Author Quotes

I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California.

Eleanor Coppola

I'm scared," he says."I know," says the nurse."I want you all to go to Hell.""That's natural.

Neal Shusterman

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

Gertrud von Le Fort

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.

E. Arnot Robertson

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

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.

Jill Paton Walsh

The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.

Douglas Preston

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

It is always so, every pleasure comes exactly half an hour too late - Life! Life!

Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.

The use of force is always an answer to problems. Whether or not it's a satisfactory answer depends on a number of things, not least the personality of the person making the determination. Force isn't an attractive answer, though. I would not be true to myself or to the people I served with in 1970 if I did not make that realization clear.

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

Katrina Kenison

Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.

Jennifer Chiaverini

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.

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

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)

Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left over for the others.

Elizabeth Fishel

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

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

Germany, Germany above everything,
Above everything in the world,
When, for protection and defense, it always
takes a brotherly stand together.
From the Meuse to the Neman,
From the Adige to the Belt,

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben

Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

Natasha Trethewey

All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.

Cassandra Clare

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.

Stefanie Pintoff

If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken