American Novelist Quotes

It takes more than Love and Passion to make a relationship work

Christie Ridgway

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

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

There is no place so benighted and godforsaken that some moron won't go there on vacation. People could be living in an open sewer and swallowing dirt to stop the hunger, and there'd be a couple from Larchmont wearing comfortable shoes there to take pictures of them.

Thomas Perry (author)

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

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

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

Carol Ryrie Brink

That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

That's what you realized when you got older. When you were little, you thought you were just too young to understand the answers and that when you got older things would come into focus. Then you had to finally face the truth: There were no answers.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Maria Dahvana Headley

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.

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

Love is a state of the heart, but also, an activity. And quite an awesome one.

You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

That's the point of it, to have those connections, as painful as they are, as much worry as they might cause; they give back in strength and comfort and joy, believe it or not, and the more connections you make, the happier you are, the more point there is to getting up and getting through the day.

Gregory Galloway

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

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

Jacqueline Kelly

Art is the most terrifying of human inventions — it preserves the right to undermine all categories.

Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.

Donald E. Westlake

It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own.

Anna Katharine Green

Dignity is like morality, Mirabilis barked. Too much is as bad as too little.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

Cheryl Mendelson