American Novelist Quotes

Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand...

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

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.

The implications of self-definition, self-celebration, and perhaps not a little self-inflation and self-designation are nevertheless quite as obvious in each as for all.

Albert Murray (writer)

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

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?

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.

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

Are you smelling me? After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. Don't tempt me, he murmured.

Deborah Harkness

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

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

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

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

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.

I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve!

Catharine Sedgwick

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

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.