American Novelist Quotes

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?

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

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?

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer―

Raymond E. Feist

No man suffers injustice without learning,
vaguely but surely, what justice is.

Isaac Rosenfeld

One eye is open to all truth, the other closed to all deception.

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

Laura Kasischke

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

He had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany...

George Washington Cable

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

There are those people who love their mothers, just so; and there are those who, out of whatever accident of temperament have to be in love with them.

Judith Grossman

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

Judith McNaught

My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death.

James Lee Burke

Time is really nothing but a huge circle. You divide a circle of three hundred and sixty degrees into twenty-four hours, and you get fifteen degrees of arc that is the equivalent of each hour.

Erle Stanley Gardner

I've always thought of this city as Disneyland for adults.... There's no danger of Las Vegas expiring from an excess of good taste.

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

Jacqueline Woodson

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

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

Carol Ryrie Brink

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

Death is a statistic for the computers.

There is a love of wood, as of other things that do not answer to our touch.

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.

Mothers know the difference between a broth and a consommé. And the difference between damask and chintz. And the difference between vinyl and Naugahyde. And the difference between a house and a home. And the difference between a romantic and a stalker. And the difference between a rock and a hard place.

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

Near or far, there are burdens and terrors in sisterhood, and perhaps the nearer, the more complicated.