Author Quotes

You gonna put on your big-girl panties and fight with the boys, now? He looked over his shoulder as if he expected me to blush or something. Who says I wear panties? I was certain that he flushed red this time. Laughing, I left him shaking his head and went on inside to find the Kid. We had work to do.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

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

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.

But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.

James K. Baxter

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

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be 'wrong', which is what our education encourages us to believe.

Keith Johnstone

You hardly know me. Why do you want me to come with you?' 'Who knows? Perhaps you remind me just a bit of -' 'Someone you used to know?' Alec interjected skeptically. 'Someone I used to be.

Lynn Flewelling

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

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

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

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 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

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

Marilynne Robinson

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Margaret Oliphant

Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men, when they are fishing, are after fish. Me, I'm after things you could never set a barbed hook in.

William Kent Krueger

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

Elizabeth Goudge

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

Given the proper suggestion, the Subconscious Mind will manifest success from failure, health from disease, prosperity from poverty, friendship and love from loneliness and isolation. For nothing is impossible to the Subconscious Mind and it operates entirely by suggestion.

Uell Stanley Andersen

Love is like fire.
Wounds of fire are hard to bear; harder still are those of love.

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

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

Eleanor H. Porter

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.

Husbands and wives quarrel a lot more than anyone thinks, and it's oftener about little things than big ones.

Patricia Wentworth

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

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

A million butterflies rose up from South America, All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...

Winfield Townley Scott