Author Quotes

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

A church is an interesting place once you get the parson and the people out of it. Real music can get in then, and a real God! Nothing flibertigibbet about religion then.

Mazo de la Roche

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

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

Katrina Kenison

Whenever [my father] saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person. Go play, go fish, go swim, go do something — why are you reading all the time?

I was compiling a list in my head titled 'Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here.

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

Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs?

Mabel Osgood Wright

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

The military preferred - invariably - those who could be readily defined, assigned roles, understood, and controlled.

Guy Gavriel Kay

They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Lucille Clifton

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

We know that productivity suffers when uncertainty is high. But we've failed to realize the equally destructive effects of too little anxiety.... By protecting people from risk, we destroy their self-esteem. We rob them of the opportunity to become strong, competent people.

Judith M. Bardwick

There is almost no limit to the possibilities of the imagination, but to get the full power of it, one must trust one's imagination. If you say to yourself constantly, as the mother says to the child, 'But this is only play; this is not real,' you never can make real the things you have created in thought.

Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.

Terry Tempest Williams

Generations should not be mingled for daily fare, she thought; they are really contemptuous of one another, and the strong individuals, whether they belong to the older or the younger, impose on the meek their creeds and opinions, and, if they are strong enough, brook no dissent.

To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective.

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)

In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

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

Time is really nothing but a huge circle. You divide a circle of three hundred and sixty degrees into twenty-four hours, and you get fifteen degrees of arc that is the equivalent of each hour.

Erle Stanley Gardner

Never settle for less than your dreams, somewhere, sometime, someday, somehow, you'll find them

The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.