American Novelist Quotes

There's not much to be said for sightseeing. You go somewhere that has a waterfall. You have a beer, watch the water go over the edge, and move on. Tours are all the same. In the end, the only thing that matters is the beer.

Don't seek approval. This may be the toughest suggestion for you to follow -- and the most important. Whether you'te a teenager seeking approval from your peers, a middle-aged parent seeking the approval of your kids, or a man or woman seeking the approval of a partner, it all amounts to the same thing. You're giving your personal power away every time you seek validation from someone else for who you are.

T. J. MacGregor

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

Alexander Theroux

Oppression is never right, even when it is elegant.

Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.

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

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

John Gregory Brown

King James of England wrote the Bible... and he made you niggers happy hewers of wood and told you to serve your masters faithfully and you'd get your reward in heaven. You all believe that shit and been worshipping a white Jesus ever since. How in the hell could God take the black earth and make himself a white man out of it? Answer me that?

Louise Meriwether

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

It's over me like a ton of water, the things I don't know.

Even though she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn't people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that.

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

If snow melts down to water, does it still remember being snow?

Jennifer McMahon

Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

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

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

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

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

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

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

Three times I have been mistaken for a prohibition agent, but never had any trouble clearing myself.

Dashiell Hammett

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

It's toys, boy, all toys. You'll see more and more contraptions as you get older, but if I teach you anything, you'll learn that all of this is decoration. What counts is what's inside you and what you can see in others.

Stefan Petrucha

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