Author Quotes

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

Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity

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.'

Ma, I'm just trying to get going on those grandchildren you want.

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

Gertrud von Le Fort

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

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

It was a day of gloom, and strange suspense,
And feverish, and inexplicable dread,
In Herculaneum's walls. The heavy, thick,
And torrid atmosphere; the solid, vast,
And strong—edg'd clouds, that through the firmament
In various and opposing courses moved:—
The wild scream of the solitary bird
That, at long intervals, flew terror-driven
On high:—the howling of the red-ey'd dog
As he gaz'd trembling on the angry heavens:-
The hollow moans that swept along the air,
Though every wind was lock'd,-portended all
That nature with some dire event was big,
And labour'd in its birth.

Edwin Atherstone

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

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

I'd gazed into the abyss and the abyss had gazed back, just like Daddy always said it would: You want to know about life, Mac? It's simple. Keep watching rainbows, baby. Keep looking at the sky. You find what you look for. If you go hunting good in the world, you'll find it. If you go hunting evil... well, don't.

Karen Marie Moning

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

Katrina Kenison

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.

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.

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.

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

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

Natasha Trethewey

You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Never underestimate the capacity of noble young men to do incredibly foolish things for perfectly good reasons.

Jennifer Fallon

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

Then I wondered if that's all God ever is—somebody who loves you enough to come back from the dead to visit every now and again. Or if that's all that other people ever are—different faces of God walking around.

One of the most important lessons she'd recently learned was that looking strong and confident was sometimes all the people required of you.

Stuart Hill (author)

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

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