American Novelist Quotes

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.

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

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

Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one's own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they've hidden their stash so well a cop won't find it. They're always wrong.

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.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

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.

The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills.

Tom Flynn (author)

Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.

Do you know how much damage we could do to each other in an hour?

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

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.

Men are failures, not because they are stupid, but because they are not sufficiently impassioned.

Maxwell Struthers Burt

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

You can't expect people to give you the things you love, unless you know how to ask.

Genevieve Valentine

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.

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

Disrespectful words cannot entirely be eaten, ever. Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the king's horses can't put it all the way up again.

Charlotte Armstrong

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

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.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

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