American Author Quotes

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

Daniel Woodrell

When there's more sick ones than well ones, by golly the sick ones will lock the well ones up.

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.

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

Harriet Winslow Sewall

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.

I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

And brown is the papaw's shade-blossoming cup, In the wood, near the sun-loving maize!

But you just gotta understand that that's the way it is and keep on steppin'.

Christopher Paul Curtis

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

Hatred can eat at you until there's nothing left, until you become the thing you hate.

If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?

Jennifer McMahon

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where the cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty And a face turned from the clod — Some call it Evolution, And others call it God.

William Herbert Carruth

A man sat on a rock and sought Refreshment from his thumb; A dinotherium wandered by And scared him some. His name was Smith. The kind of rock He sat upon was shale. One feature quite distinguished him: He had a tail.

David Law Proudfit

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.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

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

Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown to the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through.

Those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Margaret Widdemer

Did you ever hear
Of the frolic fairies dear?
They're a blessed little race,
Peeping up in fancy's face,
In the valley, on the hill,
By the fountain and the rill;
Laughing out between the leaves
That the loving summer weaves.

Frances Sargent Osgood

It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others.

Stefan Petrucha

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.

So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain....

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