Author Quotes

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

Deborah Joy Corey

What linked them was not only the closeness they'd felt as children, but also the fear of losing that closeness.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

J. D. McClatchy

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.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence.

Isabel Briggs Myers

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.

They are emotional gluttons, both of them. They gobbled up every sensation they could extract from marriage, and now they are seeing if separation won't provide them with a few more.

Margaret Kennedy

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest.

Betty MacDonald

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

France, like every other Western country except the United States, has long accepted the principle that comprehensive health care is the right of every citizen. No Frenchman need ever fear that catastrophic illness will wipe him out financially. How long, do you suppose, will it take us, in the United States, to catch up?

Giving up her home had been a much greater wrench than she had expected.... She had a curious sense of her own roots twined around the house, as she had once seen a tree's roots around an old shrine. In time the roots had grown into every crevice until shrine and tree were one indestructible entity.

Alice Tisdale Hobart

People should always mind their own business. More trouble is caused in this world by interference than any other single thing.

There are public lives, personal lives, and private lives. The public life is the one everyone sees in your daily routine, the personal one you reveal to your family and closest friends, but your private life, that's just what you know about yourself, what you hide from everyone else.

Lisa Jackson (author)

Someone had tried to warn me of the kind of catastrophe that is likely to occur when you involve yourself too closely in one of those destinies that is ringed around by the transient tinsel of human applause.

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken up These plum trees function gorgeously A few days every year In a way nobody else does.

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Go sow your wild oats
And reap as you will;
I hoe in one furrow
And heap all my fill.

To callow wings no flight is too high to attempt. At sixteen all things are possible.

Annie Fellows Johnston

Life's too short to waste it on someone you can't trust. You should be able to depend on the man you love not to lie to you or cheat on you. If you have that as a base, you can work on the other stuff.

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

We are better deceived by having some truth told us than none.

Charlotte Lennox

It was popularly supposed that figures couldn't lie, but they did; they lied like the dickens.

Mary Stewart Cutting