American Novelist Quotes

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

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

I'm tired of being Scarlett O'Hara. In my next life I'm going to come back as Melanie Wilkes, fragile and helpless.

Linda Fairstein

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.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

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?

If there was no fear, how could there be comfort? Or courage?

It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

Do not the auburn-haired gain a new sense of freedom as a blonde (see Miss Clairol)? Who can deny the madness of a redesigned nose (see Miami Beach)? Yes, indeed. A wild excitement engulfed me. My mirrored image reflected, in an occult fashion, a magnificent future.... The texture of my hair had changed.

Charles Stevenson Wright

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."

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

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Judith McNaught

Hell was not for the living, it was for the dead, even the hallowed dead. Let the dead rest in peace. Someday Mack Bolan, too, would rest. For now, he had to find his way among the living.

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 didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

Jacqueline Woodson

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

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

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

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?

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

The use of force is always an answer to problems. Whether or not it's a satisfactory answer depends on a number of things, not least the personality of the person making the determination. Force isn't an attractive answer, though. I would not be true to myself or to the people I served with in 1970 if I did not make that realization clear.

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

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

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.