American Novelist Quotes

Near or far, there are burdens and terrors in sisterhood, and perhaps the nearer, the more complicated.

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

James Lane Allen

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

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

We are a material-mad race of people. Build, increase, expand, pile up, hoard! More and more and more. "If we can just make enough money to-to- !" Jesus said: "Sell what ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth."

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

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

An author never has a vacation. He's a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he's saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.

Ben Ames Williams

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.

The house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

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

Carol Ryrie Brink

Customers are ninjas now. They are stealthily evaluating you right under your nose.

The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture.

Jennifer Echols

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?

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

Tis emblematic, the rose of youth and health soon fades when watered by the tear of affliction.

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.

The faith is not the problem, the problem is the faithful.

Robert Ferrigno

I am going to devour you, Magdelegna, he promised her, the darkness of his cravings coming to bear on her fully at last. You wanted to know my passions? Allow me to introduce them to you.

Jacquelyn Frank

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

Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over.

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