Author Quotes

To die for one's great ideas is glorious — and easy. The horror is to outlive them. That is our worst capability.

John Oliver Hobbes

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

No hate has ever unlocked the myriad interlacings—the front of love. Hate is nothing.

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

I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spread under people's eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extroversion.

The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

And all about him was the wind now, a pervasive sighing trough great emptiness, as though the prairie itself was breathing in long gusting breaths, unhampered by the buildings of town, warm and living against his face and in his hair.

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.

Nothing can stop the questing of men, not even Man. If we will it, not only the wonders of space, but the very stars are ours.

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

That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists.

Robert Olen Butler

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

Eleanor H. Porter

When the desire ain't on me I don't need help. When it is on me I don't want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn't do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody's.

Agnes Sligh Turnbull

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)

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.

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

I wanted to be a Bride of Christ but I guess now I'm a young divorcee.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

Writing is like exploring. Although the country a writer explores is imaginary, the discoveries he makes there are real. For it is the business of writers to reveal truths to us about ourselves and our lives.

Lawrence Osgood

I kinda like it when you forget to give me presents. It makes me feel like we're married.

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.

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Deborah Garrison

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

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.

Death is a statistic for the computers.