can.

How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

Maggie Shipstead

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters when what we want is sun.

Imamu Amiri Baraka

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

Jane Hirshfield

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.'

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.

We dwell within the Milky Way, Our Earth, a paltry little mommet, Suspended in a grand array Of constellation, moon and comet.

Arthur Guiterman