Author Quotes

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.

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

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

When men do not run they are likely to die prematurely from dysfunction of the heart and vascular systems or from disabling chronic disease.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Carolyn D. Wright

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

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

Caroline Anne Southey

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.'

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective.

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

George Ella Lyon

You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy

The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors.

Laurie Halse Anderson

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

Estela Portillo-Trambley

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

Katrina Kenison

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

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?

Louise Meriwether

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

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Lucille Clifton

Madame Schmid belonged to that large class of persons who believe that a man who engages in any form of art is necessarily a loafer.

Molly Elliot Seawell

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.

Josephine Johnson

Something stirs that once had life. It drops
Into the stream, a last act of faith.
Seedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,
These have outstayed their autumn, teasing death
Only so far, not yet beyond all patience.
Now they let go.

Donald Davidson (poet)

Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity