Author Quotes

The heart holds, like remembered music,
a landscape grown too dark to see.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Where would anyone in publicity be if they allowed sensitivity, restraint, breeding or good taste to stand in their way?

Isabelle Holland

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It was the strangest sensation, fallin' in love. 'Bout the only thing I compare it to would be jumpin' off a big cliff. Once you're past the edge, there ain't no particular reason to be graspin' for a line a safety. You just keep on fallin' anyhow, so you might as well enjoy it the whole way down.

Dorothy Garlock

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,

Marilynne Robinson

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

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

Berthold Auerbach

You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don't know, you don't question it, you even distrust your own doubts.

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

Kathryn Harrison

Slang is a token of man's lively spirit ever at work in unexpected places.

Young children grow, but adolescents change—and change is confusing. It confuses the sprouting adolescent to wake up every morning in a new body. It confuses the mother and father to find a new child every day in a familiar body—a child contumelious of the things that yesterday's child wanted, a child with a different rhythm of living, a child who talks knowingly about things that yesterday's child never heard of.

Hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb.

It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day.

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

Truth be told, most of us are faking our way through life. We pick only those battles we are sure to win, only those adventures we are sure to handle, only those beauties we are sure to rescue.

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr.

Favored by advertisers, preteens, and writers of ransom notes, the exclamation point is less a mark of punctuation than an oratorical cue or a typographical shriek — in newspaper slang, a 'screamer'.

Richard Nordquist

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

The love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

Evelyn Scott (writer)

There was a thoughtful frown on the face of the man who was the possessor of twenty million dollars.

Eleanor H. Porter

The Christian Scientists held that it was not God Who wanted sickness, but man who [put] himself in the way of suffering. If this were the case, though, wouldn't we all die in perfect health?

No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.

Elizabeth Goudge