American Novelist Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Henry James

Pearl S. Buck

Nathaniel Hawthorne

J. D. Salinger

Sylvia Plath

Toni Morrison

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A heart may be lifted up and cast down in the same moment, as sometimes sunshine comes while rain is falling and builds upward in the sky tall reaches of misty, unlikely beauty.

Caroline Pafford Miller

I want to collapse. I want to fall on the sidewalk right there and drag myself to the ivy.

The ancestors and the womb, they're one, they're the same.

Nature never says anything to a child. To read its message one must look at it with eyes already old.

Without God we are but bruised reeds, ever threatened by the prospect of being crushed by life's uncaring millstone. Without God we are nothing, our lives worthless, our days an endless circular tread. Without God we stand condemned, doomed to a life without the precious gift of hope.

Love is when you fry the other person's bacon even if you're a vegetarian.

Patricia Nell Warren

Cats are like insects. They should be left outside to clean up the garbage.

Michael Mewshaw

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

You don't love people for what they can give you. You don't love them because of what they do for you or how good you make them look. Love is blind, love does not boast, love is not vain.

The gorilla is a strict vegetarian like the elephant and buffalo — three of the four most dangerous animals in Africa. It behooves one to walk softly with vegetarians.

Mary Hastings Bradley

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

Lauren DeStefano

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Kate Christensen

The houses people live in reflect their opinions of themselves.

Joseph F. Girzone

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers.

When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Panic leads to carelessness, and carelessness creates accidents.

Maggie Stiefvater

It is in the darkest night that the light we are shines brightest

Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples.

Sheri S. Tepper

Science tends to frighten those who are infrequently exposed to it, while the practitioners of science are often the most misunderstood people in the world..