American Novelist Quotes

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

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.

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

Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.

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.

I wanted to be loved because I deserved it. Except I was scared to be loved like this, because what if I stopped deserving it? Unconditional love was insulting, but conditional love was terrifying.

Hatred can eat at you until there's nothing left, until you become the thing you hate.

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.

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

Elinor Macartney Lane

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

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

Alexander Theroux

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

Christie Ridgway

A man deserves credit when he accomplishes something of importance. Something that provides for the betterment of his life and his family's life and, whenever possible, mankind.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Stephen R. Donaldson