American Author Quotes

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

Lloyd Alexander

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

Robert Stone (novelist)

What is it with folks always talking about where they're from? You could grow up in a muddy ditch, but if it's your muddy ditch, then it's gotta be the swellest muddy ditch ever.

Jennifer L. Holm

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

We reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

The best way to get acid out of your body is to wash it out. The best way to wash it out is to provide plenty of water to do the job

Robert O. Young

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

Once the data is in, the theory has to follow along meekly.

Michael Swanwick

I have to think it's possible to suffer a great wrong and walk away from it. To build a life of small, exquisitely important moments.

Cinda Williams Chima

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

Jonathan Evison

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.

Richard Peck (writer)

A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Nell Freudenberger

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.

I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content.

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.

Take care not to listen to anyone
who tells you what you can
and can't be in life.

Even when it was easy, music's patterning shaped the emotions... Music proclaimed an orderly universe, promised a better place.

Ellen Hunnicutt

Perhaps lovers aren't supposed to look down at the ground. That kind of story is told in symbols-and earth represents reality, and reality represents frustrations, chance illnesses, death, murder, and all kinds of other tragedies. Lovers are meant to look up at the sky, for up there no beautiful illusions can be trampled upon.