Author Quotes

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
Robert Olen Butler
We are better deceived by having some truth told us than none.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

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'.

My grandfather was the great solace. He didn't have a lot of formal education, but he had a feeling for words and a sense of the past, a sense of being involved in something larger than his own immediate concerns.

The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.

Louise Closser Hale
Louise Closser Hale
To callow wings no flight is too high to attempt. At sixteen all things are possible.

Go sow your wild oats
And reap as you will;
I hoe in one furrow
And heap all my fill.

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

Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence.

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.

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

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?

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

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

In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest.

In Europe, a product must be good, or it will not sell in competition with other products; with you, it is enough to say that it is good, often enough and sufficiently loudly. The keenest competition is not in the making of things but in the advertising of them!

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske
Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

David Eddings
David Eddings
We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

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

John Guare
John Guare
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.

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.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr.
My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership,... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association.