Author Quotes

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

Annie Fellows Johnston

This piercing cold I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom
under my heel...

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.

Elizabeth Smart (Canadian author)

An hypothesis is only a habit - a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it.

Frederick Marryat

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

Minnie Maddern Fiske

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

I am not a member of a community or a synagogue. Really, my devotion to writing is my religion. There are other aspects of my religion, but mainly it is to be with myself, for many hours.

Aharon Appelfeld

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies

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

Theologians frequently assert that God has no body, no gender, no race and no age. Most people state that God is neither male nor female. Yet most people become flustered, upset or even angry when it is suggested that the God they know as Lord and Father might also be God the Mother, or Goddess.

Carol Patrice Christ

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.

Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

George Cooper (poet)

They are emotional gluttons, both of them. They gobbled up every sensation they could extract from marriage, and now they are seeing if separation won't provide them with a few more.

Margaret Kennedy

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Robert Wilson (director)

And all about him was the wind now, a pervasive sighing trough great emptiness, as though the prairie itself was breathing in long gusting breaths, unhampered by the buildings of town, warm and living against his face and in his hair.

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.

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

Linda Barnes (writer)

Don't forget that even our most obscene vices nearly always bear the seal of sullen greatness.

Gesualdo Bufalino

It does not seem possible to think of oneself as normal without thinking that some other kind of person is pathological,

Let not my death be long,
But light
As a bird's swinging;
Happy decision in the height
Of song —
Then flight
From off the ultimate bough!
And let my wing be strong,
And my last note the first
Of another's singing.
See to it, Thou!

When you're living by instinct, then you will naturally enhance everything and everyone around you. In other words, success will come naturally! When both your intellect and instincts are aligned, then producing the fruits of your labors brings satisfaction beyond measure.