American Novelist Quotes

I am going to devour you, Magdelegna, he promised her, the darkness of his cravings coming to bear on her fully at last. You wanted to know my passions? Allow me to introduce them to you.

Jacquelyn Frank

I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.

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?

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.

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

That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

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

For now, I just want things all safe and familiar. My life may not be perfect, but it is what I have known.

I have to say, this sounds like the worst idea in a thousand generations of bad ideas." "You haven't heard all our ideas." Luke & Bhindi Drayson

You never fall in love with anyone the same way you fell in love with someone else. It's always different, every time, if you're lucky-or cursed-enough to have it happen more than once. But I've never been uncertain about love, not any of the times I found myself in it. Love is always real, even when it doesn't last.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

The easy road is always under construction,so have an alternate route planned.

At our worst in the Middle East, we unreservedly supported—or enthroned—medieval despots who supressed popular liberation efforts, thus driving moderate dissidents into the arms of fanatics. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. In the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Iran to Guatemala. But the shah always falls. Would that we could tattoo that on the back of every diplomat's hand: The shah always falls.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

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

Jennifer McMahon

To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.

John Clellon Holmes

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.

Jacqueline Kelly

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

I know. That sounds like a lie. But Presbyterians know that every so often a lie isn't all that bad, and I figured that this was about the best place it could happen.

Gary D. Schmidt

Old radicals never changed. They just got law degrees and updated their bag of tricks.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

The marks on our lives are like music notes on the page--they sing a song.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.