American Author Quotes

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

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

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

Jonathan Evison

Death's power is limited — It cannot eradicate memories Or slay love It cannot destroy even a threadbare faith Or permanently hobble the smallest hope in God It cannot permeate the soul And it cannot cripple the spirit It merely separates us for a while That is the only power death can claim —No more

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

MaryJanice Davidson

We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job.

One's words must glide across the page like a swan moving across the waters. One must be conscious of the movement without a thought of what is causing it to move.

Robert Crichton

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

William W. Johnstone

You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

Gennifer Choldenko

There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you're with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.

But I don't want to have to stop feeling. I really think I'd rather die than stop feeling.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

I sincerely believe that there is a time in life for drifting. There is a time for sitting back and getting in touch with yourself. Some of our most interesting illuminations and ideas will come when we take time to reflect, time to kick back and cruise awhile.

I had a dream... that all babies prevented by the pill showed up. They were mad.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

Marguerite Young

Jews have always yearned for Jerusalem, from which they'd been exiled many times, but they also yearned for each and every one of the countries where they had been persecuted and where their ancestors once lived and are still buried.

Phyllis Chesler

The principle of happiness should be like the principle of virtue: it should not be dependent of things, but be a part of personality [and character].

William Lyon Phelps

You need a strategy, and a trade or investment decision can be evaluated only in the context of that strategy.

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)

In the rest of Nirvana all sorrows surcease:
Only Buddha can guide to that city of Peace
Whose inhabitants have the eternal release.

William R. Alger

It is an easy thing to call names; any fool is equal to that... and the weapon of vituperation is generally used by those who lack brains for argument or are upon the wrong side.

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier-it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the me is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.

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

Robert Stone (novelist)

Mostly I think I've learned to trust God more. I mean, if I start getting worried or freaked, I just try to put it in God's hands. Sometimes I imagine God cradling the globe in his hands, and I tell myself that as long as I'm with God, the Creator of the universe, I can be comfortable and at home anyplace on the planet.