American Author Quotes

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living...and the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can come into his life -- service for others.

Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.

Jamaica Kincaid

[That] is the essence of poker: making tricky decisions based on incomplete information.

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.

The written word is the link between the past and the future.

Lincoln Barnett

Murder, I'm afraid, if someone does not intervene.
He laughed. Oh, you women are so melodramatic. Do no expect me to catch you when you faint.
I would rather hit the ground. Good day, sir.

Mary Robinette Kowal

All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy,

Gregory Maguire

When I wrote, I felt better, as if I had remade the world all of a piece, the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was.

We are all born free from all religious affiliations and only come to believe in such things after being introduced to it ― so, atheism is the default position. Although some children are not indoctrinated with a specific religion before the age of reason, there are many more who are.

David G. McAfee

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

Love always looks nice. I don't really know anyone who doesn't enjoy it when they see it. Anyone who doesn't, I don't really want to know them.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

And here is our girl, looking— If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)

James Tiptree, Jr

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.

Chérie Carter-Scott

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When you feed yourself what your body needs when it needs it, that's love. So give your bod some TLC and sit down and enjoy a good, substantial breakfast.

As I grew up I got cynical. I'd see Mother enthusiastic and involved with charlatans. Numerologists and astrologists who charged five hundred dollars for a 'reading' which was so vague you could twist the meaning any way you wanted.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

Edward Dahlberg

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

George W. S. Trow

Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.

Utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all.

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!

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.