American Novelist Quotes

The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.

I thought I would be safe here.
You are. For the first time, he touched her, touched her hand. Safe from everything but paper and ink. Please. Put those down.
Paper and ink. She clutched the books to her ample chest. They're not nothing, Alec. They're pretty much everything to me: the embodiment of ideas, of thought—of free and open thought. Of inquiry and supposition. All of it.

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.

It's when I have to acknowledge the past and all of those nameless, faceless people I'd assassinated, that I unravel inside.

Cheyenne McCray

H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway — you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective.

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

Christopher Paul Curtis

Why is it that people don't know what to say when something bad has happened to someone they know? Maybe because they think there are some magic words that will make everything all right again, only they don't know what the words are.

Ellen Wittlinger

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

Oh — oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.

K. A. Applegate

Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?

Stephen R. Donaldson

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.

Jacqueline Kelly

I knew, deep down, that love, though a beautiful beginning, isn't enough. It's the practice of honoring and caring for another that's noble, not the emotion of love itself. The emotion is the easy part.

Megan McCafferty

The most truly generous persons are those who give silently without hope of praise or reward.

Carol Ryrie Brink

Max: "You'll never be good enough to deserve her, you know." Ash: "God doesn't always give you what you deserve," Ash said quietly. "Sometimes he gives you what you can't live without.

Teresa Medeiros

Oppression is never right, even when it is elegant.

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

I've always thought of this city as Disneyland for adults.... There's no danger of Las Vegas expiring from an excess of good taste.

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

Daniel Woodrell

It is difficult to resist a force of nature, Maman. His seduction is like all my senses struck by bolts of lightning.

When characters have different goals and are intent on achieving them, conflict results. If the stakes are high and both sides are unyielding, you have the makings of high drama.

Sparkling and bright in liquid light
Does the wine our goblets gleam in;
With hue as red as the rosy bed
Which a bee would choose to dream in.
Then fill to-night, with hearts as light
To loves as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim on the beaker's brim
And break on the lips while meeting.

Charles Fenno Hoffman

My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death.

James Lee Burke

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

Alexander Theroux

Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.

John D. MacDonald