Author Quotes

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

May Sinclair
May Sinclair
There are some secrets which scarcely admit of being disclosed even to ourselves.

Good-bye is always hello to something else. Good-bye/hello, good-bye/hello, like the sound of a rocking chair.

The Hudson River loomed cold and gray before me. There was a biting chill in the air that seemed to sharpen my perception of everything—from the trees that displayed their few, last, withering leaves to the hulking black barge that roiled the water downstream. Odd how cold temperatures can generate an effect that is uniquely visual.

You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy
We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

When one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food.

Not alone is the child born through the mother, but the mother also is born through the child.

Is it for you to forgive me? Is it for me to forgive you? Is it for God to forgive us all, and for what? Where there's no judging on one side or the other, there's no forgiveness wanted.

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

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?

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

Do they miss me at home, do they miss me?
'T would be an assurance most dear
To know that this moment some loved one
Was saying, 'Oh were she but here!'

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

Only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

The only people who are truly happy are the people we do not know very well...

Susan Isaacs
Susan Isaacs
Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

Convalescence is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

Pacifists lead a lonely life. Not even gathering together can take the place of that vast, warm sun of approval that is shed on motherhood, on law-abiding, on killing, and on making money. Someday will we come into our own? Well, motherhood may move into the shade. Law-abiding is going through a trauma. But killing and making money are good for a long, long time.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Hermann Broch
Hermann Broch
We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'

Stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away